Speaking the written language

In the years I have lived in Japan, I have worked hard at learning Japanese. It is very disabling not to be able to read - it makes you realize what it is like being illiterate, and how hard it is to get anything done when you doe not understand the language properly.
It is easy enough to understand the meaning when you look at a sign in the station, or road signs (which have to be designed for maximum clarity). When you look at one sign at the time, it is also easy. But many signs change meaning when they are combined with another. Most Japanese words are not written with one, but two characters. This is completely different from Chinese, where the goal is to write one word with one character, and the characters grow more complex as you try to put in more ideas on top of the same character base. 
If you can speak the language, you can make sense of what people tell you, and fill in the forms with the signs you have learned in the places where people point. But if you can not read the text, you do not know what you are writing, or why. And if nobody is around, there is nobody around to ask what the signs mean. It is worse than being blind, because you can see the sign but you can not interpret it.
There is hardly a modern society which does not depend on written text, but few which do it to the extent of Japan and Taiwan (who have kept the old Chinese legislative system). In other places, the spoken word often has a some priority over the written text. But in Japan, it is only in the witness booth that the spoken word has the advantage. And paradoxically, when you sign official documents.
Contracts are as written - and to make sure they are understood by both parties, a public scrivener (who corresponds to a notary public) has to read them to both parties, to make sure they are understood. But this is actually easier when you read the text.
The issue is that there are many words in Japanese which sound the same, but which have completely different meaning when written with different signs. And sometimes it is hard to determine from the context what the meaning of the words are. Different characters can make the meaning of a sentence completely different. It may sound the same but the meaning be different - which you can not understand unless you see it.
Paradoxically, the same goes the other way. There are many characters who have different meaning depending on how they are pronounced. The problem is that Japanese has borrowed the pronunciation for characters several times over the more than thousand years that Japanese and Chinese have interacted, and the meaning changed slightly between the times they were borrowed (as well as the pronunciation). There is usually an original Japanese pronunciation as well. Which means Japanese can be a very confusing language to learn, but one with a vast number of nuances as well.