Learning chinese to further japanese?

I'm currently signed up for a chinese I and chinese II course for next school year [one first semester, the other second] and my hope was that learning chinese characters will also help me to study japanese kanji... because while i'm learning the characters, i can learn both on and kun readings, right? has anyone tried this? is it a good idea at least?

[thats not the only reason i'm learning it though, i also just love learning languages... haha]