Academic/historic attempts to create an alternative writing system similar to Hangul?


I was reading upon Japanese writing system history and found out there were
several attempts to abolish the use of 漢字 in favor of kana or romaji, e.g.
[after the WWII](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/5520/9222). All of those
failed, and the only big thing which happened to Japanese writing system since
the adoption of Han characters is the invention of kana. However, I couldn't
find information about any attempts to construct alternative writing systems,
analogous to Hangul in the Korean language.

The main problem with kana/romaji approach is homophonic 漢字 and words. I can
see why this could prevent the adoption of kana/romaji-only writing with
additional spaces b/w words: it may be [enough for video
games](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/23282/9222) but is problematic for
news, scientific, and legal documents.

The other thing which strikes me is that hiragana and katakana do not exactly
match the phonetic structure of the language. For example, the word 漢字
consists of 2 syllables "kan+ji", but in kana, it is written as "かんじ", which
is 3 _mora_ s. In Hangul, each symbol encodes exactly one syllable, which
seems to the language phonetic system much better. This makes me think that
Japanese can be encoded in a similar way. This may be just my personal quirk,
but I feel like many 音読み kanji _should have been_ a single kana character,
e.g. "かん", "ほん", etc. (However, I _do_ understand why it is not so, so don't
bother explaining this.)

All this makes me wonder if the invention of kana was the one and only attempt
to address the problems related to the use of 漢字. **Are there any
academic/historic attempts to invent something akin to Hangul for the Japanese
language?** If there are, how do they address the homophony problem?

Related question on linguistics.SE: [Why was Korea able to remove kanji but
Japan wasn't when both languages use
homophones?](https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/3831/13240)

* * *

To clarify: I'm not saying or implying that 漢字 is a bad thing which should be
replaced. I'm just curious if there were any "creative" attempts of doing that
since obviously there are supporters of such ideas even among Japanese people.

Also, I'm not saying that Korea did a better job (compared to Japan) by
introducing Hangul, either. Hangul is used as an example only. No comparison
intended aside from purely scientific.




You said "hiragana and katakana do not exactly match the phonetic structure of
the language," but that's not true. The Japanese language is [mora-
based](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/30039/5010), and only trained
people who study foreign languages recognize the concept of syllable. Everyone
believes 天文台 (てんもんだい) has six "sounds" here in Japan, not three. And that's
why it's straightforwardly six characters in kana.

Kanji were only "borrowed" from China. The Chinese language is syllable-based
(correct me if I'm wrong), but ever since kanji came into use in Japan,
Japanese people have understood their readings with the Japanese mora-based
brains. There is no wonder old Japanese people used two characters to describe
an on-reading of 石 (せき), 活 (かつ), etc; they simply felt there were two
"sounds".

Even if you created different phonetic characters for different possible on-
readings ([a few hundred different characters would be
required](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/24378/5010)), you still cannot
write many native Japanese words like さむらい, よろこぶ, わたくし,
[やまたのおろち](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/13804/5010), etc, with fewer
characters. And daily conversations are largely based on such native Japanese
words.

Hentaigana were abandoned, but the number of hiragana/katakana currently in
use is small enough to remember, and I'm not aware of previous serious
attempts to reorganize them (aside from ローマ字).




You said "hiragana and katakana do not exactly match the phonetic structure of
the language," but that's not true. The Japanese language is [mora-
based](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/30039/5010), and only trained
people who study foreign languages recognize the concept of syllable. Everyone
believes 天文台 (てんもんだい) has six "sounds" here in Japan, not three. And that's
why it's straightforwardly six characters in kana.

Kanji were only "borrowed" from China. The Chinese language is syllable-based
(correct me if I'm wrong), but ever since kanji came into use in Japan,
Japanese people have understood their readings with the Japanese mora-based
brains. There is no wonder old Japanese people used two characters to describe
an on-reading of 石 (せき), 活 (かつ), etc; they simply felt there were two
"sounds".

Even if you created different phonetic characters for different possible on-
readings ([a few hundred different characters would be
required](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/24378/5010)), you still cannot
write many native Japanese words like さむらい, よろこぶ, わたくし,
[やまたのおろち](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/13804/5010), etc, with fewer
characters. And daily conversations are largely based on such native Japanese
words.

Hentaigana were abandoned, but the number of hiragana/katakana currently in
use is small enough to remember, and I'm not aware of previous serious
attempts to reorganize them (aside from ローマ字).

