Nah, 喰 is entirely unrelated; it's one of the few characters Japan invented (most are imported and sometimes simplified from Traditional Chinese).

On the other hand, you might recognize 吃 as the 喫 from 喫茶店 (café).

The Chinese simplification was overall a good thing. A lot of the simplifications are from Japanese, even. Like, compare the Traditional 體 with the Simplified 体 (body) - the latter is from Japanese.

The Japanese simplifications were pretty good, but a lot of the Communist ones are aesthetically ruinous. 车东气门 have none of the symmetry that 車東氣門 have. 气 doesn't even have its center of mass over its base of support, although at least in this case it is six strokes less. The Japanese simplifications seem to have kept the artistic flavor.

Agreed.

Those simplifications appear to have been designed purely for reduction of stroke count (that is, making it faster to write by hand), not for simplification in the sense of making it more simple, logical, and consistent.

(As a matter of fact, that "simplification" introduced further inconsistencies, in that certain radicals were written differently when part of a character, while the traditional writing maintained it. Example: 金 gold is the left part of money, which you can see in the traditional 錢, but not in the simplified 钱. Similarly 言 in traditional 說 vs simplified 说.)

Yeah, and the radicals sure got uglified. I calmed down a bit when I found that apparently a lot of the simplifications where just officializing shortcuts people were already taking. Kind of like spelling "with" as "w/", I'm guessing.

Prewett - true. But then, why make it "simple" but ugly for _printing_? It's absurd... just keep the complex form in books and reading printed text, and tolerate what people are writing out by hand in cursive. That's distinct anyway. It's as if we'd "simplify" the "-ing" at the end of words to some wiggle with a dot and a loop in printed matter.

for those who don't know, this is called 略字 (ryakuji) eg 門 > 门

To add some anecdata from native speakers (not me), I've noticed many simplifications like 机車 in "Traditional" Taiwanese handwriting, but I've never seen 机车.

That's completely subjective, most characters are not symmetrical anyway, and when they are it's a mistake to draw them symmetrical.

Characters are mostly displayed on screen nowadays, and most fonts are indeed symmetrical. I don't find Simplified Chinese handwriting ugly at all, but it looks odd on-screen.

喰 is not a Chinese character, Japanese created this character...吃 is not a modern simplification for 喰, it has appeared in ancient written Chinese but has a different meaning. Now in modern Chinese 吃 has the same meaning as ancient 喫(eat). 食 has always been in Chinese characters, composed of 人良, which means "things that hold one's life". 食 serves both as a noun and a verb.

Japanese kanji come from Chinese characters, but has become very different too. As a native Chinese, I think there is a clear link between modern simplified Chinese and 'near ancient' Chinese character. Here 'near ancient' means characters used up to 汉(漢, Han) Dynasty. Before Han, Chinese was very different too. There has always been a simplification process and a link.

You can't simply take a characater apart and glue meanings of the parts together - it's more complicated. Having "乞" part doesn't necessarily mean it has the meaning of begging - it's a "sound", rather than meaning, element, which "provides" the sound of "吃".

And although I don't know the "喰" character, I can tell it didn't become Chinese 吃 and Japanese 食. 食 is more "ancient", where "吃" seems only used so widely in modern time.

Simplification of Chinese characters indeed started many arguments, but the "tranditional" Chinese used in Taiwan has also developed some "simplified" characters.

Yeah the Japanese version of hànzì is much more ancient (Song or Tang dynasties, I think) and have changed comparatively little since then. Also, they simplified some characters in a very different way than how the Chinese did. (I'm probably wrong but: if I remember correctly, Japanese has changed a lot, but the writing system hasn't so the sounds like part of the character isn't always correct or even close. It's a lot like Irish or English in that the language has changed much but the writing hasn't.)

I have lived in Japan since I was a teenager and I had a much better time reading in China (was there for a few weeks as a tourist) than speaking.

It was quite funny because staff at restaurants thought I was some kind of weirdo who could point at exactly what he wanted on the menu but couldn't answer basic questions.

They appear to have simplified them predictably in a way that is not impossible to understand if you have a senior HS-level of kanji knowledge.