The Typographic Imagination

Chapter Title: BRAVE NEW WORDS: Orthographic Reform, Romanization, and Esperantism Book Title: The Typographic Imagination Book Subtitle: Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media Book Author(s): Nathan Shockey Published by: Columbia University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.7312/shoc19428.10 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Columbia University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Typographic Imagination This content downloaded from 128.227.24.141 on Sun, 09 Aug 2020 16:08:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Chapter Five BRAVE NEW WORDS Orthographic Reform, Romanization, and Esperantism With the ubiquity of a media ecology and social logos predicated on mass- produced typographic print, the fundamental shape and function of written Japanese emerged as a problem. This chapter explores the rethinking of language under this print regime by exploring three roughly cotermi- nous concerns: the controversy over historical versus phonetic kana orthography, debates on conventions for writing Japanese in roman script (rōmaji), and the rise of the international auxiliary language Esperanto. The first decades of the twentieth century may seem to be a phase of linguistic fixity in contrast to the debates over vernacular prose (genbun itchi) in the 1880s, but in fact we can observe the appearance of a new set of questions revolving around the material and ontological nature of printed language; the relationship between script, history, and social organization; and the role of language in mediating Japan’s place in the modern global order. For or against phonetics, Japanese script, or roman letters, whether aligned with conservative nationalism or progressive internationalism, a wide range of critics understood script in the typographic era as a fundamental, atomistic building block of consciousness and a tool to be wielded for political purposes. Orthographic and phonetic conventions of kana script arose as an issue in the first years of the twentieth century, in tandem with the promotion of hyōjungo (standard Japanese) by the linguist Ueda Kazutoshi (1867– 1937) This content downloaded from 128.227.24.141 on Sun, 09 Aug 2020 16:08:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 160 PART II: PROSE, LANGUAGE, AND POLITICS IN THE TYPE ERA and the institution of the national education curriculum. In 1902, the Committee on National Language Inquiry (Kokugo Chʪsa Iinkai) was con- vened by the Ministry of Education to investigate kana usage for the imple- mentation of the national textbook (kokutei kyōkasho) system. Writers, bureaucrats, and critics debated the merits of a so- called historical orthography (rekishiteki kanazukai) versus an ostensibly phonetic orthography (hyōonshiki kanazukai), culminating in a controversy over the ministry’s Proposal for Orthographic Reform (Kanazukai Kaitei- an) in 1924. Figures like the poet Yosano Hiroshi (1873– 1935), the philologist Yamada Yoshio (1873– 1958), and the authors Akutagawa Ryʷnosuke (1892– 1927) and Kaw- abata Yasunari (1899– 1972) imbued individual kana with atomistic, ele- mental qualities from which words, expressions, and discourse could be constructed. These proposed reforms revealed deep anxieties over the ontological status of writing. A similar argument unfolded in regard to the writing of Japanese in the roman alphabet as the so- called Nihon- shiki (Japanese- style) romanization movement challenged the model developed by the American James Curtis Hepburn (1815– 1911) prior to the Meiji Restoration. Like historical kana orthography, the Nihon- shiki convention follows the written Japanese syllabary without concessions for English transliteration and pronunciation. Many Nihon- shiki advocates were scientists who experimented with language as a measurable physical quantity; to them, the system was rational and efficient and allowed for Japan’s participation in the international pro- duction of knowledge. Later, the Nihon- shiki system became imbued with ethnonational autonomy in tandem with the expansion of empire and a global wave of romanization movements. A countervailing vision of linguistic internationalism was apparent in the movement for Esperanto, the artificial auxiliary Lingwe uniwersala created by Ludwik Zamenhof (1859– 1917), which exploded in popularity after its introduction to Japan in 1906. A utopian planned language built to transcend national boundaries, Esperanto offered an opportunity to imagine the speaking subject beyond citizen- ship. The new language