Why invent all those characters, in a language that already has too many characters? Showing a bit of my own bias here, I'd say it's a form of Chinese chauvinism, one that goes directly against the concept of "international symbols". While some of the elements were known in ancient times and indeed had names already (e.g., Liú 硫 for 'sulfur' is genuine and old), most of the characters in the table are XX century inventions. Meanwhile, at center stage, it seems that each element has a single, unique Chinese character of its own - as if these are all little pieces of ancient Chinese wisdom, placed like postage stamps into the western periodic table 'stamp book.' Really? Of course not. In the Chinese periodic table below, notice how the international symbols are played down, by chasing them all into the upper left corner in small font. No need to know any Chinese or Japanese at all to see what's afoot here.) The nuance that I'm driving at will become clear after you compare the Chinese periodic table further down, and see how S, Sc, and Mt are handled there. (Glance also at the very long katakana items that appear elsewhere, e.g., for the element Sc or Mt. That pair of kanji, Romanized as iō, is simply an annotation of the international symbol, S, not meant to 'compete with' S.
I apologize for the tiny font, but notice how, in the Japanese periodic table, the symbol 'S' has the word for sulfur (硫黄) under it. As they say, "a picture is worth a thousand words." Here are two pictures, copy/pasted from Google Images: First, the Japanese periodic table, then the Chinese periodic table.
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