> the only two countries still using a logographic writing system are China and Japan. I wonder why this writing system still has a stronghold there.
I would expect that that has a lot to do with how long-lived China's culture is. The "choice" of writing system was made long ago and has stuck. There hasn't been a significant enough upheaval that would have allowed another choice to take hold.
And Japan just happens to go along with that because they borrowed parts of their writing system from China.
Korea is a solid counter example. Around the 1400's their King devised han'gul, which as of today is the dominant writing system of that country which replaced Chinese. They still study and use Chinese characters in school, but only for two specific cases: Names, and official government documents.
Historically, most of Vietnam were the settlement for Chams people with phonetic writing and language of their own [1]. They were very successful traders and South China Sea was originally called Cham Sea [2]. Then they were displaced by the Nguyen Lords who considered themselves belongs to Han Chinese, and latter enforced Chinese based logographic writing system to the populations.
Unlike phonetic, logographic writing system is neither effective nor it's efficient. In software engineering processing Japanese words is still problematic until now because of their usage of logographic writing system [3]. The are several movies and drama series documenting how the Korean moved from the Chinese logographic to Hangul phonetic writing system by their King Sejong to rapidly and significantly increase their literacy rates.
Chinese spoken languages are different, so the replacing logographic system will create an additional fault line inside the society.
Besides, even a change of alphabet creates a barrier in understanding of an existing written corpus. I once worked as a translator for a Kasakh high school student who created a program converting different alphabets used in Kasakh language. Once it was Arabic alphabet. Then came progressives and changed the alphabet to Latin. Then came Soviet communists and change the alphabet to Cyrillic. Progressives continued to use Latin though - in exile… There were interesting texts in each “encoding”, and my protege created a program for International Science Fair competition that allowed reading of all Kasakh texts in a preferred encoding.
So computers simplified the transition a bit, but the problem still exists.
Actually neither in Mainland China nor in Japan the choice of the writing system has remained stuck to what had been used there for millennia.
In both Mainland China and in Japan the writing system has been reformed enough so that anyone who learns only the modern writing systems will have great difficulties to read any writing from before the first World War.
The reform was much more profound in Mainland China than in Japan, resulting in the Simplified Chinese writing system, so now Japan has remained with the more complex writing system.
I would expect that that has a lot to do with how long-lived China's culture is. The "choice" of writing system was made long ago and has stuck. There hasn't been a significant enough upheaval that would have allowed another choice to take hold.
And Japan just happens to go along with that because they borrowed parts of their writing system from China.