A Modern Language for Japan

byJOHN ASHMEAD, JR.

1

JAPAN is probably the only country in the world where a blind child makes faster progress in school than a normal child. The children attending the Japanese government schools for the blind take two years less in primary schools and one year less in high school to cover exactly the same curriculum studied by normal children. They require less time because they use a phonetic Braille alphabet instead of the three cumbersome alphabets and several thousand picture signs which make learning Japanese an almost hopeless task for the Japanese masses.

During the war the difficulty of the Japanese language worked to our advantage. While in Japan with the Army of Occupation, I had an opportunity to observe at first hand the strangling effect of the Japanese language on every walk of life. Even a fairly well educated Japanese is constantly at a loss to express himself. This difficulty must have slowed down Japan’s war effort in ways which it is hard for us even to begin to imagine.

The editor of Japan’s largest newspaper, with twenty-five years of experience, confessed that he cannot write the simplest feature story without constant reference to a dictionary. I have seen university graduates misread whole paragraphs in newspaper editorials. In Tokyo I met a Japanese who had been a fighter pilot at Rabaul. He was unable to remember the word tampatsu — “single-engined.” This sort of lapse of memory is not at all uncommon. Japanese engineers constantly forget everyday technical terms both in conversation and writing. Even in wartime the Aeronautical Research Laboratory of Tokyo Imperial University had to publish over 80 per cent of its reports in English. The Japanese language hastened the fall of Japan by veiling military and technical operations in a linguistic fog.

The Japanese language now in common use is an intricate combination of picture signs or characters with a phonetic alphabet. It is as though all words were written with symbols followed by letters. If an English sentence were written in Japanese, it would look something like this: “*** (The Vice Admiral) ** (The Rear Admiral) $(the money) ☞ (showed).” Translated this would read: “The Vice Admiral showed the money to the Rear Admiral.” (In Japanese: “Chūjō wa shōshō ni okane wo misemashita” — the parts italicized being supplied by characters, and the rest by letters which indicate the relationship of the words in the sentence.)

Language reform would mean writing the characters and the word endings in a phonetic alphabet alone. What happens when Japanese is written in a phonetic alphabet? Extensive tests carried out by the Japanese themselves on 50,000 primary school students show that two weeks of studying Japanese written in a phonetic alphabet (in this case English letters, though one of the Japanese alphabets in common use would have given about the same results) brought them to a level of literacy achieved only after six years of studying Japanese as it is now written.

Now that the military battle has been fought and won, we are fighting a much more important battle for the Japanese mind. Literacy enters into every phase of this struggle. The ability — or rather, lack of ability — of the Japanese to read simple prose makes our occupation costly in dollars and cuts off access to our democratization program from those who need it most, the Japanese masses. Our Military Government has known for over a year of the disastrous effect of illiteracy on our efforts to reeducate Japan; and yet, except for a brilliant survey, no action has been taken.

How many picture signs or characters must a Japanese learn before he can call himself literate? Tests conducted by the largest Japanese newspapers and by the Japanese government show that to read a newspaper 2500 such characters are a minimum requirement. This vocabulary will not enable a Japanese to read the editorials of a newspaper or our literature explaining democracy. For that, or any other kind of serious non-technical prose, he must recognize approximately 5000 characters. For some university texts he needs 8000 to 9000 characters.

How well does the average Japanese know the 2500 characters required to read a newspaper? High officials in the Ministry of Education (who said language reform was unnecessary) assured me that the Japanese are 99.6 per cent literate. None of these officials could tell me what standards were used in arriving at this figure. They admitted, however, that a literacy test such as that for becoming a voter in the state of Connecticut (reading paragraphs from the United States Constitution and from the state laws) could not be passed by many well-educated Japanese, because of the difficulty of the formal written language.

In 1935 the Japanese carried out tests on 1479 sixth-grade pupils from the Tokyo schools. Before the war, in this six-year compulsory course, 1356 characters were taught. This is a little better than half the absolute minimum number of characters required to read a newspaper. These tests showed that, on the average, only 600 characters were actually known by the sixth-graders, and this in spite of the fact that almost half the classroom time was devoted to learning characters. For rural areas it was estimated that the number of retained characters would be about 400. In other words, the graduate of six years of primary school at best knows one fourth of the vocabulary needed for newspaper literacy.

