Well first of all, the introduction of kanji has played a large part in the proliferation of homophones. Second, the world's first full length novel was written entirely in hiragana, so it's not that much of an impression. Anecdotally, I've played a few Nintendo old school RPGs and you'd be surprised by how little ambiguity comes up and matters for most of the common words. It's just like when speaking.

I hate the constant bitching and whining about learning kanji on here as much as anyone, but there's really no reason Japanese can't be rendered just fine in hiragana or hangeul or whatever. Korean used to be the same way. It's just not as concise and poetic as having kanji, so they're not going to change, so everyone needs to stop bitching and realize that kanji are actually pretty cool.

But let's not take the jerk too far in the other direction and pretend Japanese is some magical language that requires a complex logographic writing system to display, unlike any other language in the world, including languages with just as small of a vowel and consonant space like Swahili.