Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan: Reading between the Lines

Literacy

and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

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Literacy and Script

Reform in Occupation Japan READING BETWEEN THE L I N E S

J. Marshall Unger

New York Oxford Oxford University Press 1996

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaarn Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1996 by J. Marshall Unger Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. r9& Madison Avenue., New York, New York rooi6 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Unger, J. Marshal!. Literacy and script reform in occupation Japan / J. Marshall Unger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 0-19-510166-9 i. Japanese language—Reform. 2. Japanese language —Orthography arid spelling 3. Japanese langvrage—Writing. I. Title. PL549.LT45 1996 495.6'ir— dc2o 95-g63r

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 ] Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

In memory of Otsuka Haruo and Okubo Tadatoshi

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A cknowledgm en ts

Research for this book was made possible in part by the University of Hawaii Foundation, which awarded me a Fujio Matsuda Fellowship for sabbatical research in 1991. Research in the Washington, D.C., area could not have been carried out without the cooperation and support of the National Foreign Language Center, Johns Hopkins University, with which I was simultaneously engaged on another project. Special thanks to Richard Boylan, Military Reference Branch, Washington National Records Center Section, National Archives and Records Administration, Suitland, Maryland, who was unfailingly helpful; to Frank Joseph Shulman, of the University of Maryland, who generously supplied essential bibliographic information; to Kitta Hirokuni, Okano Atsunobu, Yano Yuji, and the other members of the Nippon Romazi Sya who shared their memories and memorabilia with me; and to Bonnie Butler, benefits and records manager at the Rand Corporation, for biographical information on Abraham Halpern. In Japan, I worked for three months as a visiting professor at the National Museum of Ethnology (Kokuritsu minzokugaku hakubutsukan), Suita, Osaka. The assistance of the museum's director, Umesao Tadao (now retired), and its library and data-processing staff proved invaluable. Special thanks also to Sato Hideo, past director of the National Institute for Educational Research (Kokuritsu kyoiku kenkyujo) in Tokyo; his enthusiastic support saved me from countless hours of frustrating library work. The following scholars have offered advice and helpful criticism during

viii

Acknowledgments

the writing of this book: John DeFrancis, Eleanor Harz Jorclen, Samuel E. Martin, Marlene Mayo, Richard Rubinger, and Yamada Hisao. My thanks to them all. Naturally, any errors this book contains are solely my responsibility. In parts of chapters 2 and 6 I have restated some arguments about the history of literacy in Japan that I originally advanced in The Fifth Generation Fallacy: Why Japan is Betting Its Future on Artificial Intelligence (1987), a book primarily about the handling of Japanese script on computers. I hope that by situating these arguments, in updated form, in the context of a purely historical study, they will attract greater attention from historians and social scientists specializing in Japan. J. M. U. College Park, Maryland May 1995

Contents

Transcription and Use of Japanese Words

xi

1. Introduction: Dreamers or Realists? 3 Scholarly Neglect 3 Language and Script 9 The Modern Japanese Writing System 16 2. Literacy in Japan up to 1945 24 The Tokugawa Inheritance 24 The Effects of Public Schooling 35 3. Script Reform from Within 44 Kana Typewriters and Romaji Textbooks 44 The Toyo Kanji List and Reforms of 1946—59 56 4. SCAP Steps In 59 Robert King Hall 59 Abraham Meyer Halpern

76

X

Contents

5. The Rdmaji Education Experiment 86 Evidence from Trainor and the GHQ/SCAP Archives 86 Interlude: The Strange Case of the Romazi Sinbun 106 Evidence from Japanese Sources 109 6. Conclusion: The Most Literate Nation on Earth? 119 TheE Joyo Kanji I List and the Liberal Democratic Party Backlash 119 A Functional View of Literacy 124 Appendix A: Appendix B: Appendix C: Appendix D:

Halpern's Overview of the Romanization Issue 128 Trainer's Account of the Romaji Education Experiment 133 Calhoun's Key Memoranda on the Experiment's Results 136 Remarks on Archival Sources 139

Glossary of Japanese Terms Notes 148 ReferencesS 159 Index 169

145

Transcription and

Use of Japanese Words

Throughout this book, Japanese words in direct quotations are transcribed as they appear in the source cited; if a document by a Japanese author gives his name in romanization, it is cited in that form. Otherwise, Japanese words are transcribed according to the Hepburn romanization scheme used in the third and later editions of Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary. Personal names are given in the Japanese order (i.e., family name first). Proper nouns are italicized according to English usage; all other Japanese words are italicized on each occurrence. For the purposes of this rule, words of Japanese origin that are now part of modern American usage, such as wellknown geographical names, are regarded as English. They are not italicized and are spelled without macrons: Tokyo for T5kyo, Kyushu for Kyushu, and so forth. But I avoid anglicized plurals for all words of Japanese origin. Thus, "the forty-seven samurai in the play Chushingura" and, more to the point for this work, "the forty-seven kana in the Iroha poem." When it is necessary to be precise, I follow the standard linguistic practice of enclosing phonetic notation between brackets, phonemic representations between slashes, and orthography between inequality signs. Thus, in the Japanese word /gasugaisa/ 'gas company', the first /g/ is pronounced | g j (a stop) but the second [rj] (a nasal). (Note that glosses on non-English words are given in single quotes.) The Hepburn and Kunrei-shiki romanizations of this word are and , respectively.

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Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

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I.

Introduction: Dreamers or Realists?

Scholarly Neglect Historians of Japan lavish attention on labor organizers, Communists, and their sympathizers in literature and the arts who were crushed by the military regime that led Japan into World War II. Script reform in general, and romanization in particular, simply do not qualify as social or political programs worthy of sustained study because it is "clear" (in hindsight) that thorough-going script reform was not a necessary condition for postwar economic success. Leaving aside for the moment a precise definition of "success" (upon which much obviously hinges), it is at least worth remembering that, for the first half of the century, script reform was a social policy issue that held the attention of Japanese leaders across a wide spectrum of political and cultural views. Looking back, we see it was not the would-be reformers who had their heads in the clouds so much as those who believed that all change could be resisted indefinitely. An impressively large and diverse group of distinguished Japanese understood that some sort of reform was inevitable, so obvious were the superfluities and anachronisms of the existing writing system; the question of the day was what specific shape the reform would take, not whether it would take place at all. There were a large number of possibilities, ranging from limitation on the number of Chinese characters in general use at one extreme to romanization on the other; none was dismissed out of hand. The story we are used to hearing is one of ignorant Americans coming within a hairbreadth of destroying Japanese civilization by forcing their helpless subjects to abandon their centuries-old writing system in favor of the alpha3

4

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

bet. However, this tale makes no sense when appended to the true history of the script reform issue up to 1945. A more plausible description of what happened, as demonstrated in this book, is that the loss of the war upset a balance of power among factions that were competing with one another on the script reform issue. It thereby opened a window of opportunity for romanization that conservative Japanese AND AMERICANS, working in concert, shut as quickly as possible. Some may find such revisionism distasteful, but an examination of neglected documentary evidence shows that this conclusion is only one of many necessary reversals of uncritically accepted assumptions about the nature and history of the Japanese writing system. Apart from this general conclusion, I specifically want to draw attention with this study to a little known but extremely significant experiment conducted during the Occupation. I first learned about this experiment from individuals in Japan who were firsthand participants in it or who knew people who had been. By searching through archival materials, I have been able to piece together a story very different from the one believed by most historians and have recovered data that directly challenges certain strongly held beliefs about the functionality of Chinese characters (kanji) in Japanese writing. Needless to say, a considerable amount of background information is needed in order to understand the details of the key historical episode that serves as the focus of this study: this is covered in the second and third sections of chapter r. In chapter 2,1 establish that there was a need for a Japanese script reform of some kind in 1945. In chapter 3,1 trace how the Japanese themselves had gradually worked, from the r88os and earlier, toward a consensus on this need and, from 1946 through 1959, actually implemented kanji limitation, simplification otkana usage, and other concrete measures. In chapters 4 and 5,1 review efforts toward romanization and show how they were thwarted; in those chapters and the appendices, I take the opportunity to reproduce primary source material that is relatively inaccessible and has not been discussed in the scholarly literature. Finally, in chapter 6, I describe the denouement that followed postwar script reform, summarize the political dynamics that turned Japan away from script reform, and close the circle I begin in the following paragraphs by returning to the worthiness of studying script reform in Japan. This is a story that has been waiting to be told for more than forty years. Why have scholars of Japan slighted it for so long? First, a large number of both Western and Japanese scholars who deal with Japan, especially those who study Japanese literature, have been unwilling to give up on the notion that Chinese characters are, in some vague but presumably deep way, unique among all forms of human writing. They believe either that the characters symbolize distinct thoughts or ideas irrespective of how those ideas are expressed

Introduction: Dreamers or Realists?

j

in any particular language, or else that the characters stand for distinct words irrespective of the phonetic shape of those words in a particular language. In the former view, Chinese characters are IDEOGRAMS; 1 in the latter view, they are LOGOGRAMS. In either view, it follows that one can draw a line of demarcation through the literate world and divide it into two spheres: a European/ Islamic/Indie world that writes theology, masters nature, and follows logic; and a Sinocentric world that writes history, accepts nature, and follows intuition. For those who believe that the civilizations found in China and its neighbors depend crucially on the use of Chinese characters, the very existence of intelligent natives willing to cast Chinese characters aside poses an embarrassing dilemma. Mori Arinori, who became Japan's first minister of education in 1885, is a prime example. On the first day of 1873, dissatisfied with mere script reform, Mori proposed replacing the entire Japanese language outright with a simplified form of English (Hall 1973, 189—95). Both Western and Japanese writers have repeatedly singled out Mori's proposal for ridicule, citing it as an egregious instance of how Meiji-period Japanese could make fools of themselves in a frenzied rush to absorb all things Western while failing to appreciate the strengths and accomplishments of their own culture (Taylor 1983, 215-16; Sakakura 1985, 65-70). If Mori had had his way, they note disapprovingly, the Japanese would have discarded their own native language just as they used Buddhist images for firewood (to the dismay of Ernest Fenollosa) and woodblock prints for packing paper (which is how the prints first made their way to Paris and the Impressionists). 2 The truth is, however, that Mori was immoderate, but by no means irrational; what he had in mind was unquestionably impractical in a political sense, yet perfectly reasonable given the actual state of linguistic affairs in Japan at the time. The second reason for scholarly neglect of script reform is that the reformers appear to have lost the game. Why study losers? As Christopher Seeley (1991) observes, the modest simplifications of the writing system implemented between 1946 and 1959 represent the highwater mark for script reform in Japan; since about 1960, the reactionaries have been in the saddle. Why study a movement that did not carry the day when it had its best chance at success, during the Occupation, and seems to be losing ground rapidly as computer technology makes it possible for almost anyone who knows Japanese to feign erudition in Chinese characters? Surely it is no accident that there have been only two recent American doctoral dissertations on Occupation script reform policy (Hada 1981, Hardesty 1986), both by nonlinguists. While working on this book, I called the attention of a historian of modern Japan (who wishes to remain anonymous) to the fact that Saionji Kinmochi (who represented Japan at Versailles), Kikuchi Dairoku (president of the University of Tokyo), Kano

6

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

Jigoro (father of the judo movement), Yamamoto Yuzo (the much beloved novelist), Hara Takashi (the newspaper publisher who became prime minister), Nitobe Inazo (world-renowned educator and delegate to the League of Nations), and Fukuzawa Yukichi (founder of Keio University) each publicly advocated script reform in his day.3 The historian was willing and eager to argue that the whole lot were "crackpots," were hypocrites who did not practice what they preached, were tainted by anti-Chinese and nationalist sentiments, and were proven failures insofar as Japanese society did not, in the end, adopt their recommendations. I find this view both superficial and cynical, but it is not at all uncommon, even among professional scholars. There is a third reason that scholars have neglected the history of script reform—the sheer difficulty of the language and of the writing system itself— which we will take up in the second section of this chapter. At this point, however, let us review the reasons the history of script reform deserves serious attention. First, a priori claims about the Japanese language and the Japanese writing system that are commonly invoked to trivialize the significance of the script reform movement simply do not withstand scrutiny. These include not only the notion that Chinese characters are special among all modes of writing but also the belief that the Japanese language is so phonologically impoverished and so overloaded with homonyms that Chinese characters, whether ideograms or not, are indispensable for writing it. Obviously, anyone who believes that will have no trouble believing that even the moderate reduction in the number of Chinese characters in general use since 1946 is a piece of dangerous, benighted social engineering. Nevertheless, recent research on the psychology of reading shows that these ideas have no scientific validity, while studies of the history of these ideas show that they most likely originated in the West, not East Asia. We will review these issues in the next section of this chapter and the first part of chapter 3. Second, the fact that it was possible to sustain a large script reform movement for a considerable length of time casts doubt on what we might call the "99 percent" myth of Japanese literacy. Scholars have been quick to interpret postwar research on Edo-period education as showing high levels and wide distribution of literacy throughout the population, implying that things only got better after the establishment of the public education system in the 18705 (under the leadership of none other than Mori Arinori). However, given the racism that informed much writing about Japan down to the Occupation (Dower 1986) and the understandable desire of later researchers to distance themselves from it, one must allow for a certain amount of positive bias. The optimistic view also suffers from at least one obvious inadequacy: if so many

Introduction: Dreamers or Realists?

j

Japanese were so highly literate for so long, why were any Japanese concerned about script reform at all? The truth is that literacy for most Japanese, up to at least 1950, was a "restricted literacy" (Neustupny 1984,118) that compromised their ability to participate fully and freely in politics and the economy. In chapter 2, we shall take a closer look at what these restrictions were. Third, the script reformers as a group showed originality, open-mindedness, and a confidence in the traditions of ordinary people; they were willing to shed the exterior trappings of aristocratic culture and envision a future Japan greatly different from the one in which they lived. Thus they defy the stereotypes that both Western and Japanese scholars repeatedly invoke in their descriptions of Japanese civilization: imitation, provincialism, and a cultural inferiority complex. If Japan is really a nation in which, as the proverb says, "the nail that sticks out gets pounded down," how does one explain advocates of romanization such as Tanakadate Aikitsu, Tamaru Takuro, and Kito Reiz5, who were willing to push tradition aside, examine their own culture in the cold light of objectivity, and devote a major part of their lives to championing a movement clearly unpopular with the power elite? What these men were promoting was, by the standards of Japanese culture, nothing short of revolutionary, as we shall see in chapter 3. How many American statesmen have paid more than lip service to the advantages of switching to the metric system, even in this day of deteriorating American competitiveness in world manufacturing? Compared with calling for the end to the antiquated system of English weights and measures in the United States, advocating the abolition of Chinese characters in Japanese writing was and still is seen as virtually seditious — prior to 1945, it landed more than one activist in jail. 4 Finally, there is a great deal of outright misinformation about what happened during the Occupation that passes for honest history. In chapter 4, for example, we will see how the role played by the linguist Abraham Halpern has been misrepresented by a later linguist, Roy Andrew Miller. 5 Toshio Nishi's (1982) attacks on Robert King Hall are clearly inspired by his unhappy personal experiences as a schoolchild in Japan during the Occupation. Denunciations of Hall are a stock feature of Occupation reminiscences in the Japanese press, such as Shukan Shincho 1969, Sankei Shinbun 1975, and Yasujima 1995. Kei5 University professor emeritus Suzuki Takao (1990) has gone so far as to characterize even the moderate script reforms that were actually implemented between 1946 and 1959 as needless and harmful, changes that no intelligent Japanese would ever have accepted had they not been, in effect, forced to adopt them by the Occupation. Yet what really happened between 1945 and 1951 was anything but a simple black-and-white story of arrogant Americans versus powerless Japanese. Japanese government and business had been working

