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Japanese inherited this property from Chinese.

You can tell by the word ordering. Japanese normally places the verb after the subject/object, but when a word of composed of two Kanjis, the verb comes first.

Example: 来店 coming to a store. 来 = come, 店 = store

In "regular" Japanese, it would be 店に来る "to come to a store". Not only is the readin completely different ("raiten" vs "mise ni kuru"), the word ordering is the opposite.

In Chinese creative hanzi combination happens a lot more than in Japanese, as in Japanese foreign concepts tend to get transliterated into katakana first, though sometimes you do get kanji combinations, like vending machine -> jidouhanbaiki (自動販売機): automatic selling machine.

Compound nouns are likely my favourite linguistic feature ever. Can't tell you why.