usually this effort happened in the opposite direction, where Japanese people adopted the writing system of China since they didn't have one yet and needed to c

usually this effort happened in the opposite direction, where Japanese people adopted the writing system of China since they didn't have one yet and needed to communicate diplomatically with China. The hanzi approach is the most historical one. The problem is that it is generally not intuitive for vernacular languages. Even non-Mandarin Sinitic languages like Cantonese look wildly different between the standard writing form (which is just Mandarin) vs. writing the spoken vernacular form. The closest Western equivalent would be everybody in the European Dark and Middle Ages using Latin.