8

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

on plans for script reform for decades, even during the war; what the Japanese eventually did was nothing more than what they had been on the verge of doing anyway. Some Japanese may have believed that, by appeasing the Americans with a reduction in the number of kanji in general use, they could prevent them from ordering something more drastic, such as across-the-board romanization, but they were mistaken: even before the surrender, American policymakers had largely rejected the concept of radical script reform. During the Occupation itself, the chief of the Civil Information and Education Section (CI&E) of GHQ/SCAP and several of his subordinates took such pains to maintain the appearance of fairness6 that they became de facto allies of those conservative Japanese who opposed all but the mildest script reform measures. Finally, the Japanese advocates of romanization must take a share of the blame for the failure of their movement. They favored idealism over practicality and ended up squabbling among themselves just at the time they should have been organizing a united front against their opponents in both the Occupation and the Ministry of Education. But perhaps the most interesting incident in the struggle over script reform is a little-known experiment that was conducted in Japanese elementary schools between 1948 and 1950. It deserves an entire chapter to itself. The original plan was for various subjects other than the Japanese language (kokugo) to be taught using alphabetic script rather than the complicated combination of kana and Chinese characters that traditionally make up the Japanese writing system. As we shall see in chapter 5, accurate information about this experiment, even knowledge of its existence, has been kept effectively buried for more than forty years.7 Although there are no signs that there was a conscious conspiracy, the way in which the occupying Americans and the Ministry of Education treated the experiment was extremely shabby. Contrary to what opponents of script reform had hoped, the experiment showed that students who used romanized materials exclusively did not fall behind their peers and strongly suggested that, in more favorable circumstances, they could easily have made faster progress in school than students who did not use romanized materials. Although the experiment left much to be desired from a scientific point of view, it was nothing short of miraculous that it was sustained for nearly three years, given the adverse conditions in Japan at the time. One must wonder why it was abruptly halted, despite the existence of plans for its continuation. The killing of the so-called romanization education experiment was, as we will see in chapter 6, just one in a long string of maneuvers against script reform efforts. By 1981, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) saw to it that the intent of postwar simplifications of the writing system, if not their outward

Introduction: Dreamers or Realists?

9

effects, had been thoroughly subverted. Organizations devoted to the exclusive use of kana or romaji have been politically marginalized, but manage to survive; the inefficiencies of the script remain and take their social and economic toll despite improvements in technology, including the proliferation of computers (Unger 1987). The question of what steps toward greater simplification of the script need to be taken cannot be answered at this time, but the question itself, as this study demonstrates, cannot be brushed aside as out-of-date, settled, or trivial.

Language and Script There is, as has already been remarked, a third reason for scholarly neglect of the script reform movement in Japan: the language itself and its writing system pose a major obstacle to serious research. Because script reform is a topic that sits at the borders of many different disciplines, it is of interest to a wide range of scholars, yet few with the equipment needed to study it have been willing to take the time to do so. The last part of this chapter gives a taste of the complexities involved, and they will be discussed again in chapter 3. At this point, some remarks on the general relationship between language and writing are in order. Strictly speaking, language is —strictly—SPEAKING. Seen from the perspective of natural history, writing is the exception, not the rule, and a distinctive property common to all written languages has yet to be found. The use of the voice as the means by which human beings communicate among themselves in "the state of Nature," as the philosophers of the Enlightenment called it, is no accident. True gestural languages (SIGNING) —as opposed to mappings of spoken language structures onto gestures —can be constructed, but they come into existence and are maintained only under special conditions and with the cooperation of individuals who have acquired normal (i.e., spoken) language first.8 It is particularly important to distinguish signing from writing. Signing, to use computer jargon, is the "implementation" of the same kind of cognitive system that underlies speech, but in a different medium: speech uses the voice and ear; signing, the body and eye. Naturally, differences in the media are reflected in differences in the structure of the symbolic inventories and how they are used. Signs, for example, can often be temporally superimposed or blended, but speech must be produced linearly. The underlying cognitive systems in both cases are nevertheless essentially the same. By contrast, writing is, in essence, the reduction of the forms of speech (or, far less commonly, signs)

io

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

to a more or less permanent two-dimensional form. The problem of reducing signing to writing is completely analogous to the phonemic analysis of speech (Sacks 1989, 76-80, Farnell 1996). Of course, no ordinary writing system comes close to capturing the full complexity of all the physical events that occur during actual language use. There are methods for permanently recording these events, but what they produce is of little or no practical use to anyone who is not aided by special equipment or prepared through special training. Tape recordings (analog or digital), spectrograms, and narrow transcriptions used by phoneticians are ways to preserve the details of speech in a two-dimensional format, but all are more or less illegible to the untutored layman, who nevertheless has no trouble reading a billboard. Writing of the kind we are familiar with in everyday life, even when it is consciously used to transcribe actual speech, filters out vast amounts of redundant phonetic information. Still, it manages to record enough of the salient features of speech to permit all educated speakers of the language to recover essentially the same utterance from a given text. This applies to the Chinese writing system and the scripts historically derived from it (such as the one used in Japan) as much as to any of the more familiar scripts of Europe. Nevertheless, it is often claimed that Chinese writing is logographic and thus unlike alphabetic writing, which is said to be phonographic. 9 Perhaps the most convincing reason for rejecting this view, which I call BIMODALISM, is that it grossly exaggerates the extent to which Chinese characters function as logograms, that is, as symbols that represent words and not speech sounds. Just as there are, at one extreme, precise but impractical writing systems that record every phonetic detail, there exist, at the other, true logographic writing systems that represent each word or phrase in an utterance without giving the slightest clue as to its pronunciation. 10 These are the codes used for military, diplomatic, and commercial purposes. Unlike a CIPHER, a reversible algorithm that dictates how to replace one symbol with another or scramble the symbols that comprise a text, a CODE is an arbitrary scheme for substituting one whole word or phrase for another. Even a cipher simple enough to remember and use without making many errors can provide a degree of security adequate for a wide range of purposes; on the other hand, analysis of a sufficient amount of traffic enciphered by using the same system (especially if it happens to include slightly different versions of the same messages) makes it possible to discover the algorithm ("crack the cipher"). By contrast, a code ample enough for general-purpose use cannot be memorized and can be used only with the aid of a codebook; yet a good code provides excellent security because it is purposely designed so that members of plain and code word pairs provide no hint of one another (i.e., so that it is truly logo-

Introduction: Dreamers or Realists?

11

graphic). In short, there is a trade-off between ease of use and security: a bulky codebook provides better security (unless surreptitiously stolen or copied) than a cipher that can be carried in one's head because a code lacks just those features of a cipher that make it learnable. If Chinese characters were always as unhelpful as code words in providing clues to the syllables they stand for, they would indeed be genuine logograms.11 Reading Chinese would be the same thing as, for example, recalling the names of people while scanning a featureless list of telephone numbers; learning to read Chinese would be like memorizing the phone book for a town of several thousand customers, a feat that few, if any, human beings could pull off even if every person in the book were a friend or relative with a familiar name.12 But native speakers of Chinese—and the argument carries over to Japanese —DO learn how to handle the writing system, which proves that Chinese characters do not in fact function as logograms, at least not all of the time. In fact, the learnability of Chinese characters for speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, or any of the languages of the Chinese language family with a writing tradition (and, by extension, Japanese as well) depends crucially on visual clues to the pronunciation of the syllables the characters stand for that are embedded in the graphic structure of the characters themselves (DeFrancis 1984,1989; Hansell, forthcoming). One might object that, in making this argument, I have said nothing specific about how Chinese characters provide mnemonic clues to the chunks of language they stand for. I save those details for chapter 3, in which I will identify the phonographic features of both the Chinese and Japanese writing systems that make them, in contrast to genuine logographic writing systems (namely, codes) learnable for practical purposes. The point here is simply that the existence of such phonographic features is certain. Figures i and 2 provide a handy summary of what all this means in terms of the classification of writing systems. It is simply a mistake to think that writing systems that do and do not make use of Chinese characters are distributed over a continuum with Chinese and Japanese close to one end and alphabetic writing systems with few ad hoc spelling rules at the other. The appeal of this model stems from a failure to take the true extreme cases, described above, into account, from overlooking the phonographic properties of Chinese characters, and from overemphasizing the phonographic character of writing systems based on alphabets or syllabaries. (In English, with its notoriously irregular spellings and avoidance of diacritic marks, for example, the letters of the alphabet often give poor or misleading clues to the pronunciation of words they are used to transcribe.) In reality, all well-established writing systems are concentrated in a rather small region of the continuum, well separated from its end-

i2

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

No'i've (Bimoddl) View of Writing System Typology

Actual range of writing systems Theoretical continuum

Figure i. Nai've (Bimodal) View of Writing System Typology. Korean is commonly lumped together with other East Asian scripts because of the traditional use of Chinese characters in Korea and the social prestige attached to knowing how to use them. Some authorities (e.g., Sampson 1994) claim that Japanese writing is even more logographic than Chinese because of the high percentage of kanji that take multiple readings. Source: Adapted from DeFrancis and Unger 1994. points and perhaps a trifle closer to the phonographic than the logographic extreme. It is true that the writing systems of, say, Chinese and Finnish are near the opposite limits of this region, but what is striking is not their superficial differences but rather how those differences mask the fact that, like all writing systems, they each, in different ways, incorporate a sufficiently balanced mixture of both phonological and morphological information to be useful in everyday circumstances. Theories about the uniqueness of the Chinese or Japanese "mind" that exaggerate the significance of the superficial differences between Chinese characters and other forms of writing are therefore of greater interest as indicators of trends in intellectual and social history than as hypotheses in psychology or linguistics. 13 Once a writing system has been created, it is only a matter of time before it is put to special, unforeseen uses; it takes on a life of its own. One can play with its symbols to create new patterns, modify the rules for their interpretation, and even devise ways for applying them to a different language. This adaptability creates the impression that writing systems exist independently of language, and it has even been claimed that writing systems with the full "expressive potential" of a spoken language but related to none could, in principle, arise naturally (Sampson 1985, 30). It is certainly not hard to find differences

Introduction: Dreamers or Realists?

13

Realistic (Unitary) View of Writing System Typology

Actual range of writing systems Theoretical continuum

Figure 2. Realistic (Unitary) View of Writing System Typology. Apart from the representation of Sino-Korean loanwords by means of Chinese characters, which is discretionary, modern Korean uses an alphabet to transcribe words morphophonemically. Source: Adapted from DeFrancis and Unger 1994. between how one uses language when speaking and writing. Nevertheless, there is abundant evidence that shows the association of visible symbols with distinctive language sounds (usually called phonological receding) plays an early and essential part in the processes of reading and writing, even in the case of so-called ideographic or logographic scripts.14 An American who looks casually at Japan today sees many resemblances between the social status of language and script there and in the United States. Regional dialects exist in both countries, but so does a national standard language understood virtually everywhere — j u s t tune in the evening news in Osaka or New Orleans and listen. Likewise, though the physical appearance of writing varies considerably from scientific reports to novels to comic books, all these different texts and formats share a common core of standard orthography, be it English or Japanese. These similarities between the two leading industrial societies of the 19905 are not, however, the product of similar conditions 50 or 100 years ago. In the 18905, it was not yet clear which Japanese dialect would be the foundation for the modern colloquial standard language (hyojungo) (Calvetti 1992), and the gulf dividing each of the leading rivals (the speech of the Tokyo and Osaka-Kyoto areas, respectively) from the written language of the day was immense. Several different styles of written Japanese were in use, each appropriate to certain situations, ranging from the pseudo-Chinese forms of kanbun to the immediate antecedents of today's kanji kanamajiribun (see Twine 1991). The genbun itchi movement, aimed at the creation of a standard written style devoid of anachronisms and rooted firmly in colloquial

14

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

usage, suffered a temporary setback in the 18905 and had to struggle for more than half a century to gain, in the plain Japanese of the postwar constitution, indisputable official recognition. Nothing has contributed more to misunderstanding the goals and motives of script reform advocates than the failure to grasp these fundamental facts. Consider the case of Mori Arinori, referred to earlier. In his famous letter of 21 May 1872 to William Dwight Whitney, professor of Sanskrit at Yale, Mori made his position unmistakably clear: All the schools the Empire has had, for many centuries, have been Chinese; and, strange to state, we have had no schools nor books in our own language for educational purposes. . . . Schools for the Japanese language are found to be greatly needed, and yet there are neither teachers nor books for them. The only course to be taken, to secure the desired end, is to start anew, by first turning the spoken language into a properly written form, based on a pure phonetic principle. It is contemplated that Roman letters should be adopted. (Hall 1973, 191)

As Ivan Hall explains in his biography of Mori, "Chinese" as Mori uses it in this context refers not to the language of nineteenth-century China but to Sino-Japanese, i.e., the written language of Japan as it had existed before the welding of the spoken and written languages into an identity (genbun itchi), which gradually took place during the Meiji period. His definition seems to include not only the classical (and most genuinely "Chinese") kanbun, but also the more Japanized written styles such as the epistolary (sorobun), all of which depend heavily for their vocabulary on words of Chinese origin pronounced in the Sino-Japanese (on) fashion, and for their writing on Chinese characters (kanji). (190)

This is indeed the crux of the matter, but Hall does not go quite far enough. He and other scholars use terms such as "Sino-Japanese" because they regard even kanbun as a written form OF JAPANESE and can see, from their later and broader perspective, that it was identical with neither literary Chinese (wenydn) nor colloquial Mandarin (baihuci). But did Mori himself view things this way? For Mori, none of the various forms of writing extant in Japan in which information of value was or could be recorded was a representation of Japanese. What was taught in the schools was, literally, another language, comparable to the Latin that dominated European academic discourse until the igth century. 15 Furthermore, Mori must have been acutely aware of the plethora of dialects used throughout Japan and the lack of an official standard vernacular. "The spoken language of Japan," he informed Whitney, was "inadequate

