Japanese is known to use Chinese characters. While Japanese is obviously its own language system, the letters were adopted from Chinese and remixed for their own purposes.
Korea, by comparison, originally used a similar system (adopting Chinese characters) but they later developed their own writing system called Hangul which superseded the old system.
Obviously, had Hangul not been popular, there is likely a scenario where Korean would look different than presented today.
My question is simple. Did anyone in Japan historically ever try to develop a Japanese created alphabet which was independent from Chinese influence? Did such an alphabet ever exist and simply not succeed like Hangul or was it simply never considered an issue that required adopting a new system?
Two native phonetic scripts were developed in Japan. Both are syllabaries rather than alphabets. These are katakana and hiragana, both of which were developed from the use of kanji (Chinese characters) to phonetically represent sounds. Hiragana was developed from cursive script versions of such kanji, while katakana came from the conventional kanji. Both originated in the 9th century.
Katakana was developed in a religious context, mainly for phonetic representation of Buddhist scriptures (written in Sanskrit). Hiragana was developed as a phonetic script for upper-class women (who were less likely to be literature in Classical Chinese than men), and was originally called onnade, "women's script". By the 10th century, both syllabaries were being used outside their original contexts, and were used more widely, including in mixed-script (kanji + hiragana or kanji + katakana), where most words were written in kanji and grammatical particles (such as suffixes noting the grammatical meaning of words), and for the phonetic representation of words (especially foreign words). All of these uses parallel uses of hangul in Korean (phonetic representation of Buddhist scriptures, a script for educated women, mixed-script writing).
Like most use of hangul until the late 20th century (when the South Korean government reduced the use of hanja (Chinese characters used in Korean) in media and education), katakana and hiragana were mostly used as mixed scripts together with kanji.
Neither katakana nor hiragana are completely independent of Chinese influence, since both developed from kanji, but both were native Japanese developments. Neither was the first phonetic script used in Japan, since both were preceded by the phonetic use of kanji. Also, bonji (the Japanese name for Sanskrit script AKA Siddhaṃ script) was introduced into Japan at the start of the 9th century, if not earlier. Both the introduction on bonji and the development of katakana are attributed to the Japanese Buddhist monk Kukai (774-835) - if this is true, then bonji would have been the main inspiration for katakana.