> I don't think anyone is "mysticizing" the language. It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.

People absolutely do mystify the operation of kanji, like they're more than scribbles that point to words, or that Japanese would fall to incomprehensibility and ruin if they were done away with.

> It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.

This isn't quite true - about 80% of Chinese characters are so-called phonosemantic compounds, where people originally started using the character for one thing for another thing whose word sounded similar (say, emoji for "can", as in able to) and then adding a semantic component to differentiate the character from other similar-sounding ones. In Chinese, they smushed the two components into the space of one character, but in eg. Egypt, they simply wrote whe semantic clarifier and the phonetic hint side by side, full size.

That is, the majority of the characters are primarily sound-based, it's just that the connection between a character and its sound is shoddy, even in Chinese languages.

Japanese kun readings for native words do divorce the characters pretty completely from their sound.