The Chinese invented the Chinese ideograms.
The script-less Japanese adopted them, but they didn’t fit their language well on their own. So, they created hiragana (a syllabary) to be able to properly write their own labguage. A Japanese sentence typically comprises Chinese ideograms and hiragana.
Later, both the People’s Republic of China and Japan simplified their ideograms, but not in the same way, and the Chinese went much further.
So, now, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao use the traditional hanzi.
Japan uses their kanji, somewhat simplified.
And the PRC, Malaysia and Singapore use the simplified hanzi.
South Korea uses hanja which is virtually the same as traditional hanzi. And North Korea completely abandonned the Chinese ideograms.
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Yes they are very related.
Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese loaned the symbols from China when they began writing their languages. However Japanese uses two moraic writing systems in addition (Hiragana and Katakana), Korean has later switched to a syllabic one (Hangul), and Vietnamese switched to a latin derived alphabet. Those are probably what you recognize as distinct.
Where and when they use or used Chinese symbols the meanings per symbol are or were not consistent in the languages, and later separate drifting of meaning and reforms of the writing system occured over a long period.
The symbols are called 漢字 in traditional chinese and 汉字 in simplified chinese, the are called 漢字 in Japanese, it used to also be 漢字 in Korean, now in Hangul it is 한자, in Vietnamese it was 漢字 and is now Chữ Hán or Hán tự.
As you can see they used the Chinese name for the Chinese ideograms. But they all say it a little differently. Hànzì in Mandarin, Kanji in Japanese, Hanja in Korean, Chữ Hán or Hán tự. But it all means “Han” “characters”, with “Han” referring to the Han dynasty of Chinese rulers here.
I think Japanese is the only language who loaned them and is still significantly using them. Only texts for children or learners would typically be written fully in Hiragana and Katakana, normal daily written language will have most concepts represented by Kanji, modern loanwords and foreign names in Katakana, and Hiragana for particles and some verbal endings etc for inflection.