Introduction: Dreamers or Realists?

ij

to the growing necessities of the people of that Empire, and too poor to be made, by a phonetic alphabet, sufficiently useful as written language" (Hall 1973,191); yet, as we have seen, he proceeded to advocate romanization. This seeming contradiction is easily resolved once we take Mori's "spoken language of Japan" in a collective sense. The sankin kotai system, under which the shogun compelled the daimyo to alternate residence in their home provinces with long stints in the capital, brought generations of samurai from disparate regions into close contact and disseminated, through them, the language they used among themselves in Edo to every corner of the country (Tokugawa 1992). Certainly THAT de facto standard language was not "too poor" to be of use. But in 1872, no one could foresee that it, rather than the Kamigata speech of Kyoto and Osaka —or perhaps the dialect of another suddenly influential region—would eventually become the basis for a single national standard, or that a single standard would necessarily emerge at all. Even for a national leader like Mori, the COMMON CORE of the many forms of spoken Japanese that were vying with each other for dominance must have seemed a tenuous and unpromising foundation upon which to build an educational system that would enable Japan to compete with the nations of the West and fend off the encroachments of imperialism. In addition — and for our purposes this is the vital point—Mori obviously did not share the fear, so often expressed today, that the abolition of Chinese characters would be a cataclysm, a death knell for Japanese civilization. In his concept of the assimilative and adaptive capacity of the Japanese, that is to say in his theoretical rationale for westernization, Mori hit upon what is certainly one of the most plausible definitions of Japanese cultural development and national identity. As Mori explained to the Americans in Education in ]apan in 1873, t° the Chinese statesman Li Hung-chang in 1876, and to British readers of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884, the assimilative instinct was not a weakness but rather the very genius of his countrymen, with the reception of Western culture in the nineteenth century as necessary and appropriate as had been the reception of Chinese culture centuries earlier. (Hall 1973, 480-81) Perhaps the reason so many writers are at pains to explain away Mori's letter to Whitney as a blunder almost comical in its dimensions is that Mori refused to treat Japan as a museum or Japanese culture as a dried flower to be kept under glass lest it disintegrate in an atmosphere of rapid change. By implicitly insisting that Japanese culture was resilient and robust, Mori's letter challenged the now stock view that Japanese culture is inextricably linked to all things old and Chinese and cannot survive any tampering with its bonds to the past. The very idea that using romaji rather than kana and kanji for everyday writing would

16

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

instantaneously and irrevocably sever all Japan's links with its past must have struck Mori, knowing what he did about the extent of illiteracy and diversity of dialects throughout the country, as craven and childish. It is about time to stop criticizing Mori for his letter to Whitney and start investigating the realities that prompted him to write it.

The Modern Japanese Writing System Before proceeding further, however, it is important that there be no misunderstandings about technical terms. A careful description of how the current Japanese writing system works, much less how it worked in earlier times, is far beyond the scope of this book. For the sake of readers with little or no acquaintance with Japanese, I will dissect a single written sentence in detail here to illustrate the basic terminology and concepts involved; the going may be a little rough, but a brief authentic example is worth a much longer, indirect explanation. Immediately afterward, I will offer some linguistic analysis of keyparts of the same sentence for which Chinese characters (kanji) appear. Even those at home in Japanese should read this section, for much of the opposition to script reform in Japan has turned on the question of whether or not kanji are, in some sense, indispensable. Here is the sentence in Hepburn romanization: Kare wa nyusha irai nakazu tobazu de pinto shinakatta ga, konkai no kiki de wa ridashippu o tori, kyusho o umaku kirinuketa no de, uwayaku oyobi dohaitachi kara sukkari minaosareta. (Tagashira and Hoff 1986, 91)

First, I want to emphasize that there is nothing exceptional or contrived about this sentence. It is a random example of expository written Japanese, selected from a reference work aimed at non-Japanese students of Japanese as a second language and devoted to matters other than script. Second, it is worth mentioning that the romanized version just presented serves quite well as a prompt or cue to Japanese pronunciation for a literate speaker of English, who is likely to know what a macron signifies, can guess that the vowels are supposed to come out roughly as in Italian, and has seen enough movies to imitate a Japanese voice for the consonants and overall delivery. Of course, like all practical writing systems, the Hepburn system of romanization (or romaji 'roman letters') greatly underspecifies what one would actually hear if a speaker of Japanese were to say the sentence aloud. It omits, for example, any indication of distinctive rises or falls in pitch (called, somewhat misleadingly, akusento 'accent'). It assumes that the reader is not confused by the fact

Introduction: Dreamers or Realists?

17

that the in , which comes before a vowel, stands for a consonant, whereas the in , which comes before a consonant, stands for a vowel-like resonant, or that the in is articulated more or less like the in English , while the in (also a resonant) sounds more like the in English . Such predictable variations in pronunciation are a problem if you do not know Japanese; if you do, then Hepburn romanization, like any satisfactory writing system, allows for both the transcription and the recovery of any utterance in the language it was designed to serve. Here is Tagashira and Hoff's translation of the example sentence: Since joining the company, he had not done anything special and had been rather mediocre. However, in the recent crisis he assumed leadership and got us skillfully through it, and as a result he has been reevaluated by his colleagues and superiors.

Here is how the sentence looks in ordinary Japanese script:16 1

5

10

15

20

25

50

55

31

35

40

45

61

65

70

75

30

60

Three kinds of characters appear in the text: hiragana (all the characters not enumerated hereafter), katakana (characters. 31-37), and Chinese characters, or kanji, (characters i, 3-7,10, 24-25,27-28,42-43,48, 50, 56-57, 61-62, and 71-72). (Hiragana and katakana are referred to collectively as kana.) Alphanumeric symbols (A—Z, a—z, 0—9) and a wide variety of punctuation marks (such as characters 23, 41, and 76) are also found in modern Japanese texts. The characters in the two kana syllabaries are used, with a few exceptions, to represent the syllables (more precisely, the morae, or syllable parts [onsetsu]) actually heard in pronunciation. Hiragana are used by default; katakana are used like italics in English, when special marking is prescribed — for instance, to set off words, such as nddshippu in the example, recently borrowed into Japanese from languages other than Chinese. Kanji have two basic uses. Words borrowed from literary Chinese or coined in Japan on the model

18

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

of literary Chinese (much as English speakers make up words using Latin and Greek roots) are written with the corresponding kanji; such words are called kango. Kanji are also used, according to conventional rules that must be learned, to stand in for one or more syllables of certain native Japanese words; words of this kind are called Yamato kotoba. When used in the writing of kango, the kanji are said to take on readings; when used in the writing of Yamato kotoba, they are said to take kun readings. Most kanji have at least one on and one kun reading; frequently used kanji may have several readings of each variety. In the case of Yamato kotoba (e.g., dekiru 'be able, develop') and frequently used kango (e.g., taihen 'greatly'), the use of kanji is optional; hiragana may correctly be used in many cases, at the writer's discretion. For example, the kanji Inumbered 27,28, 61, and 62 are virtually obligatory whereas 48, 50, 71, and 72 might just as well be replaced with hiragana. Kun readings were originally glosses on literary Chinese; in hindsight, they are attempts to pair up the kanji associated with a word of literary Chinese and a Japanese word that share —or once shared —a common meaning. This heuristic is of limited reliability, however, because the use of kanji has evolved over at least a dozen centuries, during which both the Japanese and Chinese languages have undergone enormous changes and erudite Japanese writers have played games, committed scribal errors, and created new usages in the name of art. As a result, there are today many cases in which several different kanji can be used to represent all or part of the same native word. Moreover, when part of a word is written with a kanji and part with hiragana, historical practice on dividing the work orthographically is not always consistent; this leaves the modern writer with a certain amount of latitude. For example, in other contexts, other forms of the words in which kanji 7 and 10 occur could be written with different kanji or replaced with hiragana. (In fact, the situation is even more complicated because of unusual kanji usages known as ateji and jukujikun; see note 37 and the glossary.) In short, from a strictly synchronic perspective, the function of kanji in modern Japanese orthography is simply to replace strings of hiraganaA according to a vast tradition of accumulated conventional rules. Nevertheless, few reference works characterize the function of kanji in this way. Kanji are instead said to stand for meanings or for words; that is, they are described, respectively, as ideograms or logograms. Such accounts of kanji usage are implicitly diachronic. They start with the earliest use of kanji in Japanese texts; some even go back to the earliest forms of Chinese characters, suggesting a direct line of continuous development from ancient China to modern Japan. The problem with this doggedly historical approach is that it imputes certain psycholinguistic processes and kinds of knowledge to modern

Introduction: Dreamers or Realists?

19

literate Japanese without justification. It is certainly worth knowing that literary Chinese was used as a written language for various purposes in premodern Japan, that this practice led to the development of many varieties of written Japanese, and that these, in turn, underlie many of the conventional rules that now specify which kanji should stand for syllables in which words. (For details, the ambitious reader should consult Seeley 1991 and Twine 1991.) From the perspective of a Japanese youngster learning to become literate today, however, the etymological stories that explain why this or that kanji takes a certain reading in this or that word are just ex post facto rationalizations for rules that are essentially arbitrary, much like the explanations of anachronistic English spellings that teachers give British and American students as they expand their literate vocabularies. Our example sentence offers many instances of how such superficial "semantic" accounts of kanji usage fail. Let's begin our linguistic analysis with nyusha and irai, each written with a pair of kanji. The latter is a very old word, a genuine borrowing from literary Chinese into Japanese; the former, which shares the same outward appearance, is a new coinage, a compound of the Sino-Japanese verb nyu 'enter' with a putative Sino-Japanese noun sha to form a new noun meaning 'entering a company'. The verb-first order here is strictly Chinese —the Japanese grammatical order would be goal followed by verb.17 Moreover, sha is not a free noun but only the second syllable otkaisha, the word Fukuzawa Yukichi devised in the igth century as a translation-equivalent for English 'corporation'. Fukuzawa pressed the Sino-Japanese sha designated by this particular kanji into service in his new word, retroactively augmenting its original sense in literary Chinese (a deity associated with a place) and its extended sense in premodern Japanese usage (in which it was associated with words denoting Shinto shrines). The phrase nakazu tobazu de literally refers to a bird that neither sings nor flies, hence proverbially to a person of undistinguished achievements. As in countless other instances, there would be nothing wrong if this phrase were written entirely in hiragana, since it contains no Sino-Japanese words (kango). But of greater interest is the fact that there is another common kanji used in modern Japanese for the verb naku 'cry, weep', of which nakazu is an obsolescent negative. Prescriptive rules dictate that the kanji numbered 10 should be used because the understood subject is 'bird' and not 'person', for which the other kanji is supposed to be correct. The difference goes back to the difference in meaning of the two CHINESE words associated with each kanji respectively; in Japanese, however, there is only ONE word, naku, which admits human or nonhuman animate subjects indifferently. The situation is somewhat analogous to the rule in English that prescribes writing "it was Father who rose first from the table" but "his father is a lawyer": in speech, there is no difference in

2o

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

pronunciation; the syntax of the sentence (no article or possessive pronoun before "Father") makes it unmistakable that 'my/our father' is meant. The use of capitalization in the written version is thus strictly redundant. Nakazu, tobazu, and, at the end of the sentence, minaosareta are also interesting in that the roots of these verbs are, respectively, nak-, tab-, and minaos-. No words end in a consonant in spoken Japanese (in final position, is a resonant), but these consonant-ending forms are the longest needed to predict every inflected form of these and the majority of other verbs in the language by rule. What is interesting is that the parts of these words written with kanji are, respectively, just na, to, and minao; the remainders are written in hiragana (which are called, when used for this purpose, okurigana). In terms of linguistic analysis, this means that the kanji stand for less than whole morphemes (the shortest units of speech associated with definite meanings). In other cases (not illustrated here), a kanji may represent more than a whole morpheme. The word uwayaku is remarkable because uwa- is a bound form of the native word ue 'top, above'; it only occurs in compounds. Here, it is prefixed to yaku '[an] official', a loan from Chinese. If you know Japanese, then you know this word; you might find it odd that it was written with characters 56 and 57, until someone explained that ue was pronounced uwe at an earlier stage of the language. But you would be unlikely to make the mistake, common among non-Japanese learners of Japanese as a second language, of misreading this word as joyaku, by applying a common but here incorrect on reading to the first kanji. Many non-Japanese believe that because they can guess the meaning of a word like uwayaku if they know the meanings of other words written with the same kanji, "knowing a kanji" in this ad hoc sense is sufficient for written communication. For them, the correct reading is a mere detail of little consequence. While it is easy to see why they should think this way, they are mistaken—as are Chinese college students who think they can coast through Japanese texts by looking only at the kanji. As has already been pointed out, the "meanings" associated with many kanji do not remain fixed over time. The kanji that stands for yaku in uwayaku, for example, now has multiple meanings in modern Japanese: it shows up in yakusha '[stage] actor', yaku ni tatsu 'serve a purpose, be useful', and other expressions that no longer have much to do with each other, if they ever did. The opportunities for going astray are as numerous as the chances for making a lucky guess. Even more important, if and when native speakers do guess at words written with kanji, what they are trying to guess is generally a READING, not a meaning; unlike non-Japanese learners, native speakers can have intuitions or entertain etymological speculations in Japanese itself.

Introduction: Dreamers or Realists?

