Basic Japanese

Around 130 million people speak Japanese, the ninth most widely spoken language in the world. Outside Japan itself, there are approximately 5 million people who speak Japanese with some degree of fluency - predominantly descendants of Japanese emigrants in Hawaii, Brazil and other parts of the Americas.

Japanese has 3 alphabets
kanji - Chinese ideograms imported from the sixth century onwards.
hiragana and katakana - both 45 character alphabets. katakana is used mainly for foreign loanwords.

Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality. There are three main levels of politeness in spoken Japanese:
the plain form (kudaketa)
the simple polite form (teinei)
the advanced polite form (keigo)

From site: japanvisitor