Language, Nation, Race: Linguistic Reform in Meiji Japan (1868–1912)

Atsuko Ueda

doi:10.1525/luminos.103

Abstract

Language, Nation, Race explores the various language reforms at the onset of Japanese modernity, a time when a “national language” (kokugo) was produced to standardize Japanese. Faced with the threat of Western colonialism, Meiji intellectuals proposed various reforms to standardize the Japanese language in order to quickly educate the illiterate masses. This book liberates these language reforms from the predetermined category of the “nation,” for such a notion had yet to exist as a clear telos to which the reforms aspired. Atsuko Ueda draws on, while critically intervening in, the vast scholarship of language reform that engaged with numerous works of postcolonial and cultural studies. She examines the first two decades of the Meiji period, with specific focus on the issue of race, contending that no analysis of imperialism or nationalism is possible without it.

Highlights

This book is about a variety of language reforms that occured in Meiji Japan (1868–1912)
Despite an apparent similarity in the urge to unify the “spoken” and “written” languages, the proposals for linguistic reform in early Meiji Japan varied from each other in their methods and goals, probably more so than at any other time in the history of modern Japan. This shows the multiple directions in which reforms could have developed before being “standardized” as “national language.”
The only thing that these advocates knew was that a new medium had to be produced, be it through the adoption of English, kana scripts, or the Roman alphabet