Aside from kanji, Japanese has two phonetic alphabets. Their language is complex, but it also seems to have a lot of redundancy built in, even if romaji doesn't count as an unofficial extra Japanese alphabet by now.

Quora has an illustration[0] of a keyboard with english and hiragana characters mapped, and conversion to kanji by software. It seems awkward, but not to the degree that it would stifle adoption considerably. Admittedly, this is a naive view on my part.

[0]https://www.quora.com/How-do-computer-users-type-in-Japanese

> This is where I come back to my working hypothesis that symbol based languages make computers more awkward to Adopt and engage.

I'm reasonably confident you can drop it, because it doesn't make any sense and doesn't actually match the country.

Please elaborate.

Well, for one: QWERTY is not the only mode of input. I have a 23-Key chorded keyboard[1] that can produce all 101-keys of a standard U.S. keyboard.

[1] http://twiddler.tekgear.com/