The best available figures indicate that 85 per cent of the Japanese do not go beyond eighth grade, and that only one out of 300 goes to college. Therefore the mass of the people probably learn only half the number of characters needed to read a newspaper.

The Japanese Army intelligence tests support these conclusions. In 1937 over half a million conscripts with eight years of education averaged 53 per cent in tests of their ability to read simple Japanese sentences and to supply correct pronunciations for simple characters. The 1941 eighth-year graduates did not do much better. The sixth-year graduates in the 1941 class had an average score of 39.1 per cent. If you write a simple Japanese sentence for an eighthyear graduate you have about a fifty-fifty chance of being understood. If you are writing for a sixth-year graduate, your chances are two out of five.

These figures were called conservative by one of America’s foremost Orientalists. They were supported by my own experiences in Japan. During five months with the occupation forces I traveled widely and made a serious effort to meet and talk with Japanese of the sort not usually encountered at an Army headquarters — farmers, laborers, minor priests, town petty officials, bank clerks, and demobilized soldiers. My impressions were of widespread illiteracy or semi-literacy. Even Japanese businessmen in Tokyo frequently expressed surprise when they saw me struggling to read the editorials in a Japanese newspaper, for this was a section of the paper which they themselves found difficult.

To be sure, it is questionable how many Americans can understand as well as read the average newspaper editorial, but I am talking merely of the mechanical ability to spell out and recognize words. For possibly 85 per cent of the Japanese population, anything written is like a crossword puzzle with half the squares filled in at random. Even with the most favorable interpretation of the figures above, I think we are safe in saying that the majority of the Japanese cannot read simple prose.

2

How does this low literacy rate affect our occupation? One serious disadvantage of the language is that so few Japanese can learn it. But still more important is the great price paid for illiteracy.

Before the war over 40 per cent of the instruction time in the primary schools was spent learning to read and write Japanese. This same proportion continues on through university life and weakens the quality of Japanese education as a whole. This allotment of time helps to explain the superior progress in school of the Japanese blind children.

The poor quality of Japanese education is shown most obviously in arithmetic. The average score for the Army conscripts in this subject is not much above their rating in language (59.1 per cent). One of the astonishing things to our lawyers and businessmen with the Army of Occupation was the inability of large corporations such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi to present correct statements of simple columns of figures. I have seen important documents in which 22 parts out of 100 were cheerfully labeled 33 per cent.

Mathematics is not the only subject which suffers. In some cases 50 per cent of a technical manual of high school level must be devoted to language, to definitions of terms, and to new picture writings or characters. This is in addition to the time-consuming courses in Japanese which are taught separately. In our own technical high school courses, a curriculum which assigns 20 per cent of the instruction time to English is regarded as bordering on the frivolous. And it is next to impossible for the Japanese who has had only eight years of education to teach himself by means of manuals and correspondence courses. Farmers cannot learn new methods of agriculture because they cannot read pamphlets on the subject; mechanics cannot easily learn new ways of motor repair and maintenance.

We do not, of course, intend to encourage the Japanese to build airplanes or atom bombs, or to engage in any kind of advanced research for some time to come. We do, however, want them to have competent nurses, public health experts, architects, engineers. Most important of all, we want to improve the way of life of the great mass of farmers and mechanics through educational pamphlets and correspondence courses, and in the technical schools.

The present food situation in Japan may well mean a decrease in population, through malnutrition and starvation, to the level of the nineteenth century (about half the present population), unless there are permanent increase and diversification of the crops now grown in Japan and improvement in the maintenance and repair of the trucks and trains which must transport this food. At the present time we are making up part of the deficit from Army supplies which the American taxpayer grows and gives to the Japanese.

The technical information necessary to enable the Japanese to help themselves can be made readily available only in a condition of literacy. Both a less expensive occupation and a democratic Japan will depend on a Japanese population which can furnish its own food. Starvation and undernourishment do not foster democracy.

