The Japanese changed a lot of hanzi to make it easier. The Chinese reaaaally simplified their hanzi to a point that I, as a native Japanese speaker, find it hard to decipher. With traditional Chinese, even with the more complex strokes, I can sorta make sense of signs and even some snippets from a newspaper article.

Also note that even though each character might have the same-ish meaning across languages, we might use different combinations to describe a word.