ORIGINS
#1 - THREE alphabets?
What's up with THAT?!
Just about
everyone knows that Japan is a very gender-conscious (read: chauvanistic) country.
If you think it's bad today, you don't want to know how bad it was back around
the end of the first millenium, when Japan first started using kanji. Education?
For women? Hell no! But there's a problem. In the Imperial Court of the Heian
Age (approx: 790-1160AD), you were less than nobody if you couldn't write and
recite delicate poetry at the drop of a hat, and the women got just as involved
with court politics and intrigue as the men did.
Of course, women were "too stupid" to fully understand kanji, what with all their complex strokes and myriad meanings. Best leave that to the men. (riiiiight) The solution? The development of a sort of "short-hand"-- certain kanji were simplified down to 2 or 3 strokes. Of course, this was for the women, who had to be graceful and elegant, so the writing had to be graceful and elegant too. Basically, they wrote a kanji, one that could be up to 10 strokes or more, in 2 strokes. Veeeeery cursive and free-form.
To make things even more simple for women, the converted kanji were stripped of their idiographic meanings and just set to stand for one syllable.
And voila! Hiragana. Only it wasn't called "hiragana" until very, very recently (like sometime this century, I think). Its original name is "onna-de" -- women's hand. Also, there were a lot more of them at first. Since the turn of the first millenium, many syllables have gone out of use, so the hiragana for them became obsolete.
How about katakana? That one is far simpler. Created around the same time as hiragana, this particular alphabet comes from the notes of Buddhist monks, the "scholarly" class of the Heian age. I mean, can you imagine having to take class notes in kanji? There were a lot more in the way of 20+ stroke monstrosities back then, too. So, searching for the best way to keep up with their tutors, monks stripped 3 or 4 strokes out of one kanji and set it for one syllable.
Outside of the Court, proper form for Kanji was just as the Chinese did it; as square as possible. The monks weren't interested in the willowy cursive of the Court, so katakana remained square and blocky.
For a while, people wrote exclusively in one alphabet. Women have been confined to hiragana for a lot longer than any of the others, but men started experimenting with mixing kanji and kana fairly fast, but no particular system was very prevalent. Little reforms in the general writing system have happened lots of times, but the biggest one hit after WWII, when MacArthur had the Japanese Diet set up. One of their projects was creating a governmental standard writing system, the most of which is still in use today.
--primary source: Kanji and Kana, by Spahn and Hadamitsky.