> I'm surprised they're both used, from that description it sounds like one would fall by the wayside, like cursive has in North America. In practice, there ar

> I'm surprised they're both used, from that description it sounds like one would fall by the wayside, like cursive has in North America. In practice, there are no less than 4 separate scripts that are used in Japanese: hiragana, katakana, kanji, and romaji, and some mix of all 4 can appear in the same sentence. It's not so much analogous to cursive, which is a different "style" of writing the same "thing" – katakana and hiragana developed at different times for different groups and came to play different roles, and there are (usually) semantic implications to which are used.