Kanji as Short hand: Mycernius' insight

[lexico]

On several occasions, member Mycernius made references to the Japanese adaptation of the Chinese characters as "short hand" for long Japanese words with many syllables. The more I think about it, the more sense it seems to make. Otherwise, the high occurence of kun'yomi indigenous readings (that is, non-Chinese, non-on'yomi) in spoken & written Japanese would be hard to explain. Considering that the earliest use of Chinese characters as phonetics to represent indigenous words only began in the 7th century Manyo'kana from which developed the kataganas, but that the Chinese characters were in use not later than the 4th century, at least there were 300 years of experimenting with the Chinesese writing system in conjunction to the Japanese tongue of the times.