[andrewzah]

As someone who has studied Korean and some Japanese, Japanese is definitely much more complex. If someone saw English had two syllabaries for the same exact sounds (like katakana and hiragana) they would probably also say it's unnecessarily complex. From a foreign perspective, lowercase and uppercase could be seen as arbitrarily complex.

I would guess they're talking about kanji though, which really isn't very complex. It's moreso just annoying to have glyphs that you can't pronounce if you don't already know an onyomi/kunyomi reading...