alt Hacker NewsThat would work nicely in an abstract spherical Japan in pure vacuum.
The hardest bit about redoing something from scratch is not how to design the new system, but it's in getting it adopted. Many societies have tried things like that, social inertia, especially paired with learning barriers (the steeper, the worse), and cultural and political notions (and Japan values and tries to preserve their history and culture quite a lot) is not something that can be just dismissed.
That's not to say that there weren't countries that had writing system overhauls, just that it's difficult and of questionable value and not entirely without negative effects.
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The issue is that its not theirs and that is exactly the problem. You can't just use China's writing system and try to make it fit to your language. Japan might have a high literacy rate but that is despite their horrible system and not because of it. Plus you can argue that they're not really literate, they just limit themselves to using a small portion of their 'kanji' and write little hiragana hints that tell you how to pronounce the written symbols for all the rest.
>and Japan values and tries to preserve their history and culture quite a lot
Has to be said though that reform can be interpreted in exactly that way too, as revitalization. Hangul for example is also a kind of patriotic achievement. I've even heard, and that was coming from a Japanese friend (who speaks both languages): "we have the world's best and most logical writing system and the most illogical right here next to each other". And in the language department and the origins of their writing systems they're in a fairly comparable boat, just went in two very different directions.