With the added bonus that it's accurate. Referring to these characters as they are originally: Chinese. Some people don't seem to be very happy about that fact.
My understanding (as a speaker of neither language) is that Japanese usage has diverged a fair bit from Chinese roots.
The phonetic bits, for example, are based on how Japanese speakers of the time thought the equivalent Chinese sounded, with allowances for Japanese and Chinese having radically different phonics. And then you do that a few more times because the language both evolved in parallel, and you end up in a situation where each kanji can have more than one phonetic representation based on the original Chinese pronunciation. It can also have a phonetic representation based on the Japanese word that means the same thing, which will invariably be something radically different since Chinese and Japanese aren't terribly closely related languages.
So while they might be using the same writing system, the fact that it's a fairly elegant writing system for Chinese doesn't imply that it's elegant in Japanese. Not any more than the Roman alphabet being a very good writing system for Latin implies that English's writing system isn't a bit of a mess.
Japan certainly adapted kanji to fit the Japanese language, but I was not aware of a dispute about the origin of the characters.
Obviously they have diverged; Japan has made efforts to simplify kanji forms, although not to the extent of zh-cn, unless you count hiragana and katakana, which are derived from kanji:
> Japanese "Chinese" readings have more in common with the Chinese spoken at the time than modern Chinese.
Yup. There are even names for the various readings based on which era/dynasty they were borrowed during. E.g. for the readings of 明, "myo" was borrowed first, then "mei" a few centuries later, then "min" most recently.
The original article makes no mention of kanji (Han zi). Instead it ends with:
"Well okay, I'll come clean. I've actually been secretly teaching Japanese to you. 口 actually really is the Japanese character for "mouth" and 食 really is the symbol for eating."
Not exactly. Those are Chinese characters and Chinese meanings. The article does not teach anything exclusivly Japanese. For anyone who was not familiar, they would go around with the impression that these characters really originate from Japan. You can imagine how the Chinese people or people who study Chinese would feel being shown this cool new way to learn "Japanese".
When someone in Japan, talking about the Japanese language, refers to "Japanese characters", they clearly mean "characters used when writing Japanese". They are not suggesting anything about where the characters originated.
