Education

At the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japanese was written very differently to how it is now. Today's modern colloquial written style did not yet exist; instead, the written language of public life was Sino-Japanese, supplemented by other classically based styles such as sōrōbun (epistolary style) and wabun (classical Japanese). Also commonly used was the wankankonkōbun style which synthesised elements of Chinese and Japanese classical grammar with more contemporary lexical items, but a considerable gap still existed between even this and the contemporary spoken language. In addition, none of the modern script reforms had yet occurred or would occur for another eighty years. The thousands upon thousands of kanji available for use, the multiplicity of readings available for each of them, a kana spelling based on classical pronunciation and the lack of a systematised method of punctuation rendered mastery of the writing system at advanced levels beyond the grasp of the majority of the population.

With no national education system in place until 1872, the only officially sponsored education available was that offered through samurai domain schools to the children of the samurai class. Commoners fended for themselves by establishing a vigorous system of education at terakoya (temple schools) and attaining a degree of literacy in kana and basic kanji, some more so than others, but the complexity of the writing system meant that advanced literacy skills were not uniformly reached. “For most”, Unger notes, “literacy meant a restricted set of skills that conferred only a portion of the liberating power we unthinkingly ascribe without qualification to education as a force for social change. Furthermore, literacy was not distributed equally”.Footnote ¹³ Nevertheless, literacy rates (when estimated based on school attendance figures, without regard to degree of literacy) are widely considered to have been higher in pre-modern Japan than in Europe at that time,Footnote ¹⁴ and this may later have worked against the idea of romanisation. Whereas in many countries romanisation has been seen as a path to literacy, in the case of Japan it is possible that fairly widespread familiarity with the Japanese writing system (however limited) in the pre-modern period helped to instil an attachment to that system that later invoked resistance to any subsequent move to replace it with the alphabet in the modern period.

It was against the above background, and in the context of a keenly felt need to modernise in order to fend off the potential threat from western powers, that the initial suggestions that romanisation might facilitate national progress were made. During Japan's period of feudal isolation from the rest of the world, when only one Dutch trading post was allowed to remain in Nagasaki Harbour, scholars of the West commented on the conciseness of the alphabet with which they came in contact through the study of the Dutch language.Footnote ¹⁵ In the first year of the new national education system, Nambu Yoshikazu (1840–1917) petitioned the Minister for Education to replace characters with the alphabet. His view was supported by influential Meiji Period philosopher Nishi Amane (1826–97), who as one of the first Japanese students sent to study abroad felt keenly that Japan's writing system was sorely in need of reform before it could function efficiently to spread learning and science among the populace. What better, then, at a time of widespread adoption of other western institutions and customs, than to adopt the alphabet as well?Footnote ¹⁶

The men in charge of the new Meiji Period government and its institutions, however, had been educated to read and write Sino-Japanese and to study the Chinese classics, and great prestige attached to these traditions. Mastery of Sino-Japanese and of kanji was the mark of an educated man. Although several significant essays on romanisation appeared during the 1870s and early 1880s, the idea of script reform did not sit well with the majority of the educated class. In order to increase their effectiveness, therefore, rōmaji supporters – most of whom had studied foreign alphabet-using languages – decided in 1885 to band together into the Rōmaji Club. The Club published a manifesto, “Rōmaji nite nihongo no kakikata” (How to write Japanese with the alphabet), and put out a journal, Rōmaji Zasshi (Rōmaji Journal), between 1885 and 1892. By the end of 1888, the Club had a membership of over 10,000 supporters.Footnote ¹⁷

A common theme informing the advocacy of romanisation was that education, so important to the modern nation-building project, would benefit greatly from the replacement of the complex Japanese orthography with the alphabet. If the burden of characters were removed, it was argued, significant amounts of classroom time would thereby be freed up, since building competence in the existing writing system took many, many hours of instruction which could be better spent on studying science and other useful subjects. Prominent Meiji educator and statesman Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933), for example, was moved to write:

An instrumentalist approach of this kind, of course, was based on pragmatic and utilitarian considerations and took no account of the affective dimensions of the orthography, particularly characters, which – despite having originated in China – were seen as the repository of many centuries of national literary and intellectual tradition. Its primary concern was efficiency in education.

