Comment by jamal-kumar

I thought this was going to be about something like the massive security problem of homoglyph attacks being currently deployed in stuff like phishing baked into the standard at first glance of the title, but this ghost character business is pretty interesting. Japanese literacy requires you to know 2-4 meanings per 2,136 kanji characters (something like 6000+ in total possible meanings between these characters) just to be able to pass a university level literacy test, it's a massive amount of complexity to get right. Even if you just need basic literacy it's still about a thousand less than that, and there's even more than these I mentioned for further literacy competence. Furthermore each of these characters look funny if not unreadable if you write them down using the wrong order of strokes. I can see how mistakes might have been made even by native speakers of that language. The two kana syllabiaries are there of course and mixed in with the kanji, but if everything was written in that you wouldn't be able to achieve the same amount of information density, which is probably part of the reason they never switched over (I understand before world war 2 or so, the more rounded hiragana was for women while the more sword stroke like katakana was for men).