> It's a necessary evil owing to the large English lexicon filled with homophones. The Japanese stick to their ponderous use of Chinese characters for similar reasons.

This is a common and incredibly stupid argument. Note that it immediately implies that oral communication in English and Japanese is impossible.

Early video games didn't have the memory available to render text in kanji and used kana exclusively. This caused zero problems.

Why do they use kanji now?

Because that's what Japanese writing is like. Why do US senators wear suits instead of T-shirts?

There's something to that argument in Japanese. According to [1] Japanese has 643 distinct syllables, while English has about 6949.

There's a lot more context in speech and video games and long-form writing than in random writing and signs. It's virtually impossible to convey a meaning to a product or company name without using kanji.

For example, let's take a company named "Bandai". Now look up "ban" (https://jisho.org/search/ban) and look up "dai" (https://jisho.org/search/dai) and "da" (https://jisho.org/search/da) and "i" (https://jisho.org/search/i), each of which has 3-5 meanings, and tell me which combination of possible words is the company's name derived from? There's literally no way to tell.

[1] https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/36909

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how language works. Determining the etymology of a name is not possible in any language.

What combination of words was "Xerox" derived from? Does that affect the meaning of "Xerox"?

How about "Samuel"?

"Rachel"?

"Ted"?

I was originally thinking about names that have intended meanings "Target", "Burger King", "Taco bell", "Pager Duty", "DuckDuckGo", "Texas Instruments", "Aperture Laboratories" etc.

> Note that it immediately implies that oral communication in English and Japanese is impossible.

Only if people communicate without context. A large amount of ambiguity can be removed by understanding the context of the conversation.

You haven't described a difference between oral and written communication.

I am responding to your comment that oral communication is impossible because of homonyms. I am not covering the difference between oral and written communication.

That is not something any of my comments says. On the contrary, I identified it as "incredibly stupid".