The efforts of Rōmaji Club members to promote romanisation proved ultimately counterproductive, since, without the visual clues to meaning afforded by kanji, classically based literary styles written using the alphabet became not simpler but even more difficult to understand because they were not based on contemporary speech. Some members realised this and began to push for the development of a modern style based on spoken Japanese to be used in conjunction with the alphabet, but it was many years before this was to eventuate.Footnote ¹⁹ To Andō Masatsugu, it was this lack of practical applicability which led to the eventual failure of the Rōmaji Club, some of whose members he believed were simply pushing westernisation rather than thinking the matter through in terms of the Japanese situation.Footnote ²⁰ The Rōmaji Club was eventually disbanded in 1892, in response to a generalised backlash against what was perceived as over-enthusiastic adoption of western customs in society as a whole. During this period, however, two of today's three transliteration systems, the Hepburn and the Nippon-shiki, had been settled upon.

By the early 1900s, thanks to the efforts of influential figures such as Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937), Japan's first western-trained linguist, sufficient agreement had been reached on the desirability of both stylistic and orthographic reform that the romanisation movement experienced a period of revitalisation. Particularly important here was the establishment in 1902 of Japan's first language planning body, the Kokugo Chōsa Iinkai (National Language Research Council), with the overarching aim of carrying out full-scale surveys on the state of the language. Under this umbrella fell four major charter points, the first of which was to investigate the relative merits of kana and rōmaji with a view to adopting a phonetic script. This was never a realistic option, however, given the prevailing language ideology in which the writing system was seen as representing a long and splendid literary tradition, much more than just an instrument. Also contributing to the fear of change was concern that young people would be cut off from access to national values and heritage if they were not educated to read and write using the existing orthography.

Unlikely to succeed as it was, however, the inclusion of this task in the Council's agenda signalled a significant challenge to orthodox views in its tacit assumption that Chinese characters were bound to disappear, and engendered a divisiveness which was to characterise script policy discussions for the next sixty years.Footnote ²¹ History tells us that the goal of romanisation did not come anywhere near being achieved before this body was dissolved in 1913, and that the existing orthography remained in use until rationalised by the postwar cycle of script reforms after 1946. Nevertheless, the fact that romanisation was mentioned as one possible outcome of the Council's survey work gave heart to rōmaji supporters. Despite the fact that the Rōmaji Club had disbanded, romanisation advocates had continued their work on an individual basis. Not all had been happy with the National Language Research Council's mandated focus on surveys, which they saw as wasting time when action was required; such action was therefore deemed to be required henceforth from the private sector.

After Japan defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 and thus gained an increase in status on the international scene, the use of rōmaji was promoted on the basis of the international character of the alphabet. Under the influential patronage of Prince Saionji Kinmochi (1849–1940), the Rōmaji Hiromekai (Society for the Propagation of Romanisation) was set up in 1905; it published its own journal, Rōmaji, and petitioned the Education Minister to teach the alphabet in schools. While at first both the Hepburn and Nippon-shiki systems were accepted for the sake of the overarching goal, in 1908 the Society decided to adopt a modified form of the Hepburn system as its official standard. Supporters of the Nippon-shiki system, including its inventor Tanakadate Aikitsu, thereupon hived off and set up the Nippon no Rōmazi Sya to publish material in that medium, including in its journal Rōmazi Sekai (Rōmazi World).Footnote ²² In 1914, the Tōkyō Rōmazikai (Tokyo Romanisation Society) was also formed in order to promote Nippon-shiki romanisation, and this group later became the Nippon no Rōmazikai (Japan Romanisation Society) in 1921.

