Onomatopoeia

Getting warmer day by day. Yesterday ウグイスcame to my garden and was singing that beautiful song in that sweet voice. This is absolutely a prettier harbinger of spring than hay fever. The adorable warble of うぐいす is so familiar to us Japanese, that to our ears it sounds exactly like "ho- ho ke kyo".
Japanese seems rich in onomatopoeia when compared with western languages. Once a British guy told me that onomatopoeia is primitive form of language and it disappears as the language gets refined. Recently under the influence of Japanese manga, English begins to have onomatopoeic words I heard, which then we may call a linguistic throwback.
三島由紀夫 disdained to use any of onomatopoeic words in his beautiful novels. He thought about this, that and the other before he described Japanese beauty without using imitative sounds. This strictness in his works appeals something to me. The British guy may be right.
However any language is in the first place a substitute for the reality of the world. It is more or less an imitation and fake. If so why not using substitute for the sounds?