Japanese as International Language

I think that Japanese would make a good International language
1) Chinese, Taiwanese, Koreans, Vietnamese intelligentsia can read the Sino-Japanese "Kanji" characters and almost make sense of Japanese newspapers.
2) Chinese (in its various forms, sharing the same script) is used by more people than any other language.  The large number of varities of spoken Chinese, and the existances of tones do not make it very suitable as an international language but, Japanese is an easy language for one in five of the world's population that use Kanji (this according to Chinese Japanophones that I have spoken to inJapan) .
3) Japanese is particularly easy to pronounce requiring no tones nor guttural nor dental fricative consonants.
4) The Chinese part of the language is agglutinative and built of only about 2000 bricks. The learning curve is steep while you are still learning these kanji, and then shallow once you have learned them, as opposed to endlessly medium-steep in the case of English.
5) There are few irregular verbs or irregular forms of any sort.
6) There is less of a connection between correct Japanese and wealth, and arguably, colonialism. The colonialism period of Japan was shorter, less genocidal, more localised, and far less persistent than that of the speakers of the current international language of favour.
7) Japanese word order is flexible, relying on suffixes to indicate subject object and case.
8) There are fewer tenses than in English
9) There is no gender.
10) There are no relative pronouns so that adjectival clauses can modify nouns directly, without the need for a relative  
English word order "I want a tool for hitting in nails"
Japanese word order "I want nail hitting tool"
English Word order "This is the place which she bought."
Japanese word order "This is she bought place."
The ease with which one can make adjectival clause is very convenient for learners who often lack vocabulary and have to rely on adjectival clauses to say what they mean.

11) There is a standard form of the language (compare English in which there are competing international standards)
12) Japanese is backed by the world's second largest economy.
13) Japanese is the third most popular language on the Internet, after English and Chinese.
14) Japanese is related to a particularly tolerant religion (Shinto) and popular religious philosophy (Buddhism, particularly Zen)
15) While Japanese has taken a lot of loan words post war, it is in its form and structure less of a bastard than English which is popular among Europeans precisely because it is a mixture -- making it more difficult to learn from anyone outside of that clique.
16) There is and will continue to be a large monolingual nation to perpetuate Japanese. About 14% of the US population speak spanish and about half of these have limited Spanish proficiency.
17) There is plenty of Japanese literature, including the earliest novel and some of the first written mythology.
18) There is a lot of learner Japanese in the form of Manga and Anime.
19) The Kanji are made up of only 200 smaller parts. The Japanese take ages over learning them but if one goes about it in a rational way then it only takes a couple of years.
20) There are no definite and indefinite articles that with bizarre rules: Even among “native English speakers there are differences. American would be inclined to say "Have you ever spent a night in the hospital" giving hospital a definite article, while the British give definite articles to bars.
21) Japanese spelling is entirely (with a few exceptions like "ha" and "desu") phonetic and regular while "ghoti" might be pronounced as fish (“gh” as in cough, “o” as in women, and “ti” as in station)
22) Japanese travel, and spend a lot while travelling meaning that Japanese language ability is a valuable skill in the large Japanese and Japan related travel and tourism industry.
23) Japan is a safe place, and opportunities for learning Japanese in Japan are immense.
24) Partly due to the fact that English is such an irregular language, the Japanese have to spend trillions of yen learning it. These trillions could be put to a better use encouraging the spread of Japanese.
25) If the French can encourage the use of French as an international language, the Japanese with their much larger economy can too.
26) The Japanese are shy and linguistically challenged (it is not only foreign languages that cause them to get nervous, but even their own) so they find it more difficult learning foreign languages then we do.
27) The US is in debt up to eyeballs to the Japanese, and increasingly so due to the trade deficit, so there should be a shift in economic power in this direction sometime soon.
28) With the advent of computers, writing the Japanese script has become no more difficult than writing English, with the proviso that the writer must be able to read.
29) Japanese is more compact than English, taking up less space on the page.
30) Being a pictorial language, once mastered, Japanese is faster to read than English since one has less need of going via phonemes.
31) Japanese is more visually attractive than English, although perhaps the more limited phonic range means that Japanese is less attractive than English aurally.
32) Nonetheless, Japanese popular music is very popular, especially in Asia.
33) Most Japanese nouns to not require plurals. If there are two books then you just say there are "two book".
34) For demographic reason Japan will soon have to accept large numbers of migrant labourers who will have to learn Japanese.
35) There are no comparatives or superlatives; one just says that things are “more red”, or “most red” without having to modify the adjective.

Edited to remove some of the more obvious mistakes pointed out by kind readers on 24th March 2007