By the time of the Taishō Period (1912–1926), the modern colloquial style was well on the way to becoming the norm and one of the major impediments to romanisation was therefore lessened. During this period, the main argument of rōmaji advocates switched from education to office automation and international communication. Major newspapers had seen a switch after 1870 from woodblock printing to movable type and therefore had a vested interest in script reform (though not necessarily romanisation). In offices, the complexity of the Japanese script meant that Japan never experienced a successful typewriter age as alphabet-using countries did, since the size of the character set rendered the Japanese typewriter bulky, non-portable and requiring serious training to use.Footnote ²³ The earliest typewriters, from 1923, were katakana-only; they were not marketed as serious writing machines because of this but were used only as billing machines in large companies. To romanisation advocates, early office automation in the form of the typewriter provided another cogent reason why the writing system should turn to the alphabet.

The groups mentioned above continued their activities in promoting romanisation throughout the first half of the twentieth century, despite the increasing power of a strong ultranationalist ideology which viewed any attempt to tamper with the existing orthography as counter to the essence of the ‘Japanese spirit’ encapsulated in that orthography. Tradition here took on rigid nationalistic overtones. During the Second World War itself, the promotion of the enemy's script was viewed as treason and those who did so were subject to persecution: in one particular incident in 1939 a group of students from Waseda University who supported romanisation were arrested by the secret police on the grounds of anti-nationalist sympathies.Footnote ²⁴ It was thus not until 1945 that romanisation advocates saw their next real opportunity to plead their cause, this time under the rubric of democratisation.

Democratisation

When the dust of war settled and reconstruction began during the immediate postwar period under the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952), rōmaji advocates – along with other advocates of script reform – saw the rejection of ultranationalist ideologies, including those associated with the orthography, as their best chance to bring about a change in the status quo. This was a period of change and renewal, characterised by democratically oriented reforms such as land reforms, the reform of the education system and the revision of the constitution in order to remove the locus of sovereignty from the emperor to the people.

Given that ‘democracy’ became one of the most often heard catchwords of these years, the previously suppressed supporters of script reform (including but not limited to romanisation supporters) saw their chance and advanced arguments on several grounds. One was that legal documents, including the new constitution, should be capable of being easily read by all citizens; it was pointless to write democratic concepts into the laws of Japan if the difficulty of the language and script used prevented the populace from reading them. Another, which echoed the early Meiji Period arguments, was that the reconstruction of Japan required an advance in levels of scientific and technological knowledge among the general public rather than among professionals alone, and that the time spent studying characters should be replaced by time spent studying science. Language reformers such as Yamamoto Yūzō (1887–1974) coined the slogan “kokugo wa kokumin zentai no mono” (our language belongs to all the people) during this period.Footnote ²⁵

Thus buoyed by the backing of the democratisation ethos, a couple of months after Japan's surrender in 1945 members of the Japan Romanisation Society joined with two other language groups supporting script reform – the Kana Mojikai (supporters of kana as the national script) and the Kokugo Kyōkai – to present SCAP (Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers) with a joint proposal for language reform. Six months later, the former two announced that they would work towards the abolition of characters by propagating (in the case of the Romanisation Society) Nippon-shiki romanisation. Tanakadate Aikitsu, president of the Japan Romanisation Society, made a further appeal in 1946 in the form of a petition to the Kokugo Shingikai (National Language Council, the body in charge of national language policy since 1934) entitled “Make Rōmaji our Script!”, which was discussed by the Council but was not considered an appropriate way to proceed. During this Occupation period, the linguistic landscape was littered with examples of romanisation on public signs, including street and station signage. To a certain extent this mirrored the experience of colonised societies elsewhere, although of course Japan itself has never been colonised and the use of the alphabet on public signs during the Occupation was intended to facilitate convenience of movement for the occupiers rather than to signal a move towards entrenched use of the script of the victors in all aspects of life.

