I have a feeling the first half of the question is about the perennial problem of phonemic distinctions being made on different axes. In Japanese it's always between voiced and unvoiced, not between aspirated and unaspirated as in the case of mandarin Chinese. Some allophones of the *same* phoneme in Japanese are actually aspirated while others are unaspirated, and this creates confusion among speakers of Chinese, especially if they only speak northern verities...