There are of course minor technical advantages which will become possible if language reform takes place. Among these are a typewriter, which will be faster than copying by hand, and the linotype machine. If the characters are abandoned it will become possible for more than a very small group of non-Japanese specialists to acquire a firsthand knowledge of things Japanese, and better supervision of occupied Japan will become practical.

The main issue, however, is the democratization of Japan. The greatest single obstacle to this process is still emperor worship and the concomitant idea that all Japanese, as descendants of the Sun Goddess, are eventually entitled to rule the world. That idea cannot be removed by such steps as the Emperor’s proclamation that he is no longer a divinity. His edict can easily be explained away once our armies leave Japan. The real answer to emperor worship, paradoxically enough, is more training in Japanese history. There are few Japanese with any real education who take this myth seriously. But we can hardly expect a Japanese school child to spend almost half of his time learning one fourth of the vocabulary needed for literacy, and still have time to acquire any but the sketchiest background in political and historical subjects. Only with language reform will our plans for revising and democratizing Japanese education have any chance for success.

Literacy is a tool, not a panacea. It is not an automatic guarantee of a democratic Japan. We can perhaps improve Japanese agriculture and transportation to a certain extent without it. We may even be able, by using the radio, to democratize Japan to a limited extent. But much of our present effort to re-educate the Japanese is just money down the drain. Informal tests of Japanese citizens in Tokyo revealed that only one out of ten could read even the names of the Japanese war criminals. I doubt if our first effort to re-educate the Japanese, the official history of the war (From the Mukden Incident to the Signing of the Surrender Documents on the Missouri), has had a wider audience among the Japanese. Even with literacy we may not succeed in democratizing Japan. But without it, failure is almost certain.

3

WHO in Japan is opposed to language reform? First of all, the militarists and nationalists. They carried their opposition to such an extreme that after 1938 the advocates of Romaji (writing Japanese in English letters) were imprisoned for the crime of lese majesty, and some actually died in prison. It is only natural that the militarists should prefer a large, relatively ignorant population which can be easily led to war. But the militarists, temporarily at least, have been discredited by Japan’s defeat.

The group which is now actively opposing language reform is that of the older intellectuals. They form an educated caste which more or less runs Japan. All too often in Japan, an educated man is one who has devoted twenty-five years of his life to the memorization of 8000 to 9000 characters. Often he lacks any accompanying knowledge of how to use this rote learning in analyzing the problem at hand. In America, so far as I know, it is impossible to make a living out of what is essentially only a knowledge of the alphabet, but it is quite easy to do so in Japan. Members of the intellectual class, naturally enough, now constitute the majority of the interpreters employed by our Military Government. They have all the more opportunity to oppose any program of language reform, since very few members of our Military Government know intimately any Japanese who do not speak English. We can hardly expect any social group to preside over its own liquidation. We might remember that they represent the opinions of somewhat less than the one out of 300 Japanese who manages to obtain a college education, and that the people who will be most benefited by language reform have few or no advocates.

The arguments of this group, however, have been blindly accepted by the minority of Japanese who can be called literate. Their main argument is that language reform is a foreign imposition which will cut the Japanese off from access to their past literature and their history. The language reform movement itself is Japanese in origin and dates back to the 1880’s. Most of the statistics presented here were voluntarily brought to the attention of the Military Government by members of the three Japanese language reform societies who felt that democratization of Japan would be impossible without literacy. Even in the short time I was in Japan I met Japanese who volunteered not only their time but their fortunes in order to further the language reform movement. I met many students, particularly those in technical courses, who favored language reform. (In March, 1946, the Mission of American Educators endorsed language reform after a careful study of the subject in Japan.)

The literacy figures suggest that in reality we shall not cut the majority of the Japanese off from a nonexistent access to these treasures. For some years to come, only a small minority will ever reach high school, and an even smaller minority will go on to college. These are the only groups which now have access to past Japanese literature and they may perfectly well continue to learn to recognize enough characters to be able to read it.