11

This applies to Yamato kotoba as well as to kango, as is shown by the verbs kirinuketa and minaosareta, two especially rich words that are used in our example sentence. Morphologically, these are compounds of native verbs: kiru 'cut', nukeru 'come off, escape, be omitted', miru 'see, look at', and naosu 'adjust, repair'. But the compounding took place so long ago that each verb is now just a single lexical item: kirinukeru means, roughly, 'struggle through [a difficult situation]'; minaosu means, roughly, 'think better of someone'. Therefore, it is anachronistic to use kanji in writing these words so as to imply that they are "still" compounds of kiru and nukeru, miru and naosu, all of which are in productive use as separate verbs in the modern language; the prescriptive writing rule is contradicted by the lexical structure of the modern language. In fact, naosu can now be used after most verbal stems to form a compound meaning 'do X again, redo X' (e.g., mo ichido minaoshite kudasai 'please look at it again'). It would not be wrong to use the same kanji seen in our sample sentence to write the verb in the example just given, yet the two are clearly not forms of the same word as far as the modern language is concerned. As even this cursory analysis should make clear, to ascribe meaning directly to kanji is to confuse historical development with linguistic competence. From the standpoint of a young native speaker of Japanese, learning how to read and write with kanji is not a process of learning an a priori theory of "meanings" linked to kanji and juggling them to make up representations for previously unknown words, but rather a process of learning conventional rules that specify when and how to use kanji to write known words and developing an a posteriori theory to keep track of the rules. Anyone who has observed Japanese schoolchildren knows that they have vast and rapidly growing active vocabularies that far exceed what they are able to read or write with the prescribed kanji they have been drilled on. I hasten to add at this point that tens of thousands of Japanese regularly succeed in coping with kanji despite the onerousness of the task. The purpose of the foregoing discussion, apart from introducing some important terminology, is to begin undermining the notion that kanji fulfill some sort of mystical role in the Japanese writing system that makes them indispensable. In chapter 3, we will look at facts about language and script in general and about alternative methods of writing Japanese that complete this undermining process. The aim here is not to suggest that the writing system is so difficult that it is dysfunctional. That is a claim that script reformers have made, and we shall consider it separately, in chapter 2, on the basis of demographic data collected in Japan. Here the point is simply that the rules for using kanji in modern Japanese writing, in and of themselves, are not of the same kind as the "rules" of Japanese phonology, syntax, or semantics. The former, like the notorious

11

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

"rules" of English spelling, must be consciously learned; while not without some historical justification, they are synchronically arbitrary. The latter may not even be rules or programmatic instructions in the brain at all; we cook up theories of "rules" to summarize the reality that native speakers acquire naturally by growing up among other native speakers during the crucial period of early childhood that precedes schooling and without which schooling and literacy would be quite impossible. In brief, one must recognize that kanji are not necessary for the writing of Japanese. Doing so is not at all the same as calling for their abolition from Japanese writing. It has been my unfortunate experience that those emotionally attached to the indispensability of kanji insist that anyone who thinks otherwise must be a kanji abolitionist. This is, of course, an utter non sequitur. Still, to preclude any possibility of misunderstanding, let me point out the practical obstacles to doing away with kanji entirely in Japan, for they are so great as to make such a development virtually impossible at this time. There are basically three kinds of obstacles. First, too much material exists in traditional written form; it can only be replaced gradually, and some of it must be preserved for as long as possible because it possesses intrinsic artistic or historical value. Second, many tens of thousands of Japanese have a personal stake in the maintenance of the orthographic status quo; their replacement in the labor force, let alone other areas of daily life, would require at least a generation. Third, there is, at present, no consensus on a standard with which to replace the existing writing system; there are many workable alternatives besides romanization, and even with romanization, there are different systems that could be adopted. Finally, apart from these material, educational, and orthographic obstacles, there is no evidence of the political will needed to abandon kanji; therefore, the most that could conceivably happen would be a gradual phasing out of kanji over several decades. Even if such a phaseout were to begin, it might never reach completion. The result would more likely be an indefinite coexistence between traditional script and a new orthography free of Chinese characters, a state of DIAGRAPHIA in which each form of writing would occupy largely complementary niches in Japanese life. It is even possible that such a state of affairs might arise in the absence of direction from the government. Even today, the vast majority of those who use Japanese script on computers input data in romanization. To that extent, even though they may refuse to read data in romanized form, they already, in a psychologically fundamental way, make use of an alphabetic representation of Japanese words and phrases. Having taken note of the political and practical forces that mitigate against the abolition of kanji, let me recall the lesson of the analysis of our example

Introduction: Dreamers or Realists?

23

sentence: the function of kanji in the current Japanese writing system is to replace strings ofkana. The historically accumulated heuristics underlying the conventional rules that prescribe how and when such replacements should be made are neither a part of the Japanese language nor a necessary part of the knowledge that enables literate Japanese to read and write. Thus there are no LINGUISTIC reasons why kanji could not be abandoned. To those who insist that holding this view necessarily entails a personal desire to see kanji eliminated from the Japanese writing system, all I can say is that linguistics is an empirical science18 and has yet to find any evidence that writing in general, much less the details of a particular writing system, influence speech.19 As far as I can see, the doctrine of indispensability of kanji stands in relation to the science of linguistics in much the same way as so-called scientific creationistism stands in relation to the science of biology. I do not know of any biologists intent on curtailing religious freedom, but there are many creationists who would turn the teaching of biology to their own ends. Likewise, I think it only fair to point out that whatever the political and social foibles of the Japanese script reformers, they were not proposing anything that was —or is —impossible in principle.

2.

Literacy in Japan up to 1945

The Tokugawa Inheritance As has already been remarked, historians have failed to pay adequate attention to the script reform movement in part because they uncritically accept two assumptions about Japanese literacy. One is that Japan was, at least relative to other nations at the time, already highly literate at the end of the Edo period (1600—1867); the other is that, in any event, most Japanese, even the poorest, could read and write by the beginning of the zoth century. The foundation for the first assumption was laid by Ronald Dore (1965, 321), who ventured a very cautious but nevertheless optimistic estimate of literacy at the end of the Edo period on the basis of school attendance figures from that time. Herbert Passin, a bit more confidently, made estimates of literacy for various groups within the general population that work out to an overall literacy rate for the same period of 39 to 47 percent (Passin 1982, 56-57; Unger 1987, 87). The second assumption is implicit in the work of historians of the Meiji period such as Carol Gluck, who emphasize the growth of the press as a factor in social change at the end of the igth century. Andrew Gordon expands on this theme when he states that "the spread of literacy prepared the ground for the rise of imperial democracy" (Gordon 1991, 18), by which he means the fundamental political and social changes that affected virtually every segment of Japanese society and reached their peak between 1905 and 1918 (1-3). By the time of the Hibiya riots in 1905, over 95 percent of school-age boys and girls, in Tokyo and nationwide, were indeed going to school. This was a 24

Literacy in japan up to 194$

2f

recent and dramatic change, for in 1892 just over half of the nation's schoolage boys and girls actually attended classes. . . . As these newly educated youths reached adulthood, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, the revolution in basic literacy created a population of avid newspaper readers, which included the working poor in the cities. The images of the rickshaw puller and the prostitute waiting for their customers with newspaper in hand became a sort of literary conceit and a symbol of a new era. . . . Four-fifths of the 659 worker households on the working-class island of Tsukishima in the heart of Tokyo subscribed to newspapers in 1919. Eighteen percent of the subscribers took two or more papers. And three fifths (61 percent) of the household heads in a perhaps more representative survey of 2,591 glass-factory workers in late 1920 were regular newspaper readers. (Gordon 1991,18-19)

There is no denying that Japan enjoyed a long and vigorous literary culture prior to its opening to the West, that public education substantially and rapidly reduced the number of Japanese who depended on others for reading and writing, and that a reduction of this sort inevitably has a major impact on the evolution of any society. If one is interested primarily in the development of institutions, the rise of popular movements, and the economic transformations often collectively referred to as "modernization," then it may be enough to establish the role of the spread of literacy in the overall process of modernization and move on. But one must be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that just because Japan has, by all accounts, succeeded in becoming a "modern" nation, Japanese literacy before the Pacific War must ipso facto have been a more or less uniform package of skills with which virtually every citizen, from the highest to lowest, was equipped as he or she entered adulthood. In reality, what constituted literacy varied greatly, from a bare knowledge of the elements of the kana syllabaries to productive facility in several socially prestigious and functionally distinct styles of Japanese and Sino-Japanese writing. A wide, continuous range of intermediate degrees of skill between these extremes was assured by the use of hentaigana, anachronistic kana spellings, and a virtually unlimited number of kanji (including several different kinds of variant forms); the unrestrained imposition of readings on individual kanji and kanji compounds; the unregulated use ofokurigana in combination with kanji; and beyond all these purely orthographic difficulties, the coexistence of linguistically diverse styles of writing, including kanbun, sorobun, and a wide assortment of blends of colloquial and classical language. For most, literacy meant a restricted set of skills that conferred only a portion of the liberating power we unthinkingly ascribe without qualification to education as a force for social change. Furthermore, literacy was not distributed equally: how far one pro-

26

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

ceeded along the path toward full literacy (a long path for all the reasons just enumerated) typically depended on one's sex, one's family's occupation, and the location of one's residence. At first, it may seem impossible that the nation that humiliated the Russian empire in 1905 and then waged a stubborn war from Hawaii and Alaska to Burma and Australia could have done so while carrying the burden of a social pyramid in which only a relatively small number of citizens at the apex of power were completely at home with reading and writing. The standard view of Japanese modernization and the less rosy picture of literacy delineated here are not really so very different, however. Great things can be built on a foundation of "restricted literacy" (to use Neustupny's 1984 term), as can be readily seen by looking at China, Iraq, and the emerging countries of the Third World today. Remember, too, that enormous leaps in science and technology have occurred since 1945: it was easier for Japan to develop the human infrastructure needed to wage war on a global scale then than it would be for a similarly situated nation to do so today.20 The problem with the standard view is more one of focus than of substance: it neglects to inquire into precisely those aspects of Japanese literacy that make it difficult to compare with literacy in other linguistic and cultural environments. We have already alluded to the difference between literacy as usually defined for census and other official purposes21 and literacy as a vehicle for full and free participation in society. Discriminating these two senses, important in the case of alphabetic scripts, is absolutely vital when dealing with kana and kanji. Kana alone suffice to transcribe any Japanese utterance: does this mean that a working knowledge of kana and passive recognition of some common kanji qualified most prewar Japanese as literate? Before the war, furigana were used extensively in publications aimed at the masses. Should we side with those who see this practice as a helping hand to the disadvantaged and cite it as evidence that educational differences mattered little, or with those, like Yamamoto Yuzo, who, realizing that recourse to furigana merely encouraged the use of rare kanji and fanciful readings for both rare and common kanji alike, thought a BAN on furigana would benefit most readers over the long term? Even today, blind Japanese can read and write anything they wish using Japanese braille (based on kana),22 yet their inability to handle kanji contributes to discrimination against them in employment and other areas of everyday life.23 Should we hold Japanese society blameless and say that its blind readers are less than roo percent literate, or should we say that they are fully literate and question Japanese society's implicit definition of literacy? When such incompatible interpretations of the same facts seem equally possible, it is often wiser to consider whose interests are served by each than to argue over which is correct.

Literacy in Japan up to 1^45

27

Even the staunchest opponent of script reform will grant that knowing kana is not enough for full literacy. Can one then measure literacy by counting kanji? And if so, just how many kcmji must one know before qualifying as literate in Japanese?24 Estimates vary wildly, quite apart from the troubling case of the blind, because which kanji appear in a given document and how they are used depend greatly on the document's content. Furthermore, since most kanji have multiple readings and since the sense of a passage may be clear even when the intended reading of a particular kanji is not, any definition of what it means to "know a kanji" is unavoidably arbitrary. In addition, there was an immense gulf separating the grammar, vocabulary, and social connotations of the Japanese used in writing and that used in speaking, particularly before 1945. Up to that time, the heavy influence of written Chinese had created and maintained a surfeit of written styles in Japan, some so distant from the day-to-day speech of ordinary citizens as to verge on being foreign languages. Although writing in the colloquial always existed, formal composition demanded a working knowledge of kanbun, sorobun, and other highly conventionalized systems of written expression. Chinese literary studies were a major part of the prewar post-elementary curriculum (Roden 1980), and familiarity with Sino-Japanese expressions is still regarded as a sign of learning; even today, traces of the older styles can be found, embedded like fossils, in ordinary writing. Despite the overall success of the movement to unify speech and writing (genbun itchi), the gap between what one reads and one hears in Tokyo today is significantly wider than what one reads and hears in, say, San Francisco. Once one becomes sensitive to the different meanings of the term literacy and to the unusually large gap between the spoken and written forms of Japanese, one finds it easier to spot the unwarranted overgeneralizations and peculiar omissions in standard accounts of Japanese literacy. As noted in Unger (1987, 85) for example, the use of "signboards to communicate the will of the shogunal and domain authorities" does not prove that there was "an increasing reliance on the written language in the political system of Tokugawa Japan" (Black et al. 1975, 109); more likely than not, the ordinary citizen learned what a signboard said because some educated person read it out loud to the anxious crowd that had gathered to see it posted. Likewise, the fact that "Fukuzawa Yukichi's Conditions in the West... is reported to have sold 150,000 copies in its first edition in 1867" (109) is meaningless in isolation and tells us nothing about literacy unless it is interpreted in relation to the number of potential readers in the population as a whole at the time. Fukuzawa estimated that i out of every 160 Japanese had read his Gakumon no susume. In his study of Meiji period self-help literature, Earl Kinmonth goes further by a whole order of magnitude; he started

28

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

with "a total population of 35 million, . . . deducted one third for infants and nonliterate juveniles, one-half of the remainder for females, and assumed that 20 percent of the remaining population (2.3 million) could read Gakumon no susume in its original form" (Kinmonth rg8r, 45-46). This is equivalent to one out of every 15 Japanese, but surely not a very impressive result after the concessions made for juvenile and female illiteracy and the inaccessibility of the text, which, as Kinmonth himself observes, "was fairly difficult in its original form (so much so that some illicit versions were simplified)." The problem with the standard view, to repeat, is one of perspective: there is no question that literacy in Edo period Japan was more widespread than in other nations at that time or that the introduction of public education reduced drastically the number of completely illiterate Japanese; nevertheless, there is no basis for assuming that the schools before or after the Meiji period imparted a uniform, high level of literacy to each and every one of their charges. Most scholars do little more than pay lip service to this difficulty. Dore takes great care to qualify his generous estimate of school attendance at the end of the Edo period, but does not grapple with the key question of the extent to which we can rely on school attendance rates as indicators of achievement in reading and writing ability. Passin concedes that much Edo period literacy "was certainly of a very low order—perhaps the bare ability to write one's name or to read simple materials with effort" (Passin 1982, 58), but puts greater weight on his estimated literacy rate of roughly 40 percent. Gluck, by way of explaining why the press was able to play an important role in social change during the Meiji period, says, "The establishment of the written colloquial language (genbun itchi) and the widespread use offurigana glosses increased the accessibility of newspapers and popular works" (Gluck 1985, 172-73), but in so doing, puts the cart before the horse. The innovations she refers to undoubtedly helped enhance the power of the press over the long term, but they were first and foremost necessary conditions without which newspapers and popular works could not have exercised the kind of influence they did. Furthermore, the writing style that an author or publisher chose to use and the extent to which furigana were added to a text helped determine who would read it. Andrew Gordon's account of the spread of literacy as a precursor of "imperial democracy" deserves special scrutiny. In the first place, it is doubtful that Japanese "boys and girls" (Gordon's phrase) were in fact treated equally by the educational system at the turn of the century, but perhaps this is reading too much into Gordon's choice of words. Be that as it may, even Gordon admits that the impact of public education did not really make itself felt until the period following the Russo-Japanese War. Therefore, how efficacious could public education have been before then? We might also ask whether it is more

Literacy in Japan up to 1945

2

9

significant that three-fifths of the factory workers in the 1920 survey Gordon mentions said they read newspapers regularly or that two-fifths did not. And what sort of newspapers were those factory workers reading? No doubt "the inexpensive antigovernment papers that took the lead in promoting the various causes associated with imperial democracy were particularly popular among the urban poor and the lower middle classes" (Gordon, 1991, 19), but would they have been if they had not been written so as to fall within the range of restricted literacy characteristic of these classes? As Gordon himself observes, those same factory workers "had been taught by managers how different they were from respectable folk" (205). He continues, "Low pay and long hours were only part of the 'treatment' problem. They entered work through separate gates, they ate separately, they used separate toilets, and on leaving work at day's end, to prevent theft of tools or materials, they were subjected to a body check." Does it make sense to assume that literacy for this large class of Japanese, or for the peasants in the countryside, was essentially the same thing as literacy for the relatively small urban bourgeoisie? Gordon cites newspaper readership statistics as evidence of widespread literacy. The Yorozu chohd was the best-selling and cheapest paper in Tokyo around the turn of the century, and its pages were filled with both jingoism and calls for a greater popular role in politics. In a sample of sixty-seven letters to the Yorozu in 1900, the newspaper historian Yamamoto Taketoshi found that workers, artisans, rickshaw pullers, or delivery boys sent almost one-third (twenty) of them. (Gordon 1991, 19)

Here Gordon refers the reader to Yamamoto's 1981 study (pages 95-101); the data Gordon uses come from a table on page 94 of Yamamoto's work and do indeed show that more than a quarter of the letters published in the Yorozu came from the lower-class types enumerated. But the data in the table also show that, among the six leading papers of the day, four—the Hochi, Yomiuri, Tokyo Asahi, and /z'/z —published many more letters from readers in general (547, 399, 218, and 185, respectively) than the Yorozu did, and only one, the Nippon, published fewer (20) than the Yorozu. Gordon could have noted, for example, that his lower-class letter-writers made 40 appearances in the Hochi in 1900 — twice as many as in the Yorozu — but there they accounted for only 7 percent of the total. The fact is that Yorozu and Nippon simply did not run many letters; furthermore, the tabulated data clearly show that different classes of letter-writers preferred different forums for self-expression (merchants, government bureaucrats, and soldiers favored the Hochi; students, the Yomiuri; etc.).

