I believe that whether it is news, or Japanese dramas, Japanese anime, often see the emergence of Chinese, everyone must be very curious, Japan obviously has their own Chinese words and words, but why do so many Chinese characters still appear? Today I will answer your questions.
First of all, Japan actually did not have its own use of writing in ancient times, they only had language, all the written records had been blank until then, until about 270, during the reign of Emperor Yingshen of Japan, Chinese characters were introduced to Japan and instantly became their official language, and also began in that period, all their written records were Chinese characters, and then during the Tang Dynasty, Japan invented their unique "kana" by changing the head of the Chinese characters, until now, Chinese characters still account for 50% of the Japanese system.
However, the Chinese characters that appear in Japanese, friends may often feel confused, think that they "do not use words accurately", in fact, this is also a good explanation, because the Chinese characters were introduced to Japan, they still belong to the literary language, and the words and modern Chinese also have deviations, so some words can not be seen from the current point of view, here I give a few examples.
The Japanese "timepiece" is actually "clock"; "yuan" is actually "healthy"; there are many XX "clubs" that appear in many advertisements, which are actually "companies"; and for example, we think of the unfinished graduation "death", which they mean "graduation".
We can barely guess the general meaning of the above, but some of them are completely different from modern Chinese.
For example, "female general", we mistake it for a female soldier or general, but they mean "lady boss"; "ginseng" means "carrot" in their language; and "car", which means "train" in their language system; and a very interesting "mud stick", most people will look confused and think that the stick is wrapped in mud, but the actual meaning is "thief".
Of course, culture will have an impact on each other, after the introduction of Chinese characters into Japan, it has been changing, they themselves have derived many words, absorbed by the Chinese, here everyone will feel strange, I will give you a few examples: "cadres", "telecommunications", "railways", "political parties", "ism", "philosophy", these words we are accustomed to are Japanese derived and then passed back, as well as modern we are more common "house culture", "two-dimensional", "kawaii", "Loli" and so on.
Chinese is like a teacher of Japanese, it helped Japan to establish a language system, although the two languages belong to different language families, but they influence each other, at the same time, Japan's current language is actually four: hiragana, katakana, Kanji, Roman characters, Chinese characters have as many as 2500 words, finally, I saw some people accuse, saying that Japanese is plagiarism, in fact, we change the perspective, it is because our country has a long history, deep cultural heritage, only to create a development, for this we should be deeply proud.