Rōmaji supporters still refer to this period as the golden age, when events seemed to conspire towards the realisation of their goals. In 1946, the report of the US Education Mission to Japan's chapter on language reform recognised that learning characters represented a hefty investment of time and suggested that consideration be given to adopting romanisation, with the exact system of romanisation to be decided by a commission of influential Japanese educators and politicians. Concerned that the 85 per cent of Japanese students who did not proceed beyond elementary school at that time lacked the linguistic skills needed for democratic citizenship because of the time needed to master the existing orthography, the report argued that the use of the alphabet “would lend itself well to the growth of democratic citizenship and international understanding”.Footnote ²⁶ A contemporary American observer and advocate of romanisation for Japan agreed with this: “Though the time saved acquiring the writing tool could be spent in studying the glories of Japanese militarism, it could also be devoted, as the United States Education Mission suggested, to studying the virtues of the democratic way of life. It is in this sense that the Mission stressed the democratic potential of Romaji”.Footnote ²⁷

Although the language of the report verged on the overblown in places, as in its opening statement that members felt called upon to give a friendly stimulus for language reform “and with it every encouragement to this generation to begin at once that for which all future generations will surely call it blessed” (p. 20), it concluded calmly enough that “the adoption of romaji would constitute a major contribution to the transmission of knowledge and ideas across national boundaries” (p. 23). This recommendation gave great hope to romanisation advocates, but it was in no way binding and in the event was not taken up. As is made abundantly clear in the memoirs of Joseph C. Trainor, who served in the Occupation's Civil Information and Education section (CIE) for a year during the relevant period and discusses the various attempts made by zealous American advocates of romanisation inside the Occupation administration to enforce their views in Japan, Occupation policy was that the nature of the Japanese writing system was a matter for the Japanese themselves to decide.Footnote ²⁸ Even the purported link between democracy and orthographic change was not sufficiently strong to win the day: others such as Yamamoto Yūzō were diligently applying the same idea to their campaign to simplify the existing script system, with greater success.

A significant American figure in the whole debate over romanisation at this time was Robert King Hall, a staffer in the education division of the CIE section who was utterly convinced that the alphabet was the answer to what he saw as Japan's linguistic problems and the threat they posed to true democracy. In 1949, he wrote:

During Hall's period of service in Japan, he attempted to expedite the use of the alphabet in Japanese textbooks and, when that failed, to influence the Education Mission's report on the issue, also unsuccessfully. Nevertheless, Japanese rōmaji supporters succeeded in obtaining permission from the Civil Information and Education section to run an experiment to see whether elementary school pupils would learn faster if rōmaji were used in non-language courses. While initial indications seemed positive, the experiment was cut short and written up as inconclusive.Footnote ³⁰

In the event, the decision taken was to remain with the existing orthography but to rationalise and streamline it by putting limits on the numbers of characters to be taught for general use, simplifying characters’ shapes, putting a cap on the number of readings a character could have and modernising the kana spelling. Rōmaji, while not adopted as the only script, was nevertheless recognised as having a role to play in written Japanese, albeit not an official one. A rōmaji programme was instituted in schools on a voluntary basis from 1947, with schools left free to decide on which system they taught and how they taught it. The following year, the Rōmaji Research Committee was set up to advise on teaching matters. Textbooks also first became available in this year, published in both Hepburn and Kunrei systems.

In 1950, the Rōmaji Research Committee became the National Language Council's Rōmaji Research Division and set up three subdivisions of its own to work on spelling, education and yokogaki (writing horizontally with spaces between words, not normally done in Japanese but naturally necessary when writing romanised Japanese). Three years later, the National Language Council recommended to the Education Minister that the kunrei-shiki style be given precedence, with the other two systems reserved for international contact situations where reversing the previous system of Romanisation might cause difficulties; this was ratified as “Rōmaji no Tsuzurikata” (How to spell with the Alphabet) in 1954, superseding the earlier 1937 kunrei directive.

