Brittany spears throwing out MAJOR SYMBOLISM
(media.greatawakening.win)
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Kanji is Japanese.
Yes and no.
Kanji is the Japanese word for chinese characters, literally. "kan" 漢 meaning Sino/China and "ji" 字, character/letter/word. It's also what they use to describe the chinese characters they adopted into their syllabary. These are chinese characters, some of which have changed within Japanese over time to become uniquely Japanese. They can have their own unique Japanese sounds associated with them (kun-yomi, or Japanese reading) but still retain japanese-ified (technical term) chinese sounds (on-yomi, or Chinese reading).
Ex. 人 = ひと, hito (kun-yomi); じん, jin (on-yomi) -- there are other pronunciations, but I'm only listing these as an example.
nani!!??
TLDR: Japanese is hard, yo.
Japanese can take even more leeway with the use of furigana, tiny kana (the "letters" from both their "alphabets") written besides or above kanji and used to give the proper reading for a kanji, either for unknown kanji for the target audience age or for disambiguation.
Authors can use those furigana to give new readings to a kanji, a very common usage of this is "ability names" in manga, one of the most well-known being "The World", written "Sekai" which means "World", and pronounced "Za Warudo" as per the furigana which is the Japanese way of pronouncing the English words "The World". The character never says "Sekai", and the Japanese reader reads "Za Warudo", but knows it has a link to his understanding of "Sekai". Sometimes there's no correlation at all, and the furigana just gives a cool-sounding name to a set of kanji otherwise describing what the character is actually doing.
Furigana can also be used to include a double-meaning, as in "what I say" in kanji within the spoken sentence from one character to another, compared to "what I really think" in furigana, making perfect sense in Japanese, but is way harder to properly translate and may lead to loss of information...
Again, Japanese is hard, yo.