Moreover, the oldest and some of the best Japanese literature is written in what is essentially a phonetic alphabet. The Kojiki or Record of Ancient Matters(A.D. 712) is one example. The single Japanese work which has attained wide international fame, The Tale of Genji (ca. A.D. 1014) is another. Much of the most famous Japanese poetry has been written in characters only in modern times. The best collection of modern Japanese novels has been printed in such a way that it can be read without reference to the characters. The language reform societies have successfully printed in a phonetic alphabet some of the Confucian classics, textbooks, and technical and scientific works. The appeal to history proves only that the characters are a foreign importation from China and that phonetic alphabets have been used successfully to record Japanese of every level of difficulty, from the earliest days to the present.

In the event of language reform, works originally written in a phonetic script can be allowed to revert to their original status from the mixture of characters and phonetic writing into which they have been laboriously translated. The scholars may well be employed in converting the remaining body of literature (perhaps a third of which is written in Chinese or a Japanized version of Chinese) to a phonetic alphabet with explanatory notes for difficult passages. If all the classics are reprinted in a phonetic alphabet, Japanese culture will be available to the mass of the people for the first time in Japanese history.

The second argument of the intellectuals is that the character in Japanese enables the eye, at least, to distinguish between the large numbers of words which have the same sounds but different meanings. These homonyms, they claim, would be hopelessly confused if written in a phonetic alphabet.

Homonyms exist in Japanese, just as they do in most of the languages of the world. They are a difficulty, but how serious is it? The actual number of homonyms in Japanese is far from startling. It varies from 3.6 per cent for a large dictionary vocabulary (250,000 words) to 4.9 per cent for a modern technical vocabulary (some 30,000 words). In one month of broadcasting over Radio Tokyo in May, 1934, 1880 potential homonyms appeared in the scripts. Of these, 923 appeared only once. Only 100 or so occurred at all frequently.

Even such common homonyms are not an impossible hurdle. The classic example of homonym confusion which is constantly cited by the Japanese is the word hashi. This can mean “ beak,” “edge,” “chopsticks,” or “bridge.” The scholars argue that these words can be distinguished only by using the four different characters which are assigned to them. To begin with, these words, like a number of homonyms, are accented differently, and they could conceivably be written with accent marks. But even this is not necessary. Usually context will tell which word is meant. We go to the edge of the bridge, not to the bridge of the edge. A similar situation exists in every language. Depending on context, the English word “ bridge,” for example, refers to part of a ship, a structure over a river, a card game, or false teeth. Other examples are the English words “mete,” “meat,” and “meet,” or the 13 verbs used to express more than 3000 meanings in Basic English.

4

THE solution to the difficulty presented by homonyms, and to the language reform movement as a whole, has been provided quite unintentionally by the Japanese radio, the only universally understood means of communication in Japan. I met many Japanese who admitted that they could not read newspapers. I never met any who had difficulty in listening to and understanding the radio (here I am referring to broadcasts in the colloquial language). And any language which can be understood when it is spoken aloud can be understood when written phonetically.

Japan now possesses two similar but distinct languages. In the written language used in newspapers and books, reporters and authors rival one another in the invention of amusing combinations of rare characters without caring whether these compounds can be understood when spoken. That this is a problem can be shown by the numerous attempts made to limit the number of characters. Since 1923 limitation has been tried by several newspapers, by individual authors, by language reform societies, and, as late as November, 1946, by the Japanese government (in all government documents). These attempts have been tried on a large enough scale to indicate that any future attempts at a partial cure will fail.

In the spoken language of the radio, however, broadcasters use only those words which can be understood when heard — in other words those which can be understood when written in a phonetic alphabet. A striking incident which shows the gulf between the two occurred when the Japanese surrendered. The Emperor broadcast his surrender message in the older form of the written language. The citizens of Karuizawa dutifully listened and staged a victory parade, during which they taunted internees in Karuizawa with having lost the war. An hour later the Emperor’s broadcast was translated into colloquial spoken Japanese and rebroadcast. The victory parade in Karuizawa ended.

