(For those who don’t read Japanese: 彼=he 彼女=she)

Sure those exist, but so do many gender-neutral pronouns, although many of them are impolite and/or colloquial. However the main difference between English and other European languages vs Japanese is that you can make a fully-formed Japanese sentence with no subject at all. “Went to the store” (or even just “Went”) is a fragment in English but a perfectly complete sentence in Japanese. Actually if you say “he went to the store” you’re emphasizing that HE went to the store, rather than SHE or I or WE or THEY (Japanese verbs do not conjugate based on the subject). So if context makes it clear whom you’re speaking about, it’s actually clunky to include a subject. It’s like saying “Sam dropped her son off at school, then Sam went to the store, then Sam went home” instead of “Sam dropped her son off at school, then she went to the store, then she went home.” In Japanese it would be something like “Sam dropped son off at school, then went to store, then went home” (so if you don’t know whether “Sam” is male or female, this sentence would provide you with no information on the matter).

A fun wrench in the system is that Japanese has gendered speech; in theory you can tell the gender (and sometimes rank and age) of the speaker based on their speech pattern, although this is significantly less true in writing, especially formal writing (e.g. academic, business, etc). There are gendered forms of “I” (あたし, 僕, 俺, わし, etc) as well as various phrases and conjugations (such as かな vs かしら, ~て vs ~ろ, use of の at the end of a sentence, etc). However the Japanese people, especially the younger generations, have been breaking away from these conventions, and it’s not that unusual for women to use male speech patterns, and to a lesser degree vice-versa. Plus there are gender-neutral speech patterns where based on context you might be able to make a guess as to the gender of the individual, but this is highly context-dependent and again, these conventions are being contested.

There are lots of examples out there of works that are successfully able to obscure the gender of characters (intentionally or merely by chance) for either a chunk of time or even the entire series. This happens pretty frequently in manga, where the pictures provide extra context and make gendered pronouns (or any pronoun at all) even less necessary: no need for “he said… she said…” when there are speech bubbles, and no need to say “he’s doing a thing” when a character can point to another character. This occasionally creates problems for the English translation, where it’s much harder to avoid gendered pronouns; if it’s not immediately obvious what the character’s gender is based on context or appearance, translators have to either hope that future chapters will include a gendered pronoun, or that the manga-ka will clarify in supplementary materials. This usually happens in fantasy/sci-fi series with non-human characters, but it can also happen with androgynous human characters. For example, nearly every character (except for the human protagonist) in the CLAMP series Wish is a gender-less angel or demon; for ease of translation the English version made the angels female and the demons male because they thought the translation would be too clunky if they couldn’t use gendered pronouns (this was back in the early 2000s, when the singular “they” wasn’t a mainstream thing yet).

In conclusion, while gendered pronouns and speech-patterns certainly exist and are frequently used in Japanese, it is also possible (and more importantly, grammatically correct and not linguistically awkward) to avoid gendered references to individuals in Japanese, especially when done on purpose.