Well, it’s kinda complicated. We will specifically look at the situation of Early Heian because it is the one I am most familiar with.
Now, ignoring texts that were composed in Classical Chinese, the administrative language of the time, the Japanese of the period was mainly known as *Old Japanese*, codified in a wide range of texts such as the 万葉集 or 古事記歌謡. These texts, despite encoding Old Japanese, were indeed fully written in Kanji. However, they functioned rather differently than nowadays.
Namely, a lot more Kanji were used to encode syllables. This way of using Kanji is called 万葉仮字 and it is basically 当て字 on steroids. For instance, we have the following line
> 奈良能弥夜故尓許登都氣夜良武 > Nara-nǝ miyako-ni kǝtǝ tuŋgɛ-yar-am-u > Nara-Gen. capital-Loc. word report-send-Tent.-Fin > (I) would send a message to the capital of Nara
Morpheme-by-morpheme this correspondends to modern 奈良の都に言(を)告げ遣ろう. Now to a Sinitic speaker, this is completely gibberish.
Though, semantic Kanji like we see today are still found in abundance.
But the main problem lies in that plenty of phonetic Kanji are used, encoding an underlying Japonic language. As such, a Sinitic speaker reading these texts would be rather confused to say the least. This is not to mention other complexities such as phoneme adaptation or the 音仮名 vs 訓仮名 BS that makes the sounds incredibly opaque for a Sinitic speaker.
You could write Japanese in this way and it would look like Chinese but Chinese people wouldn’t be able to read it because the phonetic parts, previously, kana wouldn’t have any meaning.
Japanese is as far as we know a language isolate with no know ancestral link to Chinese so to put in simple words, yes and no. Japanese did use the Chinese characters but in a similar sense as we do when writing Chinese in the Latin alphabet, a text written in Japanese would mostly not make sense to someone reading only based on the Chinese characters.
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Well, it’s kinda complicated. We will specifically look at the situation of Early Heian because it is the one I am most familiar with.
Now, ignoring texts that were composed in Classical Chinese, the administrative language of the time, the Japanese of the period was mainly known as *Old Japanese*, codified in a wide range of texts such as the 万葉集 or 古事記歌謡. These texts, despite encoding Old Japanese, were indeed fully written in Kanji. However, they functioned rather differently than nowadays.
Namely, a lot more Kanji were used to encode syllables. This way of using Kanji is called 万葉仮字 and it is basically 当て字 on steroids. For instance, we have the following line
> 奈良能弥夜故尓許登都氣夜良武
> Nara-nǝ miyako-ni kǝtǝ tuŋgɛ-yar-am-u
> Nara-Gen. capital-Loc. word report-send-Tent.-Fin
> (I) would send a message to the capital of Nara
Morpheme-by-morpheme this correspondends to modern 奈良の都に言(を)告げ遣ろう. Now to a Sinitic speaker, this is completely gibberish.
Though, semantic Kanji like we see today are still found in abundance.
But the main problem lies in that plenty of phonetic Kanji are used, encoding an underlying Japonic language. As such, a Sinitic speaker reading these texts would be rather confused to say the least. This is not to mention other complexities such as phoneme adaptation or the 音仮名 vs 訓仮名 BS that makes the sounds incredibly opaque for a Sinitic speaker.
In simple yes. You can find [tables that show the kanji that Hiragana and Katakana are derived from](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FlowRoot3824.svg) . They are just a shorthand version of those kanjis.
You could write Japanese in this way and it would look like Chinese but Chinese people wouldn’t be able to read it because the phonetic parts, previously, kana wouldn’t have any meaning.
Japanese is as far as we know a language isolate with no know ancestral link to Chinese so to put in simple words, yes and no. Japanese did use the Chinese characters but in a similar sense as we do when writing Chinese in the Latin alphabet, a text written in Japanese would mostly not make sense to someone reading only based on the Chinese characters.