The success of Japanese radio broadcasting of the colloquial language indicates that a phonetic alphabet can be used immediately and successfully, without a transition period, if writers will follow the same precautions observed by the radio. Radio Tokyo has already published an exhaustive study in dictionary form of potential homonyms which should be avoided or paraphrased, and has provided popular substitutes for some of them. I doubt very much if this book will be needed by most Japanese writers, since they will only have to be sure that they write more or less as they talk, but it should be a useful guide in the early years of language reform.

What part should our Military Government play in language reform? Why must the initial impulse in language reform come from our Military Government rather than the Japanese themselves? The answer is that the Japanese rely on direction from above to an extent which it is hard for us to realize. Long after the Japanese newspapers were freed from censorship restrictions they continued to apply them voluntarily until they were twice ordered to print both sides of controversial questions. This slavish attitude, we hope, will disappear as the re-education of Japan progresses. In the past, this willingness to take orders from above has made possible spelling reforms in Japanese far more extensive than those unsuccessfully advocated by Theodore Roosevelt in English. Unless language reform is promoted by the Military Government, now the supreme authority in Japan, it will not be accepted by the Japanese people.

We have not hesitated to direct the Japanese to disarm, to break up the big trusts, to begin land reforms, and to rewrite their textbooks. Surely, unless the Japanese masses are reasonably literate and educated, these reforms will vanish from Japan with our armies. If we continue to allow writing in characters, only the 15 per cent or so of the Japanese who can afford a higher education will ever become literate. Why should we hesitate to direct the Japanese to write in a phonetic alphabet — a method of writing which their own liberals have advocated for over sixty years, which has been successfully employed since the beginnings of writing in Japan, and which will make widespread literacy possible?

It is only natural for the Military Government to hesitate to make what seems like a sweeping change in the Japanese way of life. Not unnaturally, the Military Government fears that such a move may give the nationalists a starting point for a resistance movement . Such fears might be justified if Japanese language reform meant an abrupt interruption in the Japanese historical tradition — if, for example, we tried to introduce Basic English instead. But language reform in Japan is not so much a break with the past as a return to a method of writing found in the earliest and best-known Japanese literature, and still occasionally used at present. It is the recognition of the kind of Japanese successful on the radio today. We even have the example of Turkey, which in 1928 successfully carried out a much more drastic language reform involving a sharp break with the past.

I have often been asked why there has not been more popular demand from the Japanese for language reform. The answer is simply ignorance. The figures were brought together for the first time by the Education Subsection of SCAP, from scattered and relatively inaccessible sources. Thanks in part to Japanese government censorship, the facts come as a shocking surprise to most educated Japanese. In addition, we can hardly expect an illiterate to read that he is so. We cannot expect support from the militarists. We cannot expect support from most of the older intellectuals, who wish to maintain their tight monopoly on Japanese learning. But Japanese writers, publishers, and students to whom these facts have been shown have become enthusiastic converts to language reform.

We can, I am convinced, make any program of language reform a popular success if it is actively supported by our Military Government, if we tell the Japanese people the facts, and if we then give them as large a part as possible in the details (such as the choice of a phonetic alphabet).

We should take the issue by radio, not to the intellectuals, for these are already literate, but to the great mass of the Japanese people whose daily living will be most improved by the change, to the farmers and mechanics, the village and town mayors, the members of the local assemblies, the parentteacher associations, the students (particularly in technical courses), the publishers, the small businessmen, and the labor unions. We should try for the greatest possible participation in the program by the greatest possible number of people. There is a great unsatisfied hunger among the Japanese people for this kind of civic activity. And we should put in charge of the program not the scholars, but as many as possible of the demobilized soldiers who have completed high school or college and who have seen what illiteracy has cost Japan in lack of efficiency, in poverty, in disease, in starvation, and, at the root of these, in wasted opportunities for a liberal, well-balanced education.

The Japanese now have compulsory education without compulsory literacy. If the Military Government decides in favor of language reform, education will automatically include some measure of literacy and one phase of the battle for the Japanese mind will have been won. A hundred years from now, historians may decide that one of the most powerful forces in guiding the Japanese away from the tragic errors of the past decade was the exchange of a Bronze Age language for a twentiethcentury one.