I've been doing some research on a few different characters, and I was wondering if anyone knows of a resource that tries to date the most common 漢字. By that I mean, the earliest recorded use of each character. Ideally, I want to find this information for both when they entered into Chinese writing, and especially when they came into use in Japan, but I'd take either at this point. The problem is that I don't read Chinese, so the information would have to be in English or Japanese.

For example, right now I'm looking at http://tinyurl.com/6oqltc6 and I see at the bottom that this character existed in Middle Chinese, at least. But then I see that Middle Chinese spanned like seven centuries, so that's not incredibly helpful to pin down a general date.

Does such a non-Chinese-language resource exist, in any form?