3o

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

Figure 3. Osaka Conscription Tests: Last Decade of Meiji. Source: Data from Yamamoto 1981,167. The Yorozu did indeed dominate the market. Yamamoto Taketoshi (1981, 95-96) notes that it had total press runs of 26,415,000 copies in 1897 and 31,481,000 in 1898, compared with the second-place Tokyo Asahi, which had press runs of 20,049,000 and 15,484,000 in the same years, respectively. But, as Yamamoto observes, Yorozu was the most widely circulated paper not only because it was the cheapest but also because it was written in an easy-to-read style; as a writer in the June 1901 issue of the magazine Child koron remarked, "Even in the capital, there is hardly anyone with even a smattering of learning, from so-called gentlemen and carriage-trade merchants down to rickshaw coolies, stable boys, and others of their ilk, who does not read it"25 (quoted in Yamamoto 1981, 95-96, trans. JMU). Thus we see that Gordon makes limited use of Yamamoto's study of newspaper readership, extracting from it only such facts as establish that illiteracy was on the decline. Of course, illiteracy DID decline, and for Gordon's purposes, that is enough; but for an understanding of the script reform movement, it is not. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to think that Yamamoto is silent on the question of literacy itself. In fact, he devotes several pages (164-81) specifically to Meiji period sources of qualitative as well as quantitative data on literacy, particularly military conscription tests. Yamamoto presents these data in tabular form, but their significance is more easily grasped when displayed in graphs. Consider, for example, the data from the conscription tests given in Osaka Prefecture.

Literacy in japan up to 1945

3'

Figure 4. Osaka Test of 1911: School Records. Source: Data from Yamamoto 1981, 170-71.

Figure 3 shows the literacy levels of military recruits tested from 1902 through 1912.26 They are ranked into five categories. The categories "normal elementary" "higher elementary" and "middle school" include both those who had graduated and those who performed at the same level even if they had not graduated. The "illiterate" category aggregates those who could and could not write their own names, of whom separate tallies were kept from 1902 on. It is hard to know why this refinement was introduced; whatever the reason, suffice it to say that those who were unable to write their own names always outnumbered those who were able to do so. Overall, we see a decline in illiteracy. It is obvious, however, that this decrease is due mostly to an increase in the "normal elementary" category. The percentage of recruits at the "middle school" and "higher elementary" levels grew slightly, but the "slight learning" category remained more or less the same. Yamamoto presents detailed data from the 1911 test, which not only recorded the family occupation and years of schooling of the recruits but also divided them into three classes according to test results; the classes were simply designated, from highest to lowest, A, B, C (ko, otsu, hei). In figure 4, we see the differences in school attendance associated with each of six family occupations. How far a young man went in school obviously depended heavily on how his family earned its living. Nevertheless, when we compare figure 4 with figure 5, which shows

32

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

Figure 5. Osaka Test of 1911: Performance Levels. Source: Data from Yamamoto 1981, 170—71.

the relative performance of the same six groups, we see that the relationship between the number of years a young man went to school and the level of literacy he attained was rather tenuous. For example, although less than 10 percent of fishermen's sons entered higher elementary school, about 30 percent were ranked in the top category on the test; likewise, although the sons of farmers had, as a group, significantly more schooling than the sons of laborers, both groups performed almost identically on the test. In short, socioeconomic factors related to family occupation seem to have influenced both how long boys stayed in school and how well they learned to read and write, but school attendance itself did not determine the level of achievement measured by the test. Indeed, Yamamoto's most striking observation is that school attendance figures were not, as Dore had assumed for the late Edo period, a reliable gauge of literacy27 (165); on the contrary, he notes, the children of families involved in commerce — especially in small retail operations — tended to perform well even if they did not have much schooling whereas the children of laboring families often performed poorly even if they had completed compulsory education (180). Part of the reason was that, without the reinforcement of reading and writing in daily life, lower-class students tended to forget most of what they had learned in school (169). A family's source of livelihood could thus be as

Literacy in Japan up to 1945

33

important a factor as formal education in determining the level of literacy attained by its children; and as data on factory workers in 1898,1899, and 1900 demonstrate, women were not on an equal footing with men (179—80). In a recent study comparing literacy in Japan and Europe, Richard Rubinger (1992, 85-90) provides more information about the conscription tests. Starting in 1891, the statistical annuals of the Army Ministry classified recruits by intellectual level. Starting in 1899, more detailed records, which include breakdowns by birthplace and family occupation, are available for the entire age cohort of twenty-year-old males eligible for military service; less regular compilations from various prefectures are also available. Test results were recorded in terms of equivalent levels in the compulsory school system. The criterion for elementary school reading equivalence was successful reading either of an elementary school textbook or of a simple sentence or short poem in kana and a few simple Chinese characters. The test for writing at the elementary level was to write one's own name, address, and height. Between elementary school equivalence and the lowest category ("absolutely no ability to read, write, or do arithmetic") was a category called "a little learning." According to Rubinger, the tests, "though limited to male twenty-yearolds, nevertheless show rather astonishing levels of total illiteracy continuing well into the twentieth century" (1992, 87).28 In 1899, about 25 percent of Japan's twenty-year-old males fell into the bottommost group. If one includes the "little learning" group, the percentage exceeds 50 percent. There was considerable regional variation: in the same year, over 50 percent of the young men in areas such as Omura, Kagoshima, Miyazaki, Okinawa, Matsuyama, and Kochi were totally illiterate; but in Osaka, Kyoto, and Yokohama, the rate was 25 percent; and in some urban areas (e.g., Nagano, Tsu, Sendai, and the Azabu section of Tokyo), it was as low as 10 percent. There is also evidence of occupational stratification in educational opportunities and achievement: in Osaka as late as 1911, over half of those in the emerging professional classes (bankers, government officials, and company officers) and those engaged in commerce had graduated from higher elementary schools, but only 40 percent of farmers and artisans had done the same, and 80 to 90 percent of fishermen and laborers had less than an elementary education. Rubinger also draws attention to some little-known data Yamamoto does not mention. These are the results of an 1881 literacy test given to all 882 males in the small village of Tokiwa in Kita Azumi County in what is now Nagano Prefecture. Unlike the conscription tests, which only give a clear idea of the extent of illiteracy, the Tokiwa test provides an indication of educational accomplishment in positive terms; it ranked examinees by levels of skill in a six-step hierarchy, shown in table i.

34

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

Table i. Skill Categories in the 1881 Tokiwa Literacy Test Level of Ability r 2

3 4 5 6

(none) read or write one's name, address, or numbers keep daily accounts of revenue and expenses fill out simple financial forms handle ordinary business transactions read official proclamations and newspaper editorials with full comprehension

TOTAL NUMBER OF SUBJECTS

Subjects 312 363

!35 39 18 15

(354) (41-2) (15-3) (4-4) (2.0) (1-7)

882

Source: Data from Rubinger 1992.

The ages of examinees were also recorded. Thus, assuming that examinees achieved their lifetime level of literacy during school-going age (i.e., from six to thirteen), one can chart changes in levels of literacy attained from the 18105 (when the oldest examinees were of school-going age) to the 18705 (when the youngest could have entered school) — almost the entire span of the igth century. A very broad range of skills was found among the male population of Tokiwa village in 1881 —everything from total illiteracy to fluency with government documents. Still, the largest number of test-takers were at the bottom of the scale, and the numbers drop off precipitously at the higher levels. According to Rubinger, a more detailed analysis shows that the percentage of those totally illiterate dropped steadily throughout the late Edo and Meiji periods and that the percentages of those minimally literate rose during the same time; he ascribes these changes to increasing attendance at terakoya (temple schools), which aimed at relatively low levels of accomplishment. Significantly, Rubinger did not find a sudden jump in test scores that could be correlated with the initiation of compulsory schooling; growth was steady and incremental over a long period going back at least to the 18105. At more functionally advanced levels of literacy, the percentages are low and no clear trends emerge. The data suggest continuity within a small but highly trained elite who performed the reading and writing tasks of the village. The monopoly on high literacy held by this group — probably officials, teachers, doctors, and priests —was tightly maintained. Such skills were probably achieved by direct experience in hereditary positions or apprenticeships, or through special tutoring, rather than in a school. Analysis of those who scored at the higher levels on the survey reveals that the vast majority were from fam-

Literacy in Japan up to 1945

3£

ilies that performed administrative tasks in the village. In Tokiwa and elsewhere in the Nagano area, administrative tasks were widely shared among a number of families and did not belong to a single village headman. One may therefore hypothesize that in areas such as Tohoku, where the administration of villages tended to be dominated by a single family, the percentage of males in the higher categories would have been even lower than it was in Tokiwa at around the same time. Perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from the Tokiwa data, however, is the need to define in functional terms what we mean by literacy. As Rubinger observes, if one includes as "literate" all those with minimal skills, a claim of 65 percent male literacy in the 18505 and 76 percent literacy by the 18705 could be justified. If, on the other hand, literacy is defined as the ability to read at least ordinary materials and fill out simple forms, the male literacy percentages in this remote village dip down to 7 percent in the 18505 and 8 percent in the 18705. In sum, optimistic views of pre-Meiji Japanese literacy need to be scaled back considerably. If all the pertinent linguistic and social factors are taken into account and full use is made of all the available sources of data, the picture that emerges, while certainly not one of rampant illiteracy, is not nearly as uniform or positive as claimed by those who deny that some kind of script reform was necessary.

The Effects of Public Schooling A few scholars have taken the dimension of quality into account in their studies of Japanese literacy. Koji Taira (1971, 375—76), who estimates that male and female literacy rates rose from about 35 and 8 percent, respectively, to about 75 and 68 percent between the beginning and end of the Meiji period (1868-1912), emphasizes the need to interpret "Japan's progress in education and literacy without the glow of'rapid' economic development in the background" (372). According to Taira, "Quantitatively, the spread of literacy in Meiji Japan was credible enough. Qualitatively, however, the 'compulsory' education imposed on the unwilling populace without a full commitment of public resources ('compulsory' but not 'free') was painful as well as wasteful" (372). The reason for this wastefulness is not hard to find. "Years of arduous study were required to master the literary forms and script of officialdom, and only the upper classes had the leisure to devote to it. The degree of literacy attained by the commoners was usually just sufficient for the small concerns of everyday life and the perusal of popular fiction" (Twine 1983,116).

36

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

Such minimal literacy was the lot of many rural and indigent Japanese until to the Pacific War. Todo Akiyasu, who went on to become the Japanese dean of Chinese linguistics, recalled his experience during the war: I was drafted into the 36th Regiment of the Mie Prefectural Infantry; among the 150 men in my company, some from the Shima seacoast and the mountainous areas of Iga couldn't read a whole sentence. I was ordered to teach ten or so, who could not even write kana properly, every evening. The company commander made them learn the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors [ Gunjin chokuyu by rote, and they would bark it out with their eyes fixed on the ceiling: "Military men should set their minds on nitrogen [chisso]" which should have been "frugality" [shisso]. Whenever I went back to the country for the weekend, old couples in the neighborhood would bring me letters from their sons and ask, "Please read this for us." (Todo 1982, 173-74, trans. JMU)

Illiteracy and the poor technical education of the average conscript figure in other wartime reports. In one case, a soldier sent to the rear to fetch a replacement part for a damaged artillery piece returned with a completely different part; he had forgotten the official Sino-Japanese name he had been told—to him, it was just a meaningless string of syllables (Hoshina 1949,209). Incidents like this often led to disaster (Hirai 1948, 330), and by 1940, the army had limWASstudying the possiited the number otkanji for weapon parts to 1,235and was bility of cutting that number in half (Hoshina 1949, 210, 215; Seeley 1991,150). The anachronistic rules for kana spelling were also a major cause of concern within the army (Tani 1995, 145)- Ironically, the military continued to pepper its reports in civilian newspapers and magazines with obscure, hard-to-read kanji, presumably to cow the general public (Hirai 1948, 327-28). The first full-fledged nationwide attempt to measure literacy in Japan was the survey conducted in 1948 under the auspices of the Civil Information and Education Section. The authors of the survey report itself found only three earlier efforts —the conscription tests, the surveys of the Kanamojikai (Kana Writing Society),29 and a 1933 Tokyo Department of Education test—worthy of note (Yomikaki Noryoku Chosa linkai 1951, 6—12). Their survey, by contrast, involved the testing of about 17,000 Japanese men and women between the ages of 15 and 64 throughout the country. According to Ishiguro Yoshimi, who chaired the survey's Central Planning and Analysis Committee, the survey was of unprecedented scope and rigor not only by Japanese standards but by world standards as well (Ishiguro 1951, 181). Although the survey is sometimes cited as proof that the level of literacy of the majority of prewar Japanese was high (e.g., Ishii 1983, 22), it clearly shows that earlier government claims were grossly inflated (Yomikaki Noryoku Chosa linkai 1951, 425 — 30). It was found

Literacy in Japan up to 1945

37

that the rate of illiteracy (monmoritsu 'complete inability to read or write') was indeed very low, but it was also concluded that only 6.2 percent of the population were literate in terms of the survey definition, which was liberal. Full literacy was defined as answering all questions correctly; illiteracy was defined as scoring zero. By today's standards, all the questions were very simple. The ability to write kanji from dictation (kanji no kakitori), which was identified as the single most important skill tested, was found to be "remarkably low" in ALL groups surveyed. Performance was closely correlated with levels of formal education; subjects whose education had been disrupted by the war did significantly poorer in all areas than those whose education had not been disrupted. This showed that mastery of the basics, without years of supplementary instruction in kanji, was inadequate for full literacy. Finally, the claim that the average Japanese experienced trouble dealing with the media of mass communication, a claim long made by script reform advocates, was deemed proven. Neustupny points out that a second, smaller survey conducted in 1955—56 by the Ministry of Education produced similar results. The survey covered subjects aged 14 to 26 in two selected areas, Tokyo and Northern Japan. The percentage of total illiterates in the survey was less than 1% in each of the two areas. On the other hand, those who were considered to "possess no competence in the use of the written language" and were expected to experience serious problems, made up approximately 10% of the Tokyo sample and 15% of the North-East Japan sample. However, another 50% or 60%, respectively, were also judged to lack sufficient competence, and some of these subjects definitely could be classified as functional illiterates. (1984, 119)

The surveys of 1948 and 1955-56 set the standard in terms of which all other assessments of Japanese literacy up to that time must be measured. We might well end this chapter at this point, for the need for some sort of script reform has been established beyond any reasonable doubt. The pragmatic argument that any nation that could hold out against the Allies for so long in World War II had to be well educated contains a grain of truth, but is too simplistic to be maintained in the face of the data. The actual situation was more complex: Japanese society had a highly literate elite at one extreme, and an equally small uneducated stratum at the other; for the vast majority of the population that filled the bell-shaped curve between them, literacy was, to a lesser or greater extent, but never inconsequentially, restricted by the sheer difficulty of the writing system itself. How the script should be reformed was an open question, in theory if not in practice, but the need for some kind of reform was undeniable.

