Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

To be sure, the Japanese written language, already mature and widely used, would have remained in circulation. People would have continued to use the traditional epistolary form to write letters. They would have continued to compose waka and haiku in their leisure. They would even have continued to compose Chinese poetry for a while. New works of the popular traditional fiction called gesaku (playful writing) would have continued to be written, depicting the new society. The general population would most probably have been taught reading and writing in Japanese.

Yet colonization would have had drastic effects on how the Japanese language developed. First of all, it is likely that the use of Japanese in critical thinking would gradually have been abandoned. What is known as the genbun itchi (unification of spoken and written word) movement, a movement to create a standard form of prose closer to the spoken language, probably would not have come about, or, if it did, would not have attained much sophistication. Moreover, it is even possible that the ruling Americans would have enforced the use of the Roman alphabet. (As I will discuss later, after Japan’s surrender in World War II, the United States Occupation forces proposed this very change.) All this on top of the fact that Japanese society itself would have become polarized, as is typical of colonized societies, with a deep gap between a small number of bilinguals and a large number of monolinguals.

In short, if Japan had become a colony, the Japanese language would in all likelihood have been reduced to a typical local language. Of course, the age of colonization would eventually have come to an end. Nationalism would demand that, with independence, the Japanese language would transform into a national language. Nonetheless, to what extent could it have become a national language in a true sense?

Thanks to the expanse of the British Empire, by the time Perry’s “black ships” appeared off Japanese shores, the English language was already the world’s most dominant language. At the same time, the United States was well on its way to becoming the world’s richest and most powerful nation, so if Japan had indeed been a U.S. colony, by the time it regained its independence, English dominance would have been even more entrenched. Unlike the people in Japan’s former colonies of Taiwan and Korea, who did not hesitate to abandon the Japanese language once they were liberated, the Japanese people might easily have chosen to stick with English. Even if they had decided to relegate it to the status of “second official language,” which language would the government actually have used? The universities? Which language would novelists have elected to write their novels in?

THE BIRTH OF JAPANESE AS A NATIONAL LANGUAGE

The Japanese language escaped threats from the outside. Yet the path to becoming a national language is fraught with difficulty, as is shown by what happened next. After the Meiji Restoration — however incongruous this may seem — the Japanese language was faced with threats from inside, from the Japanese themselves. Many Japanese intellectuals at the time doubted whether their language could be turned into the language of a modern nation-state. One such doubter was Mori Arinori (1847–1889), a contemporary of Fukuzawa’s who became the first minister of education. Mori implemented important educational reforms, but he remains a controversial figure, mainly because he initially advocated that Japan abandon the use of its language and adopt English instead. 10In 1873, he wrote a short article in English for American readers entitled “Education in Japan.” Here is an excerpt:

The absolute necessity of mastering the English language is thus forced upon us. It is a requisite of the maintenance of our independence in the community of nations. Under the circumstances, our meager language, which can never be of any use outside of our islands, is doomed to yield to the domination of the English tongue, especially when the power of steam and electricity shall have pervaded the land. Our intelligent race, eager in the pursuit of knowledge, cannot depend upon a weak and uncertain medium of communication in its endeavor to grasp the principal truths from the precious treasury of Western science and art and religion. The laws of state can never be preserved in the language of Japan. All reasons suggest its disuse. 11

Notice Mori’s descriptions of the Japanese language: a “meager language, which can never be of any use outside of our islands… doomed to yield to the domination of the English tongue”; “a weak and uncertain medium of communication”; a language in which the “laws of state can never be preserved.” The Japanese who today criticize Mori for his seemingly unpatriotic assessment of his own language lack historical imagination. They fail to see that Japan was in such precarious circumstances that someone like Mori, who was fluent in English and could look at the world from a global perspective, felt compelled to consider the radical option of abandoning Japanese altogether. To remain independent, Japan needed a language that would allow it to function as a modern nation and gain parity with the Western powers. Many intellectuals, even those who opposed Mori’s proposal, were genuinely skeptical as to whether their language was equal to the task.

Mori’s proposal for the adoption of English was rejected before he became minister of education. It was not compatible with the ideology of national language, which was gradually penetrating Japan from the West. The new ministry made no attempt to adopt English but tried instead to come up with various ways of reshaping the language into one befitting a modern nation. The heated discussion dragged on for years. Nonetheless, those involved in the task were nearly unanimous on one point: they all wanted to do away with Chinese characters. Not only did Chinese characters symbolize an “external language,” which went counter to the ideology of national language — worse, they were ideograms, then thought to be a symbol of underdevelopment.

At the time of the Meiji Restoration, alongside the ideology of national language, social Darwinism was also in full force in the West. In Japan, the works of its advocate Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) began appearing in translation around 1880. Social Darwinism, which saw Western civilization as the pinnacle of human evolution, was applied to writing systems as well, suggesting that human writing evolved from ideograms to phonograms. Among the varieties of phonograms, syllabaries like hiragana and katakana that combine a consonant and a vowel in one letter were considered less evolved. Those that separate consonants and vowels and thus are closer to phonetic signs were considered more developed, and somehow the Roman alphabet was given a privileged status. (It is perhaps no accident that powerful Western nations happened to use the Roman alphabet and not Cyrillic.) In other words, social Darwinism was inextricably connected to phoneticism or, more precisely, what would a century later be criticized as “phonocentrism”—an understanding of language that gives primacy to spoken language as a spontaneous expression of the human mind, thus reducing written language to the status of mere representation of spoken sounds.

Chinese characters, by exemplifying ideograms, went blatantly against such phoneticism. Though regarded as more evolved than Egyptian hieroglyphs, they came to symbolize the backwardness of East Asia, crystallized in China’s defeat in the Opium Wars. Such a view was bound to influence how people in the former Sinosphere regarded their own writing systems. In fact, as we shall see in the final chapter, the fall of the Qing dynasty presaged the fall of Chinese characters in the former Sinosphere, as country after country came to espouse the ideology of phoneticism.