Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

Japan went on investing in Korea, and put increasing pressure on its government to provide for modernisation. In 1902 Japan struck an alliance with Great Britain, which was to last for twenty years. This emboldened it to resist Russian moves towards Korea, and start the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Like China, Russia found that it had seriously underestimated Japan’s military strength. The land battles (mostly in Manchuria) were bloody but inconclusive, but then Russia lost not just its Pacific, but also its Baltic, fleet. In the ensuing peace, Japan gained the Liaodong peninsula of Manchuria, with its two excellent harbours, Port Arthur and Dalian, and the southern half of Sakhalin island, called in Japanese Karafuto. Meanwhile the continuing Japanese pressure on Korea was now without competition from Russia or China: Korea buckled, becoming first a protectorate, and then, in 1910, a colony.

Japan’s aggrandisement did not stop there. It joined the Allies in the First World War, and speedily grabbed the German possessions closest to it, the city of Qingdao in north-east China, and the islands of Micronesia. At Versailles in 1919—when French first yielded diplomatically to English—Japan was compelled to quit Qingdao, but its control of the islands, henceforth called Nan’ yō Guntō , ‘South Ocean Islands’, was confirmed.

As a result of all this, during the inter-war years of the twentieth century Japan held a substantial overseas empire round the north-west Pacific: Taiwan, southern Manchuria, southern Sakhalin, all of Korea and the islands of Micronesia. Here it had between twenty-five and fifty years, one or two full generations, to impose itself and its language; and we shall now take a brief look at the results. [173]

The motives that had expanded the Japanese empire had some impact on the use of Japanese in the resulting territories. In these Pacific lands, the Japanese had not come to trade, nor for industrial exploitation. As a result, Japan sent few civilian settlers or residents: the newcomers were overwhelmingly soldiers and administrators. There would be relatively little interaction for daily business; most communication took the form of locals having to comply with Japanese instructions.

In the new colonies, the Japanese attitude to life was far from laissez-faire. Both Taiwan and Korea had in their different ways long been parts of China’s sphere of influence, and had their own systems of education in place; but the Japanese policy was gradually to undermine the locally run schools that had survived from the previous era, and to replace them—at local cost—with Japanese-language institutions. In Micronesia, where literacy and urban life were far more recent acquisitions, the aims were more modest, and years of schooling shorter: nevertheless, they remained aimed at basic literacy in Japanese. Although the attitudes of the Japanese to the colonial peoples increasingly emphasised their natural solidarity as fellow members of a potential ‘Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’ ( Dai-Tō-A Kyōeiken ), the effective pressure on them all to become members of the Japanese language community only heightened.

This was having its effect when the Second World War placed the whole empire in jeopardy. It is estimated that in 1942 62 per cent of the Taiwanese population could understand Japanese, and 20 per cent of the Korean. [646]But when it first took control of Taiwan in 1895, Japan had elected to follow characteristic French, rather than British, advice and aim at total integration of the territory into Japan. [174]This policy had then been followed, essentially without debate, as the other colonies were taken. Over the early twentieth century, this counsel proved disastrous in the large developed colonies, especially in Korea: the emperor’s new subjects were never sufficiently trusted to allow them to contribute directly to policy-making in Tokyo, but they had no means to assert at least partial control of their fate locally. This became abundantly clear in the militant demonstrations by Koreans in 1919, bloodily put down by the Japanese; looking back in 1925, the Japanese analyst Aoyagi Tsunataro noted: ‘nearly all educated Koreans, even those who were fluent in Japanese—even those who had studied in Japan—rejected Japanese rule’. [647]

It became wryly accepted among the rulers that for Koreans, ‘to be educated was to be anti-Japanese’. A fresh rash of Korean student strikes, against Japanese assumed superiority, occurred in 1929-30. There was less trouble, and apparently less resentment, in Taiwan, even as their education became increasingly Japanese. Chinese studies were made optional there in 1922, and dropped in 1937; ironically, they continued on the curriculum—along with Korean—in the schools of Korea.

Meanwhile Micronesia, with no tradition of developed literacy to be effaced by the Japanese, was far more receptive to the new education. Moreover, its 50,000 indigenous population were rapidly joined by an equal number of Japanese settlers, arriving to grow sugar. Plantations were established in the 1920s; by the early 1930s they accounted for over 60 per cent of government revenues there. If it had not been for the Pacific war, it is probable that Micronesia would have been overwhelmingly Japanese-speaking to this day. [175]

However, Japan’s Imperial Plans for its Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, and by implication for the spread of the Japanese language, were decisively disrupted by the political triumph of militarists, and the Pacific war into which they joyfully led Japan. Any hearts and minds that may have been won through fifty years of (relatively) peaceful colonialism were definitively lost in the terminal rampages of the Japanese army through East and South-East Asia. Although they briefly gained the whole western littoral of the Pacific Ocean, Japan ended 1945 confined to the islands it had controlled in 1868, even losing the outlying Kuriles in the north and the Ryukyus in the south. Taiwan was returned to Chinese rule, and Korea became independent. The more scarcely populated Sakhalin and Micronesia were placed under Russian and American control respectively. Nowhere in their hard-won colonies was a Japanese administration permitted to remain; and 6.5 million Japanese were repatriated to Japan. There was a forced intermission of all Japanese influence in Asia and the Pacific for a good fifteen years.

What, then, remains of the Japanese overseas language community, half a century after Japan’s expulsion? Many who survive from the generations that attended Japanese schools can still converse in the language. But it seems that it is hardly used as a means of communication, even among this generation: [648]the opprobrium that the Japanese had stirred up lasted so long that it prevented any advantage being taken of this heritage when Japanese industrial interests began to spread again. The old Japanese empire has in no way served as a launch-pad for the global spread of Japanese products, and latterly of Japanese culture, in the last four decades of the twentieth century.

Japan’s fifty years of language spread can be seen as a demonstration in miniature of the career of an imperial language. Like the other colonial empires, Japan took advantage of its technical and military superiority over other countries—in this case, its close neighbours—to increase its territory. It then faced the problem of what to do with the native populations there, people who did not think of themselves as Japanese. It attempted everywhere to convert them into members of its own community, certainly not trusting them to associate themselves voluntarily, but setting considerable store by education in the Japanese language. As everywhere else, this conversion process failed.

There was reasonable success in spreading the language, but once the political motive for using it was gone, the language turned out to have no independent staying power. The framework suggested to explain the decline of Russian can be applied here too. The creole motive was absent, since essentially the whole overseas population had been repatriated. There was no nostalgia for life under the flag of the Rising Sun, nor any wish to preserve unity with its speakers. Indeed, the bitter memories that the few years of Japan’s control had caused were such that even when there were globalisation reasons to renew economic links through the language, they were disregarded. Permanent language spread, it turns out, is not to be achieved through planning, or naked force.