While the National Language Council enshrined in the cycle of postwar script reforms the decision to continue with the existing three-script system, albeit in rationalised form, the more conservative of its members who opposed the changes feared that they were witnessing the thin end of the wedge. It seemed to them, given that many supporters of both romanisation and kana were vocal members of the Council, that the script reforms were nothing but an interim stage in the process of abolishing characters altogether. Playing on a resurgence of conservative sentiment in the late 1950s and early 1960s, therefore, they convinced the Education Minister to change the system by which Council members were chosen for each new term and to request a reconsideration of the cycle of reforms to see whether changes had been too hastily made. The Rōmaji Research Division was abolished in 1962 as part of this reorganisation. Romanisation supporters, upset by the speed at which the changes were being pushed through, joined with the Kana Mojikai and the Language Policy Discussion Group to work out a plan to oppose them which was forestalled when the Ministry announced the final revision of the Ordinance a bare ten days later. From that time on, rōmaji advocates were marginalised; having lost the chance to influence policy from within the public sector, their work was thereafter restricted to the private sector.

In sum, the main thrust of the democratisation phase of the romanisation movement was the argument that characters and the historical kana spelling system were relics of feudalism and were therefore not suited to a democratic postwar age. While support for a democratised writing system was strong in general during this period, romanisation was not the favoured candidate, as the cultural heritage argument proved too strong to be overturned. In the event, the government decided that democracy's prospects could best be improved by rationalising the existing orthography.

Computerisation

Until around 1980, the main message of the romanisation groups remained – despite all evidence to the contrary – that only romanisation would allow Japan to close the technology gap with the west, facilitate international communication and allow proper office automation with a convenient typewriter. Such a typewriter would allow touch typing; operators could thus use it to compose text as they went along, whereas the existing cumbersome Japanese machine was suitable only for reproduction of previously handwritten texts in print.

In the decades following the Second World War, it was the third of these arguments that seemed the strongest selling point, particularly after the first word processors appeared in the United States in the 1960s and 70s. Opinions along these lines were usually couched in terms of national and social disadvantage. It was argued, for example, that the lack of an affordable, portable, easy to use typewriter prevented individual citizens from communicating ideas easily and openly through typed pamphlets and other forms of minikomi (newsletters and small-circulation magazines, as opposed to masukomi, the mass media), thus making a mockery of the idea of free exchange of opinions.Footnote ³¹ In other words, the difficulty of the Japanese typewriter was represented as a barrier to the intellectual life of the nation which could be resolved through the use of the alphabet.

The invention of the first Japanese word processor in 1978 and the subsequent rapid uptake of the new technology during the 1980s dealt a severe blow to this argument. Although the input method remained (and remains) multi-step and therefore not as fast as an alphabet-using machine, electronic character retrieval from internal dictionaries meant that the problem of the size of the character set – such a problem on a mechanical typewriter constrained by limits on its physical size – was no longer an issue. It could therefore no longer be argued that Japan's orthography impeded office automation and therefore national progress. Articles by romanisation and kana supporters zeroed in on what they saw as defects of the new machines (e.g., their relative slowness compared to western word processors), but it could not be denied that this technology represented a major breakthrough, which has since allowed also the construction of a sizable Japanese-language presence on the Internet. Optimism died hard, however: one article argued that because users could now retrieve characters easily, this would in time cause them to realise how very complex and wasteful of time and energy the Japanese script was. The romanisation movement should therefore not ignore or criticise the word processor but rather adopt it as its symbol of the push towards adoption of the alphabet.Footnote ³² Despite such optimism, the hopes of the writer have not yet been realised.

Others who are similarly unconvinced of the computer ‘cure-all’ claims include Hannas, who argues that the gap between alphabet users and character-users on computers in terms of computerisation will continue to widen because of input time and because of the impact that will have as numbers and diversity of applications continue to increase. Computers, he contends, have been developed to meet the needs of alphabet-using languages, and it is simply not possible to adapt them successfully to the needs of East Asian languages as long as those languages continue to use characters.Footnote ³³ In this view, the gains made in handling the character set through electronic memory retrieval are no more than cosmetic, disguising the actual magnitude of the continuing problem.