38

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

Table 2. Kanji Recognition: Hall's Summary Length of Time Attending School 11 or more years 9 -10 years 8 years 6-7 years

Mean Scores Males Females

86% 71% 56% 36%

80%

57% 52% 19%

Source: Hall 19463, i; 1949, 314.

Still, we need to append here a few words about some presurvey data reported by Robert King Hall in his 1949 book Education for a New Japan. Many passages in Hall's book derive from a report he prepared while working in the Civil Information and Education Section of GHQ/SCAP.30 As we will see in chapter 4, Hall's report (19463) was extremely controversial: many saw it as proof that Hall was a fanatic with no respect for the truth. How valid was this charge? The statistical data in the report should be allowed to speak for themselves, for their validity can be judged independently of Hall's interpretations and recommendations. Most of the data came from the survey, mentioned previously, conducted between December 1945 and January 1946 by the Kanamojikai, which tested 1,452 male and female workers in fourteen factories in and around Tokyo. The stimulus material for the survey was extracted from the Japanese translation of an official SCAP history, From the Mukden Incident to the Signing of Surrender Terms aboard the "Missouri" that had been published in installments in the Japanese press between 7 and 20 December 1945. Subjects were asked to give the readings for 20 comparatively uncommon kanji and kanji compounds and to explain the meaning of two sentences in the text, one considered easier than the other. Summary statistics for the first task are shown in table 2 as Hall presented them in 1946 and 1949; the raw data on which these figures are based are found in appendix i of Hall's report (19463) and are reproduced in table 3; from these data, it is easy to calculate the values in table 4, which confirm and augment Hall's reckoning. Hall claimed that "the scores may be taken as the maximum percentage of the total of different, not running, ideographs whose meaning might be understandable to the worker" because he assumed that a Japanese worker was unlikely to be able to give the reading of a kanji in isolation unless he or she knew the meaning of the word it was being used to write (Hall 1949, 314). That is debatable; moreover, the small number of distinct kanji on the test were cer-

Literacy in Japan up to 194$

39

Table 3. Kanji Recognition: Raw Data Years of Schooling Items Read Correctly

11 or more F M

9-10 M F

o i

8 F

M

F

Totals

2

6 9 8 4 5 7 6 9

8 6 3 7 5 9 4

48 25 3° 40 46

24

32 8 8 8 8 8 5 9 10 11 8

20

12

1

21

3 8 6 6 4 4 4

2

2

11

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

21 28 29

4 3 2 2

4

i

1

10 11

2 1

i

8 5

12

1

2

12

!3

2

14 15 16

4 5 5 7

!5 1O

!? l8

10 13

3 3 4 4

2

17

1

1

11 8 13

J 9 2O

12

2

26

2

9 8

Totals

89

5

129

2

i 3

35 43 51 54 57 59 66 65 57 47 4i 26 26 21 21

7

6-7

M

762

12 l8

!9 l6 12

8 7 6 4 3 224

2 1 2 1

1

2 2

i66a

5ob

57 53 65 81 86 101 102 105 113 97 91 75 59 66 5° 62 1,452=

y

Hall gives 168, two more than the actual sum. Hall gives 49, one less than the actual sum. c Hall gives 1,453, one more than the grand total. Source: Hall 19463, appendix i b

tainly not a random sample of the first several hundred most frequently used kanji. Still, putting Hall's interpretation aside, there can be hardly any disagreement that (i) the figures show a strong positive correlation between years of education and scores for both men and women; (2) men did better than women at each educational level; and (3) the medians were lower than the means except in the case of men with 11 or more years of education. From the first point, we can safely infer that by the time of the survey, how many years

40

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

Table 4. Kanji Recognition: Updated Summary Years of Schooling 11 or more 9-10

8 6-7

Males

Females Medians Means

Medians

Means

87.50% 70.44% 54.07%

85.90% 70.93%

79.17% 52.50%

80.00% 5 51-lffi

55-73 % 36.14%

51.00% 19.00%

51.41% 19.90%

33-33%

Source: Data from Hall 19463 and 1949.

one spent in school had become the most important factor in determining how well one could read; the second shows that the female half of the population was relatively disadvantaged; and the third suggests that the means were pulled up by a few unusually high scores and might not be so high for the general population—in particular, the median is likely to be a better indicator than the mean for women with 9 to 10 years of education (of whom there were just seven subjects). All this is suggestive of the sort of restricted literacy we have noted throughout this chapter, but it does not justify Hall's claim. In appendix 18 (mislabeled XXVIII) of Hall's report, data collected from the first task for the 762 male factory workers with only 8 years of schooling are displayed as in table 5. According to Hall (19463,13), columns (a) through (d) show the percentage of subjects in each age group who correctly read the kanji. The difference (c) — (a) (labeled "increase after leaving school" in the original) in all but two cases is positive; similarly, the difference (d) — (c) (labeled "decrease from peak ability") in all but one case is negative. Hall interprets these results by saying [t]he ability to read Japanese rapidly disappears unless constantly practiced. . . . Tests of recognition of kanji indicated an average improvement of 9.1% from the end of schooling to the peak (between 30 and 39 years of age) and then a drop of 15% bringing the reading level of persons over 40 years of age considerably below the level of those recently graduated from school (13).

But this is more than the data justify. The most obvious problem is that Hall speaks of a general "ability to read Japanese" as if it were a continuously variable attribute of each individual (like height or weight), yet the figures are based on all-or-nothing performances by each individual. Also, unless only the "decrease" and not the "increase" is statistically significant, what specifically prevented male factory workers from reading regularly after, but not before, age 40? Once again, the data suggest restricted literacy, but Hall goes too far.

Literacy in Japan up to 1945

41

Table 5. Kanji Recognition: Males with 8 Years of Schooling Age

Kanji i 2

1

y

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

M 15 16 l

l

18 !9 20

(a) or 'uba, thyuba> to handle these new, troublesome words, for and are already assigned to [ci] and [cu], respectively. Thus, when gairaigo are lumped together with the rest of the

i;6

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

Japanese lexicon, Hepburn romanization turns out to be closer to a phonemic transcription than Kunrei-shiki. Not surprisingly, Nippon-shiki promoters believed that gairaigo ought to be incorporated into Japanese texts as they were written in the language from which they were borrowed. This approach resolves the problem of gairaigo by declaring it out of bounds. The following sentence in Tamaru's textbook on dynamics shows how this works in practice: Vektor-kaiseki ni oitewa, Tyokkaku-zahyodiku (x, y, z) no Hoko ni okeru Tan'i-vektor sunawati Ooisa i no Vektor wo sibasiba tukau. (Tamaru 1935, 3)

In vector analysis, we frequently use unit vectors, that is, vectors of magnitude i, in the directions of the axes (x, y, z) of an orthogonal coordinate system, (trans. JMU)

The Japanese word for vector comes from the German Vektor (which, as a borrowing from Latin, starts with [v], not [f]) and is therefore pronounced /bekutoru/; x, y, z are read /ekkusu, wai, zeddo/ because the names of the letters of the alphabet entered Japanese from British English. It is simply assumed that the reader knows the facts of pronunciation. In sum, cogent arguments can be made for both the leading systems of romanization, and each has its weak points. One of the great tragedies of the script reform movement was the squabbling among romaji advocates over which system was best, for it is clear that the question itself is incoherent. Tanakadate, to his great credit, kept his eye on the goal of eliminating the burden of kanji and was eager to see a single standard established even if it was not the one he favored.

The Toyo Kanji List and Reforms of 1946-59 For all the accomplishments of the kanagaki and romaji movements, however, the only approach to script reform ever actually implemented on a nationwide basis has been the plan to reduce the number of kanji in common use and their readings. In summary, the pertinent events were as follows (for details, see Seeley 1991, 142-51). In 1900, Hara Takashi, then chief editor of the Osaka Mainichi Shinbun, published a series of articles in that newspaper arguing for a reduction in the number of kanji. His rise to prime minister in 1918 signaled, among other

Script Reform from Within

^7

things, greater official receptivity to the concept of kanjiI limitation. On 21 March 1921, several Tokyo and Osaka newspapers carried a joint statement announcing their intention to replace difficult kanji with strings Oofkatakana; the same year saw the formation of the Rinji kokugo chosakai (Ad Hoc Japanese Language Study Board), the first body officially commissioned to come up with practical proposals for solving the script problem. 46 By May 1923, the Ch5sakai had produced a joyo kanjihyo (list of kanji for everyday use), which specified 1,963 characters for ordinary writing. On 5 August, major newspapers jointly announced their intent to adhere to the list starting i September. The chaos ensuing from the great Kant5 earthquake on the same day forced a postponement, but by 1925, the newspapers were ready with a revised list of 2,108 kanji; characters not on the list were replaced with hiragana highlighted with adjacent clots. The effect of this replacement of certain kanji with kana was predictably unsatisfactory because it was not coupled with an attempt to modify the vocabulary used in articles and advertisements. The result was therefore graphically uneven, with hiragana and kanji mixed together in unexpected combinations. The Chosakai addressed this problem between 1926 and 1928 byproposing substitute kanji in various kango; it also produced a revised list of 1,856 characters, but once again fate intervened. The Manchuria "Incident" of 1931 ushered in a period of conservative reaction and military ascendancy that made further progress toward script reform difficult. In 1934, the Rinji kokugo chosakai was superseded by the Kokugo shingikai (Japanese Language Council), which in 1942 produced a hydjun kanjihyo (standard kanji list) of 2,528 characters, which was eventually expanded to 2,669. It is noteworthy that the Shingikai persisted in its list making even as the Pacific War raged.47 Perhaps even more significant were the steps the Japanese military took on its own initiative to limit the number of kanji it used internally (see p. 36 ). At any rate, by the time the Americans arrived in Tokyo in 1945, the Japanese had had nearly half a century of practical experience with the business of taming the myriad kanji that swarmed in their newspapers, books, and correspondence. For this reason, the toyo kanji list and gendai kanazukai of 1946 are important not so much for the specific changes they effected in the written language as for their social and political significance. These measures were the Japanese government's first departure from a laissezfaire policy on language since its abortive attempt at simplifying certain kana spellings in 1900 (see note 46). They signaled a fundamental change in attitude, an acknowledgment that "no change" was not a viable option. The replacement of the older term joyo 'daily use' or 'ordinary use', which suggested permanence, with the new term toyo 'current use', with its implication of an interim, temporary standard, showed a commitment to move forward toward

f8

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

further simplification. The designation of 1,850 kanji for general use and the later designation of the subset of 881 so-called kyoiku kanji to be taught during the first six years of school marked a substantial lowering of earlier official standards, but what was more important was that they were clearly meant to serve as ceilings, as definitions of the most that would be expected of a Japanese adult or child. Both the toyo kanji list and the gendai kanazukai were promulgated on the same day, 16 November 1946, only a little more than a year after MacArthur's arrival. The Kokugo shingi kai, building on this foundation, proceeded to make adjustments, all but one of which were officially promulgated by the cabinet. In January 1948, permissible on and kun readings for the approved kanji were specified. The following month, the lists of kanji to be taught in each of the six years of elementary education (881 in total) were announced.'*8 In April 1949 came a toyo kanji jitaihyo, a list that defined graphic shapes for approved characters; this document simultaneously set standards for the printing industry and gave official approval for many simplified forms in print that had long been used in handwriting. May 1951 brought a special list of 92 kanji that could be used in personal names. Starting i April 1954, newspapers replaced 28 lowfrequency toyo kanji with 28 others that experience suggested were more useful; this was the one development not officially sanctioned. Finally, in July 1959, 26 rules on okurigana usage were published. Thus the years from 1946 through 1959 witnessed moderate but comprehensive efforts to reform the Japanese writing system while preserving all its basic constituents. Although it rejected the means proposed by the advocates of kanagaki and romaji, the government, if only implicitly, acknowledged that their goals were legitimate and their concerns real.

