[Coda]

Originally Posted by whitexsuicide

it is horrible to do the stroke order wrong!

It's important to know WHY the stroke order is important, though, or otherwise just saying it's bad is meaningless.

Older Japanese people are worried that such finer points of culture will be lost as youth do most of their writing on computers. Already young people are losing their kanji vocabulary; while they can read them when they encounter them, they can't think of them in handwriting because the computer automatically converts the kanji for them. (They call this ワープロ馬鹿 "wa-puro baka" -- "word processor fool" -- because they depend on their word processors to do their kanji for them.) So a focus on stroke order to them is just clinging to their cultural heritage.

But the real loss is the ancient art of Japanese calligraphy, which as I mentioned requires an innate understanding of stroke order to be able to read -- and younger Japanese people are finding it increasingly difficult to read older poetry.