Western stenographic civilization gave much impact to Asia ; Pen, Writing motion, Writing order,Concept of phonetics and so on.

In Asia, our ancestor used writing brush in writing Chinse character on hand made Japanese paper which absorb water much.
Character is ideogram. It is very different from Latin alphabet. Chinese, Japanese write Chinese character which has meaning and pronunciation. But pronunciation varies among each languages. Even in the same language, the pronunciation is not one. Moreover, one character in Japanese has plural pronunciations.
Traditional writing direction was Up to down right to left though,today, we write as European from left to right direction.
Today we use phonetic letter for writing a loan-word.