4SCAP Steps In

Robert King Hall In chapter 3, we saw that Japan had started down the path of script reform, albeit fitfully, long before the Occupation. Both the press and the government were prepared to limit the number of kanji in general use. The press had already voluntarily begun to reduce the use offurigana,A, which indirectly established a lower limit on the frequency of the kanji and the readings for kanji used in newspapers; even the military had been forced to admit the practical necessity of some sort of script reform. The consensus was that setting a ceiling on the number of characters in general use, reforming the kanazukai, and controlling the readings that kanji could take was a practical compromise between the status quo and the more radical proposals of the kanagaki and romaji movements. It is therefore wrong to characterize the situation in 1946 as one in which the Japanese were forced to draw up the toyo kanji list in order to prevent SCAP (Supreme Command for the Allied Powers) from imposing more drastic measures (as has been claimed by Suzuki Takao [1990] and others). Nor is it correct to regard the 1946 report of the United States Education Mission (USEM), which advocated romanization but insisted that the implementation of that recommendation be left strictly to the Japanese themselves, as the climax of SCAP involvement in script reform. Perhaps the main reason for these misunderstandings is that the best known source for information on Occupation involvement in script reform is the 1949 book by USNR Lt. Comdr. Robert King Hall, Jr.49 Of all the Americans on the scene in 1945—46, Hall was the most vociferous supporter of radical changes in S9

60

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

the Japanese writing system. He was inclined to polemic, and his account of the period, which naturally focuses on the events that occurred during his tour of duty, casts him as the pivot around which everything else revolved. Hall, who had already merited a notice in Who's Who in American Education in 1944, went on to a distinguished career at Teachers College, Columbia University, after returning from Japan. It is hardly surprising that of all the personalities on the scene at the time, he continues to arouse the strongest reactions among historians. By bringing together the disparate pieces of information various scholars have ferreted out and observing the points on which their accounts agree and differ, we can gain considerable insight into not only the events in which Hall participated but also the circumstances under which the rdmaji education experiment—the central focus of the present study—took place. Hall, who was born in 1912, was a fast-rising star when he went to Japan at age 33.50 He had attended Lake Forest College, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, from which he earned a master's degree, and the University of Michigan, where he began his dissertation research on federal control of secondary education in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. He was employed as a professor of education at the University of Chile in 1939, and in August r94o, he participated in "raids on clandestine propaganda schools in the Japanese colonies in the Alta-Paulista of the state of Sao Paulo in southern Brazil" (Hall ^49, iii). After the United States entered the war, he attended the Naval School of Military Government and Administration at Columbia University and upon graduation became Assistant Academic Director of the Navy School of Military Government at Princeton University (Suzuki 1983, 51; Mayo rg8r, 68). 51 From there, Hall proceeded to Monterey, California, where he was Chief of the Education Section of the Planning Staff for the Occupation of Japan at the Civil Affairs Staging Area (CASA), a research organization that today we might call a high-level think tank (Nishi 1982,199; Mayo 1981, 114 n. 74). On 23 June 1945, Hall sent a memorandum entitled "The Exclusive Use of Katakana as Official Written Language" to the War Department's Civil Affairs Division, which was headed by Major General John LI. Hilldring; in the memorandum, he recommended that the Occupation prohibit the use of materials containing kanji and order the exclusive use of katakana. Such an order, he argued, would (i) greatly reduce access to prewar propaganda, (2) facilitate censorship, (3) improve the quality of education, and (4) increase business efficiency by making it easy to use typewriters and other office equipment. To show that his idea was practical, Hall pointed out that (i) his proposal would not suddenly render the country illiterate, (2) the transliteration of existing documents into katakana would not be difficult, (3) the choice of katakana

SCAP Steps In

61

would appeal to Japanese national pride, (4) Japan had undergone a similar change to the metric system before the war, and (5) education in the traditional script would almost certainly be interrupted in any case immediately after the surrender. On 30 June, aware that not only his katakctna proposal but also his ideas about education reform in general would probably be regarded as overstepping the Occupation's authority, Hall sent a somewhat revised version of this memo to Lt. Col. Daniel C. Fahey, the Far Eastern planner for the Civil Affairs Division (CAD), for his opinion (Kubo 1984, 73-74; Nishi 1982, 199-201; Mayo 1981, 68-69). Hilldring was interested enough in Hall's views52 to solicit advice on them from Eugene H. Dooman of the Department of State in a letter dated 3 July 1945. Dooman had been born in Japan, spoke the language fluently, and had worked at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo under Ambassador Joseph C. Grew before the war. Grew had been appointed Under Secretary of State in November 1944; Dooman was an influential member of Crew's conservative circle, which opposed punitive measures against zaibatsu interests, land reform, and other actions that might disturb the stability of Japanese society (Perry 1980,28, 41-42, 45). On 6 July, Dooman responded predictably that an order prohibiting kanji would almost certainly be unenforceable and, worse, would cripple the Japanese economy (Nishi 1982, 201; Mayo 1981, 69—70); he added that advocates of script reform, Japanese or foreign, were "crack-pots, visionaries, and fanatics" (Hall 1949, 352). Hall was informed of Dooman's objections and sent a lengthy rejoinder to CAD on 11 July (Kubo 1984, 75-82), but Dooman's view won the day. 53 Both Toshio Nishi and Marlene Mayo take Hall to task for his katakana proposal, and from the postwar perspective of cultural awareness and "political correctness," it does seem rash. In the context of its time, however, it was hardly unreasonable. As the end of the war came into sight, talk of Japanese civilians fighting with bamboo spears to the last man, woman, and child was widespread and was taken seriously. Americans of Japanese ancestry had been rounded up and deprived of their property in a fit of racist hysteria that trampled on the Bill of Rights. Wartime propaganda had successfully ingrained the notion that the Japanese were die-hard fanatics (Dower 1986) and that all vestiges of ultranationalist and militarist ideology would have to be ruthlessly extirpated, if not to rebuild the shattered nation as a bulwark against Communism, then at least to protect the lives of the Occupation forces. Few expected the selfcontrol, obedience, and goodwill with which those forces were actually greeted. We should recall, in this connection, Hall's personal experiences in Brazil. Hall also knew that Kemal Atatiirk had successfully and rapidlyimposed script reform "from above" in Turkey during the 19305.54 Given his

62

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

position at CASA, his implicit belief that script reform by fiat was possible, necessary, and legitimate is entirely understandable. Far more significant than the extreme tone of Hall's proposal is that in his messages to both Hilldring and Fahey, he specifically cautioned AGAINST a sudden change to romaji (Nishi 1982, 205; Mayo 1981, 69). Hall's later switch of allegiance from katakana to romaji therefore shows that his commitment to the concept of script reform, though aggressive, had deep intellectual roots, and that he was flexible enough to change tactics when it appeared advantageous to do so. 55 It is not hard to imagine what those advantages might be. Romanization was easier to explain and justify to Americans who did not know Japanese than was the exclusive use of katakana. If communications between the occupiers and the occupied were to be improved, public use of romaji — the language of the vanquished, the script of the victors — would seem a more fitting compromise than public use of katakana. Indeed, General MacArthur's second directive after arriving in Japan was to require that all signs in public buildings be romanized. Even conservative Japanese might prefer the romaji option because the inevitable period of transition during which traditional script would be replaced by romaji could be protracted, perhaps indefinitely; under the katakana option, the use of kanji would be curtailed immediately for, obviously, no one who knew kanji had to be taught katakana. The incident surrounding Dooman's letter also shows that even while the war dragged on, certain highly placed "Japan hands" were as adamantly opposed to script reform as the most conservative Japanese. The views of these acknowledged experts must have carried enormous weight with the many Americans who were about to participate in the Occupation but had no prior exposure to Japan. One such individual was Joseph C. Trainor, a specialist in education from New England, who was seven years Hall's senior. Trainor apparently saved every scrap of paper that crossed his desk, whether addressed to him or not.56 He seems to have made up his mind —perhaps even before he arrived in Tokyo —to write the definitive history of CI&E and diligently collected his sources while on the job. His memoir was "written in 1952-53, the year following the end of the Occupation [when] memories of what had taken place during the years from the fall of 1945 to the spring of 1952 were still vivid and the materials which are now at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University were at hand" (Trainor 1983, iii). The fact that Trainor's memoir did not see the light of day until it was published by a Japanese university press 30 years later is probably due in part to its complete lack of individuals' names (except in an addendum that seems to have been written in 1982) or notes identifying the pertinent documentation. 57 It could also stand some editing—sentences ram-

SCAP Steps In

63

ble on, paragraphs tend to be redundant—and with the right papers from the Trainor Collection in hand, one sees that the author sometimes quoted or paraphrased material from other people's memoranda without attribution. Trainor emphasizes in both the preface and the foreword that his book is a "personal story" about how things looked "from behind one desk" (1983, ii). His brief Caesarean reference to himself in the addendum minimizes his involvement in the affairs he describes: "Textbook and curriculum problems were for a short time in [the] charge of Dr. J. C. Trainor who became Deputy Chief of the [Education] Division in 1946, a position which he filled until the end of the Occupation" (425). Yet the mere fact that he was able to accumulate his vast trove of documents shows that he wielded considerable power within the division, which, in its first year at least, was a small organization with a high turnover rate. At the end of 1945, three months after the occupation had begun, the staff consisted of fourteen officers, Army, Navy, and Marine. Of those, only three were to be with the Division a year later. Except for Colonel Nugent, who had become Chief of Section, the others had returned to the United States to take up their civilian work in education. (Trainor 1983, 243)58

The tone of Trainor's account makes it plain that he regarded his service in Japan as the high point of his career and took his role as self-appointed division historian seriously. At least on matters concerning "language simplification," as it was called, Trainor turns out not to have been a reliable recorder of the facts. The following paragraph, typical of his long-winded style, is a case in point. The interest of the Education Division in language reform had its inception long before the Division was established, indeed before the end of the war. In the thinking and planning of some officers who were assigned to the Division later but who were, before the end of the war at the Civil Affairs Staging Area at Monterey, consideration was given to the problem and it was concluded that the language of Japan should undergo severe changes under occupation orders once the war was over and the land occupied. The nature of this revision was considered to be simple: the abolition of all Chinese characters and the writing of Japanese with a phonetic and romanized alphabet. All textbooks were to be written in romaji, as the romanized Japanese is called; newspapers and all printing [were] required to use it and work was to begin on the transliteration of already published materials from the customary form of written Japanese to romanized versions. For all its simplicity of concept it was a devastating program which was envisaged. It is well to keep in mind at this point that the planning which was done at Monterey was not binding on the occupation organization. While it was done with as much realism as was pos-

64

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

sible and also on the basis of the best available information regarding internal affairs in Japan, its basic purpose was training. In the nature of things military the theater commander is furnished with only the minimum of directives and all detailed carrying out of them is left to his discretion and decision. Thus the thinking at Monterey regarding language reforms in Japan was not binding on General MacArthur and his Headquarters when it came eventually to be established. However, the plans for language revision did enter into the stream of occupation thinking since those responsible for the planning at Monterey were later assigned to the General Headquarters in Tokyo, in fact to the Education Division, and they carried with them to Japan their startling convictions regard the Japanese language, its faults and the required remedies. (Trainor 1983, 300—301)

Because Trainor does not name names in the pages that follow (302—8), it is unclear to whom, besides Robert King Hall, he is referring, but there can be no doubt that Hall was one of "them." It is therefore of great significance that Trainor insists that "the plan developed at Monterey was f o r . . . a romanized form of written Japanese" (1983, 307), for, as we have seen, Hall's strong initial preference was for katakana, not romaji. In any case, it is clear that Trainor was of essentially the same mind as Dooman. One person Trainor may have seen as an ally of Hall was Ken Reed Dyke (1897-1980), the first chief of the section. Dyke was attached to MacArthur's Southwest Pacific command in 1943 as section head for information and education and seems to have proceeded directly to Japan. He served as CI&E chief for only eight months (Suzuki 1983, 49-50), but within that short space of time, he "was a powerhouse, demolishing thought control, revising textbooks, disestablishing Shinto, encouraging and guiding the press and radio, purging the schools, and bringing over a prestigious Education Advisory Mission" (Cohen 1987, 96). A second key player, whom Trainor curiously does not mention in his addendum, was Harold Gould Henderson (1889-1974). Henderson, who was a specialist in Japanese art and was highly skilled in the Japanese language (he published an excellent reference grammar in 1943), was on close terms with a number of liberal Japanese intellectuals. From October through December, he headed what was to become the Education Division and was therefore Hall's immediate superior (Suzuki 1983, 50—52). Henderson was succeeded by USMC Lt. Col. Donald Ross Nugent, who headed the Education Division until late May 1946, when he replaced Dyke as chief of CI&E. There was nothing about the relationship between Nugent and Hall that might have misled Trainor; Nugent was Hall's nemesis. He was a graduate of Stanford, had coedited a textbook on the Pacific region (Nugent

SG4P Steps In Table 8. Titles and Positions of Selected CI&E Personnel Name

Position

Title

CALHOUN, HOWELL V. Analysis & Research Division Research Unit Mr. Analysis & Research Division Research Branch Education Research Unit Mr. Education Division Education Research Branch Mr. DYKE, KENNETH REED Chief Col. Brig. Gen EELLS, WALTER CROSBY Education Division Mr. Education Division Higher Education Unit Mr. Education Division Higher Education Unit Universities Mr. Education Division Higher Education Branch Dr.

From

To

Spt 46

Apr 48

Jly 48

Oct 48

Jly 49

Apr 51

Oct 45 Jan 46

Nov 45 May 46

May 47

Jne 47

Jly 47

Dec 47

Apr 48

Oct 48

Jly 49

Oct 50

Sep 46

Dec 46

GEORGE, SCOTT Education Division Lt. HALL, ROBERT KING Editor Lt. (USNR) Education & Religion Lt. (USNR) Education Lt. (USNR) Lt. Cmdr. (USNR) (continued)

Oct 45 Nov 45 Jan 46 Apr 46

Feb 46 May 46

6S

66

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

Table 8. Titles and Positions of Selected CI&E Personnel (continued) Name

Position

Title

HALPERN, ABRAHAM MEYER Education Division Mr. Education Division Language Simplification Unit Mr. Education Division Education Specialist Unit Language Simplification Mr. Education Division Education Specialist Branch Language Simplification Mr. HENDERSON, HAROLD GOULD Editor Maj Education & Religion Lt. Col. Special Advisor Lt. Col. LOOMIS, ARTHUR K. Education Division School Administration & Finance Unit Mr. Education Division School Education Unit Administrative & Finance Mr. Education Division School Education Branch Administrative & Finance Education Division Chief Dr. MITCHELL, J. Analysis & Research Division Statistics & Reports Unit Mr. (continued)

From

To

Nov 46

Jne 47

Jly 47

Dec 47

Apr 48

Jly 48

Oct 48

Oct 45 Nov 45 Jan 46

Jly 47

Dec 47

Apr 48

Jly 48

Oct 48

Jly 49

Apr 51

Jly 47

Apr 48

SCAP Steps In Table 8. Titles and Positions of Selected CI&E Personnel (continued) Name

Position

Title

Analysis & Research Division Research Branch Mr. (Asst. Dir.) Education Division Education Research Branch Mr. (QIC) NUGENT, DONALD ROSS Education Lt. Col. (USMC) (QIC) Acting Chief Lt. Col. (USMC) Education Lt. Col. (USMC) (QIC) Acting Chief Lt. Col. (USMC) Education Lt. Col. (USMC) (QIC) Chief Lt. Col. (USMC) ORR, MARK T. Education Maj. Education Division Lt. Col. (QIC) Mr. (QIC) Mr. (Chief) Education Division Chief Mr. STALNAKER, L. W. Education Division Higher Education Branch Dr. TRAINOR, JOSEPH C. Research & Analysis Lt. Cmdr. (USNR) Analysis and Research Lt. Cmdr. (USNR) (continued)

From

To

Jly 48

Oct 48

Jly 49

Apr jr

Feb 46 Apr 46 Apr 46 May 46 May 46 Spt 46

Apr 52

Jan 46

May 46

Spt 46 Nov 46 Jly 47

Jne 47 Dec 47

Apr 48

Oct 48

Jly 49

Oct 50

Nov 45 Jan 46

Apr 46

67

68

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

Table 8. Titles and Positions of Selected CI&E Personnel (continued) Name

Position

Title

From

To

Education Lt. Cmdr. (USNR) Education Division Lt. Cmdr. (USNR)

May 46

Mr.

