As we know, Japanese for the most part uses traditional Chinese characters, but there are a handful of simplified characters that are used in both languages today that actually match. Three that I can think of off the top of my head include 国，区， and 台. I’m pretty sure there are others, but they’re the only ones that are coming to mind at the moment.
I’ve always been curious as to who simplified each matching character first and who adopted the simplified form from the other. Which were simplified by China during or before 简体 and adopted by Japan into their 新字体? Which went the other way? And which were simplified in both places separately but coincidentally wound up the same?
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Iirc most simplified variants had already existed as handwritten shorthands before each country started standardizing characters and choosing simplifications to standardize.
Decent list of the differences between characters compared on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_Shinjitai_and_Simplified_characters).
It is always incredible to see what is available in Wikipedia. The other day I stumble on this page which explains how (what is the logic) used to simplify characters in chinese. It is very interesting https://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/SimplifiedCharacters.html
Now about Japanese what I know is that modern kanji are all based on a chinese dictionnary tranlated in japanese (around 1700) called Kōki Jiten (康熙字典). There have been severals wave of standadisation/simplifications since Meiji but it looks like the start is the kanji seirian (漢字整理案) but was more institutionalised shortly after the toyokanji introduction (post WW2) with the touyoukanjijitaihyo (available here https://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/sisaku/joho/joho/kakuki/syusen/tosin05/index.html in japanese). If you are interested there is an old english research paper available on this subject : https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/vl/article/view/5390/4254
So I feel that japanese simplication starts to diverge since this period especially since the latest newest simplication in chinese that are so drastic that the system has lost a big part of the ethymology and logic.
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Japanese simplification came first, and China adopted some of them. But some of these were, as others have said, common handwritten variants already, so in some cases they may have arrived at them independently.