Language Policies Regarding the Written Language in Japan
The existence of an earlier indigenous runic writing, known as kamiyo moji, prior to the introduction of Chinese to Japan in the 4th century AD,
has never been proven. Initially after its introduction to Japan, like in China, classical Chinese was only read and written by highly educated and sinicized Japanese scholars. This was until a system of diacritic marks placed alongside the Chinese text, called kanbun, was developed to aid ordinary but educated Japanese speakers to decipher classical Chinese. Around the 5th century, a system of using Chinese characters to phonetically represent Japanese sounds, called manyogana, was developed initially to record indigenous Japanese poetry. Manyogana eventually gave rise to hiragana and katakana, two of the four syllabaries that make up the modern Japanese writing system. The other two are
kanji, Chinese-based characters that represent
Chinese loanwords and some native Japanese morphemes, and romaji or romanized Japanese.
Prior to the Meiji period (18681911), there had already been some haphazard suggestions to reform the Japanese writing system as a result of contacts with the West, notably the Portuguese. However, more concrete institutional attempts to amend the orthography did not begin until the Meiji period when the whole country was fervent in the attempt to catch up with the West. The major focus of these attempts was to achieve a closer correspondence between spoken and written Japanese (genbun-itchi) by eliminating obsolete grammar forms and limiting the use of kanji in the writing system. In 1919, the Ministry of Education issued a plan to limit the number of kanji to 2,616 and to eventually replace all the kanji by an all-phonetic script. However, this plan, like many others before and after it,
did not meet with much success, partly because of opposition from the conservatives who staunchly believed in
the immutability of kanji as part of the Japanese cultural heritage. Such a belief is still quite widely held even today.
In the Occupation years, the anti-Chinese character movement got a boost from the Occupation Authorities who advocated the exclusive use of kana or even romaji in school textbooks. However, such radical proposals were met with opposition from the Japanese officials and educational leaders. In 1946, the government issued a series of script reform proposals that included the specification of 1,850 kanji for daily use (toyo kanji), a list that was subsequently revised (and augmented in 1981 to 1,945). Today, while many of these post-war reforms have remained, one has witnessed not only a gradual relaxation of these restrictions, now called recommendations, but also a diminishing role of the educational authorities in script reform. In 2004,
there was actually a further revision and huge expansion of the list of kanji for personal names (kinmeiyo kanji). It has been speculated that such a move may represent a government-sponsored attempt to bring about a de facto expansion of the toyo kanji list. It is estimated that today a well-educated Japanese person may know about 3,500 kanji.
Chinese letters in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam: Past, Present, and Future - All Empires
