>>511107604
The bureaucratic elite of Japan spoke Chinese and Dutch. And kana was an abugida, you can find literal cannibal tribes that have offshoot Brahmi script like the Batak tribe. The average Japanese didn't read hanzi characters that was a bureaucratic language. And hentaigana had entirely different orthography than modern kana usage. I implore you try reading this. The person who wrote this is an acquaintance of Natsumi Soseki, so basically this would be the closest vernacular equivalent of modern Japanese in the 1920s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language#History

>Bungo (文語; "literary language") used in formal texts, is different compared to the colloquial language (口語, kōgo), used in everyday speech.[24] The two systems have different rules of grammar and some variance in vocabulary. Bungo was the main method of writing Japanese until about 1900; since then kōgo gradually extended its influence and the two methods were both used in writing until the 1940s.

They changed the writing system drastically after the 1940s. Do you really think the average person can read bungo?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Japanese

>By 1908, novels no longer used classical Japanese, and by the 1920s the same was true of all newspapers.[6]