Characters evolved from Chinese characters, and many Chinese characters are still preserved today.
Religious aspects and so on are all handed down from China.
Some people in Japan even claimed that the Chinese culture was no longer in the Central Plains after the Yuan and Qing Dynasties, and only Japan kept the Chinese culture. Chinese culture is not in Han, but in harmony. During the Qing Dynasty, Japanese aggression against China included Eight-Nation Alliance and the Sino-Japanese War. But interestingly, one of the Japanese propaganda slogans is to expel the Manchus and regard themselves as the orthodox representatives of China.
Therefore, Japanese culture basically retains the culture of China before the Song Dynasty, and has more China characteristics than China.