was infused from the first with political signifi- cance and adopted by the Japanese proletarian socialist movement as a means to commune with a brotherhood of workers across the world as linguistic thought became linked to Marxian materialism. At issue in the discourse on these reforms were less the questions of national solidarity and educated citizenry that were central in the 1880s and This content downloaded from 128.227.24.141 on Sun, 09 Aug 2020 16:08:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 161 BRAVE NEW WORDS early 1890s than concerns about the capabilities of printed language for individual and social expression, the place of Japan and Japanese in the international global order, and the material qualities of mass- produced printed type. Intellectuals considered how sound and symbol work together in the making of meaning and how different phonetic systems could medi- ate the evolution of expression. The diverse range of thinkers and authors discussed here wrote from a variety of positions in regard to kana, rōmaji, and Esperanto, but their ideas demonstrate shared interests in the trans- formations of sensation, perception, consciousness, communication, and social organization through and with the mechanical reproduction of typographic text at a mass scale. What we see emerge is a sense of script as a historically contingent and materially fungible artifice and agent of change. SPEAK AND SPELL: KANA ORTHOGRAPHY AS A NATIONAL CONCERN Shortly after the establishment of the modern Japanese nation- state, the simplification and rationalization of writing styles, orthographic approaches, and regional pronunciations was a key aim as reformers sought to craft a language appropriate for mass education, literary writing, and social discourse.1 The form of the Japanese language was subject to near- constant debate in the late nineteenth century, from calls in the 1870s by Mori Arinori (1847– 1889) and Nishi Amane (1829– 1897) for the abolition of Japanese and debates over vernacular prose (genbun itchi) in the 1880s through the later consensus of Japanese as “national language” (kokugo) and linguist Ueda Kazutoshi’s (1867– 1937) standard language (hyōjungo) ini- tiative. Intellectuals in the 1870s and 1880s agreed on the necessity of a standardized writing pedagogy distinct from Edo primers and Sinitic rec- itation but could not decide on a specific form of the written Japanese language. Even once Japanese as kokugo took root as national linguistic ideol- ogy, there was little agreement as to how standardization might be practically achieved. In the wake of language reforms to engender imperial subjectiv- ity in the model of European nationalist projects, it was necessary to install a national school curriculum based on standardized forms and conventions of written language. Ueda’s response to the need for standardized linguistic pedagogy was hyōjungo, a convention based on a modified form This content downloaded from 128.227.24.141 on Sun, 09 Aug 2020 16:08:39 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 162 PART II: PROSE, LANGUAGE, AND POLITICS IN THE TYPE ERA of Tokyo vernacular speech.2 Ueda was one of the first to train in Western academic linguistics and a leading advocate for the “phonetic” (hyōonshugi or hatsuonshugi) kana system, and in 1900 the Ministry of Education fixed the kana syllabary as per his recommendations, severing the educational curriculum from the Chinese pedagogical paradigm.3 Ueda learned linguistics from Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850– 1935) at Tokyo Imperial Uni- versity, then studied in Berlin, Leipzig, and Paris, where he adhered to a classical philology curriculum with courses in folklore, Sanskrit, Eng- lish, Greek, German, Romanticism, and phonetics.4 Ueda and his disci- ples like Hoshina Kʪichi (1872– 1955) later outlined genealogies tracing the history of domestic linguistic thought (kokugogakushi) from Fujiwara no Teika (1162– 1241) through Edo nativist scholars like Ogyʷ Sorai (1666– 1728) and Motoori Norinaga (1730– 1801), but the structure of their approach was based in modern European academic disciplines. Despite Ueda’s claims to the incommensurability of Western linguistics with the particularities of Japanese grammar, the epistemological reframing of Japanese as a linguistic system like any other was a necessary prerequisite to the construction of these nativist genealogies. Ueda’s approach, based on a scientific kaga-( kuteki) methodology for the study of language (gengogaku no hōhō), circu-

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