This glossy hardback is Nanette Gottlieb's sixth book in sixteen years about aspects of language and society in Japan. It continues her particular interest in two areas: first, national language planning and policy, and in particular how these relate to minority groups in Japan, and, second, the traditional Japanese script and the impact thereon of keyboard technology. The volume consists of five chapters. It is meticulously researched and full of dates and detailed statistics specific to various prefectures. Gottlieb's straightforward style, though, would render the content readily accessible to readers unfamiliar with the administration of the Japanese education system.

The main concern of this publication is to show whether and how the Japanese authorities are responding to the two developments of immigration and electronic texting tools. With the former, due to long-standing and deeply-rooted notions of monoethnicity and monolingualism in Japan, no policy exists on the provision of Japanese as a Second Language (JSL) for new residents. Gottlieb touches on the key role of a ‘language regime’ in building a notion of a unified nation-state, and points out that the 1997 Act of Parliament giving protection to the endangered Ainu language (endemic to Hokkaido) was a first step in moving away from this cultural monopoly. This will be an interesting area of Japan's political scene to watch in the near future, as the country comes to grips with the fact that many different ethnic groups now live within its borders, all of whom require language provision in varying ways, whether this be JSL support in schools for children, or JSL for employment or for basic daily life for adults (the book devotes sections to migrant factory workers, nurses and care workers, foreign spouses, and foreigners caught up in the Japanese legal system). Some local communities are pragmatically getting on with the job of supplying such needs, but how the government will grapple with this issue at the national level when it goes against the grain of centuries-old ideologies and the long-cherished uchi/soto ‘home/outside’ distinction, remains to be seen.

The other strand of this book is the impact of the electronic era on the traditional kanji, which previously had been written only by hand. Here, in contrast to the lack of language policy described above, the Japanese Government has shown that it can move to take positive action in response to changing circumstances, for instance, by issuing a revision of the List of Characters for General Use, expanded in recognition of the fact that larger numbers of kanji are now routinely used than in the pre-electronic age. In sum, this book affords fascinating insights into Japanese policy making and into the collective psyche that underpins it, especially with regards to Japanese concepts of themselves and ‘others’.