Your Name in Japanese
Ateji: How Foreign Names Get Written in Kanji
The tradition is real and it is a sound game first. Meaning is a filter, not a starting point - and the tattoo failure mode is structural rather than linguistic.
Japan Know How archive
kanji
Writing & Language
How Many Kanji Do You Actually Need?
The official answer is 2,136. The useful answers are thirty, a hundred, and a thousand, depending on what you want to read. What each threshold buys, and the official lists explained.
Writing & Language
Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji: How Japanese Writing Works
Three scripts in one sentence, each doing a job the others cannot. What each one is for, why Japanese never dropped kanji, and how to read the layout before you read the words.