Characters of Japan

-You can’t live in Japan, if you just speak Japanese.-
Japan an island country. So Japan had been produced a lot of original culture. For example, customs, greeting and foods. Character of Japan is one of original culture. Japan has three characters. Kanji(漢字), Hiragana(ひらがな) and Katakana(カタカナ).
Japanese is written using two systems orthography, Chinese characters and syllabaries. Chinese characters, or Kanji, were brought in from China staring about 1,500 years ago. Prior to their introduction, Japanese was strictly a spoken language. Chinese characters are by far the more difficult system. Because of the sheer number of characters and the complexity both in writing and reading each character. Each character is associated with a meaning. The difference between Chinese language and Japanese language is that Chinese are write entirely in Kanji. Japanese use three characters to write their language.
Japanese usually use Joyo Kanji List(常用漢字) that means it for daily use. Joyo Kanji has 1,945 characters. This list is limit of the use characters to newspapers. Japanese must learn these characters while primary school and secondary school. Most characters have least two readings. Because they are associated with the Japanese reading(訓読み) and the original Chinese reading(音読み). So we have to learn 3,000 readings in fact.
Kanji are used for writing nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. Kanji has the stroke order of each. Those coordinate form of Kanji beautifully. And we write and learn Kanji easily through those. Japanese people are demanded beautifully of the form in calligraphy. So the stroke order is important to Japanese. Original of Kanji is the hieroglyphic. It is produced by shapes of body and things. And Kanji are usually composed by some radicals. The reading or the pronunciation of those depend on how compose them.
Hiragana and Katakana were invented by noblewomen in 9th century. Hiragana and Katakana each consists of 46 signs and they are combination of 5 vowels (a, i, u, e, o) and a consonant (k, s, t, n, h, m, y, r, w). For example, か is ka (a+k). Hiragana is usually used only for grammatical endings of verbs, nouns, and adjectives, as well as for particules, and several other original Japanese words which aren’t written in Kanji. Hiragana is the first of all the writing system taught to Japanese children. Many books for children are written in Hiragana (or Katakana) only. Katakana is mainly used for writing loan words and the names of persons and geographical place which aren’t written in Kanji. For example,私はテニスをするのが好きです。(I like to play tennis.) They are helping each other, that is to say they can’t be made up by themselves.
We can see the characters throughout Japan by newspaper, on TV. And people who live in Japan have to understand them. So you can not live in Japan, if you don’t know Japanese characters.