Nov 46

Jne 47

Mr. (Deputy Chief) Dr. (Deputy Chief)

Jlv 47 Jly 49

Oct 48 Apr 51

Jan 46 Apr 46

Feb 46

Spt 46

WUNDERLICH, HERBERT J. Education Lt. Cmdr. (USNR) Cmdr. (USNR)

Note: QIC = Officer in Charge, USNR = United States Naval Reserve, USMC = United States Marine Corps Military personnel belonged to the army if not otherwise indicated. All data are drawn from Occupation telephone directories. Only information on individuals mentioned in the text is presented. The information on an individual in two or more successive directories is combined in a single entry in this table if there was no change. Nomenclature in different editions of the directories was not always consistent; actual dates of service, tenure of title, and so forth may differ slightly from the dates shown here. Source: Sato 1984, 199-368.

and Bell 1936), and had taught in Japan from 1937 to 1941. Though he knew Japanese, he spoke only English in the presence of Japanese. The contrast between Nugent and Dyke was striking: Dyke lacked a college degree (Schaller 1985, 28), but had been a successful advertising executive at the National Broadcasting Company before the war and was promoted to brigadier general before leaving the service (see table 8); Nugent was a professional educator with "extensive prewar experience of Japan" (Schwantes 1955, 127), but "turned out to be an unimaginative, stodgy administrator" (Cohen 1987, 97). Kishimoto Hideo, then an advisor to the Americans, later wrote, "[Dyke] was broad-minded and his decisiveness was exceptional. Of all the people at SCAP with whom I came into contact, he was the one of most admirable character. Comparing Nugent with him, it seemed to me there was a considerable gap between the two" (Kishimoto 1976, 30, quoted in Suzuki 1983, 50, trans. JMU). On 30 September 1945, Hall was ordered to review Japanese textbooks on morals (shushin), and later, history and geography as well (Nishi 1982, 176) — the subjects in which students were most likely to hear justifications of Japan's wartime and prewar activities. On 12 November, Dyke assigned him additionally

SCAP Steps In

69

the task of Japanese language reform. This was the origin of Hall's "First Draft" (19463), parts of which we examined in chapter 2. Gary H. Tsuchimochi (1993, in) says that Hall "began to work behind the scenes" for romanization at this time, and cites CI&E displeasure with a story about Hall's work carried by China's quasi-official Central News Agency on 18 January 1946 to imply that Hall was operating surreptitiously. This was, however, not the case (Nishi 1982, 201). On 10 November, a meeting was held at CI&E headquarters at which Hall told Arimitsu Jir5, head of the Textbook Bureau, to halt publication of all textbooks until further notice. Henderson, without official approval from SCAP, had previously obtained the personal understanding of Minister of Education Maeda Tamon that textbooks containing passages about Japan's empire and sacred mission would not go to press; nevertheless, on 9 November, word had been received from the Ministry of Education suggesting that some new books were about to be printed. On the i6th, Hall and Herbert J. Wunderlich dropped in on Arimitsu unexpectedly to make sure the Henderson-Maeda agreement was being carried out. Arimitsu assured them that it was, but later in the day, the two Americans visited a printing plant, despite Arimitsu's strenuous objections, where they found Japanese (kokugo) and arithmetic books being produced and packaged for shipment. Dyke was furious and demanded that Maeda find and punish the responsible party. The following day, Maeda explained that Arimitsu had inadvertently failed to pass along the order to cease publication. 59 Dyke warned him that he would not tolerate a second slipup and emphasized that an official order from SCAP to stop the presses was on its way (Suzuki 1983, 81). The mood must therefore have been somewhat tense at the meeting that followed on 20 November at the Ministry of Education to discuss textbook revisions. In the midst of a discussion between Hall and Arimitsu, while Henderson was out of the room, Hall raised the issue of romanization of textbooks. Arimitsu responded that textbooks for the Tokyo Model High School were going to be romanized; the Foreign Ministry would be asking CI&E to recommend foreign teachers who could assist in the project. Hall then made several points: (i) CI&E wanted textbooks to be romanized so that they would be easier to read for both Japanese and non-Japanese; (2) romanized material should be in colloquial style so that it could be understood when read aloud; (3) what was desired was not the abolition ofkanji but rather a reduction in the number of kanji used in the textbooks, which was to be accompanied by the inclusion of passages in romaji; (4) the Ministry of Education should not drag its feet, but did not have to do everything immediately; and (5) romaji could be introduced first in foreign language and arithmetic books. Next, Hall asked about plans for revising history texts. After answering, Arimitsu brought the dis-

7o

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

cussion back to script and expressed a desire not to limit the number oikcinji. Hall had no objection as long as the style was colloquial and romaji were included. Speaking for himself, he said that children ought not wait another year to start learning romaji. Did that mean that magazines would be romanized, asked Arimitsu. Hall said he could not answer that question. Then, turning to his interpreter, he observed that Henderson was going to meet with Maeda and that an order on rornanization would probably come out; he remarked that the idea of introducing romaji into textbooks was only his personal idea, but he instructed the interpreter to tell Arimitsu anyway. The discussion turned to other matters. Henderson returned to the room before the meeting ended. Exactly how rornanization was brought up again is not clear. What is certain is that Henderson contradicted Hall: he explained that there were no plans to romanize textbooks and that any decision on the matter would be made on the basis of discussions with the minister and after extensive research. Wunderlich later wrote that Hall clearly overstepped his authority and that Henderson accused Hall of disobeying orders. In the aftermath of this conference, Hall was relieved of his duties on textbook revision (Kubo 1984,188-92; Suzuki 1983, 52). Trainor's (1983, 302) version of the conference of 20 November is consistent neither with the conference record in the Trainor Collection, upon which Kubo Yoshizo based his account, nor with Wunclerlich's statements, cited by both Kubo and Suzuki Eiichi; Trainor's aim is clearly to denigrate Hall. Curiously, Nishi, who, as we will see presently, shares Trainor's dislike of Hall, does not mention this crucial episode (1982,177, 201).60 Nevertheless, the conference of 20 November was pivotal: the confusion it caused was one reason that General MacArthur ordered a reorganization of the Education Division of CI&E. (He was also displeased with the division's nomination of Harvard President James B. Conant to chair the upcoming United States Education Mission.) Tsuchimochi describes the reorganization as follows: Hall was forced to hand the textbook matter over to H. J. Wunderlich, as he was himself reassigned to the Planning Division. He was also relieved of operational duties and liaison with the Ministry of Education. In order to resolve the confusion concerning rornanization, Lt. Col. Donald R. Nugent was appointed Chief of Education Division of CI&E, succeeding H. G. Henderson, who was to become a Special Adviser, on December 10,1945. This confusion over rornanization continued until D. R. Nugent told Shigeru Fukuda, a liaison officer, that the rornanization of textbooks was unnecessary, effective December 14, 1945. Thus, at this point, the issue of the romanization of textbooks was officially settled. (Tsuchimochi 1993, no—11)

SCAP Steps In

71

In fact, however, the matter was by no means settled within CI&E, as Tsuchimochi himself is well aware. Hall redoubled his efforts to complete the report on which he had been working since 12 November so that it would be ready for presentation to the USEM, which arrived in Japan on 6 March 1946. A copy of Hall's "Study" (i946b) and other documents related to Hall's presentation to the USEM on 13 March 1946 were among the papers Trainor brought back with him from Japan. Trainor derided Hall's report as "unscientific" and "cultist" (Trainor 1983, 303-5), and despite the large amount of pertinent information Hall had managed to assemble, he undeniably did leave himself open to such criticism throughout. Indeed, by the time he wrote Education for a New Japan, Hall himself was evidently aware of the shortcomings of his 1946 effort, as we have already noted (see p. 43). Officially, "the Division and Section took the view that a staff study which proposed that the Occupation bring about a radical change in the Japanese language was out of order, since the basic policy of the occupation would not permit its implementation" (Trainor 1983, 305); but the other material in Box 37 of the Trainor Collection suggests that opposition to Hall's actions had been growing from much earlier. Adjacent to the copy of the "Study" in Box 37 are two press summaries: one reports that Hall had been quoted on 16 February in the magazine Shin Nippon as advocating romanization, and the other notes that on 11 March some of the results of the Kanamojikai survey were reported in Nippon Shinbun Ho. The inclusion of these documents in the same folder makes it appear that someone (perhaps Trainor himself) was keeping track of Hall's public utterances for later reference. Next comes a stinging memo, classified "Restricted" and dated 12 March, from Nugent ^9463), as Acting Chief of Section, to Hall. It is worth quoting in full. In presenting a general orientation to the United States Education Mission on the problem of "Language Revision", you will be guided by the following: a. There will be no a priori assumption that a revision of the Japanese written language is necessary. You are instructed, however, to present all evidence of a standard usually acceptable in academic or scholarly circles to indicate that the Japanese written language does present problems worthy of attention and study by members of the Mission. You will define those problems and allow the members of the Mission to draw their own conclusions. b. You are at liberty to present the "change-over" plans, as shown in your "confidential" study, as "suggested" plans, but with no recommendations concerning them.

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c. There will be no conclusions or recommendations, specific or implied, as to specific reforms to be made in the Japanese written language. d. Evidence presented will be identified as to basis. Any study quoted will be further identified as to origin, number of cases or persons studied, techniques followed, and validity of evidence and conclusions resulting therefrom. e. You will not present as evidence any research, studies, facts, figures, or opinions which would not be acceptable in a dissertation for the doctorate at a recognized American university, unless such studies, facts, figures, or opinions are identified properly as not meeting such a standard. f. In mentioning any Japanese organization for the first time, you will identify that organization as to date of origin, purpose, and number of members. g. When "expert opinions" or "informed observers" are addressed, it will be your responsibility to show that such opinion is, in fact, expert, or that such observers are, in fact, informed on the Japanese language and any problems concerned therewith. h. You will not introduce any materials of whatever nature which indicate authorization or encouragement of language revision by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers or this Headquarters. i. At all times you will bear in mind that you are presenting problems and not recommendations to the United States Education Mission for their consideration. j. For purposes of your presentation oral reference may be made to such parts of "A Tentative Study, Japanese Written Language Revision Study", classified by this Section as "Confidential", as within your judgment do not violate security or embarrass the Supreme Commander, and do not violate the instructions set forth above. Different readings of this memo are possible, but it certainly has the tone of a military order designed to prevent a lower-ranking officer 61 from speaking his mind without creating the appearance of silencing him outright. The next document, also dated 12 March, is a "Memo for the Record" (Nugent i946b), which begins: r. Lt. Comdr. R. K. Hall's "A Tentative study, Japanese written Language Revision Study" came to my attention on the afternoon of n March. Study of the document, during the night of n March, gave rise to comments as shown below. 2. The original study will not be released in its present form. There follow five, single-spaced pages of criticisms in outline form. Hall's "Study," as Trainor later wrote, "was a formidable document of some 43 closely typed pages, with a more voluminous attachment of 35 appendices and a bibliography of some 260 titles" (Trainor 1983, 303).62 It is therefore difficult to

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believe that Nugent managed to digest the entire document overnight in his quarters, form his opinions about it, draft an outline, and have it typed up by the end of business on the i2th. Indeed, features of Hall's "First Draft" (19463) (as distinct from his "Tentative Study" [1946!}], see note 30) imply a different scenario. The "First Draft" lacks appendices, is headed "First Draft / Tentative Study / Prepared by RKH / 6 Jan 46-4 Mar 46,"53 and contains handwritten notes in the margins. The notes include numbers that identify passages in the text that correspond to the references to "comments" in Nugent's "Memo for the Record," and they are not in Nugent's hand (specimens of which appear on various papers in the Trainor Collection). Someone else evidently worked, between 4 and 11 March, on the detailed critique that Nugent signed. It concludes with the following two paragraphs: The study presents a large amount of valuable evidence indicating the need for some positive action to be taken toward the problem of the written language. The information, however, is scientifically inadequate, both in quantity and quality. There is every sign of an inexcusable partisanship on the part of the writer. And the concept of the problem presented, of the objective of the study, is considered unthorough. (Nugent 1946^

(Since the "evidence" in the study was "valuable" and showed a need for "positive action," it was evidently Hall's partisanship that rankled.) There is ample evidence to justify the writing of a staff study, possibly a pilot study, whose object would be not to make recommendations for the reform of written Japanese, but to recommend the necessity for, and to outline the problems to be solved by, a full-fledged research project. This project would be delegated to a representative group of scholars qualified by their thorough familiarity with problems of language reform, linguistics, and the Japanese language, to ensure the most informed handling possible of the problem [be] presented. (Nugent 1946^

Finally, we should note that Hall's presentation to the USEM on 13 March (also in Box 37) was followed by a lecture by Ando Masatsugu, who spoke in favor ofkanji limitation and a postponement of consideration of more radical changes. Ando was a distinguished Japanese linguist who favored moderate reform measures (Gottlieb 1994, 1180,1182), but was at that time banned from holding public office or educational position by the 4 January 1946 SCAP Purge Directive (Appendix A, Category G) and was under investigation by the Civil Intelligence Section, GHQ, SCAP, for alleged complicity in a plot to misinform and nullify the recommendations of the United States Education Mission. (Hall 1949, 350)

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Even if one takes this as just a spiteful remark made after the fact, it would seem that Ando could not have put in an appearance had someone above Hall not taken extraordinary steps to make it possible.64 The foregoing evidence suggests that Nugent and Trainor were working to curb Hall's influence long before the submission of his report in March. Although they may not have been opposed to script reform in principle, they certainly did not accord it a high priority and definitely felt that romanization was not the way to go. From their perspective, any script reform beyond kanji limitation and the like was a no-win proposition; if anything more radical were clone, no matter what, SCAP was bound to be criticized by some group or other. Securing the cooperation of the Japanese government on other matters was far more important. Hall was rocking the boat; the merits of script reform in general or romanization in particular were beside the point—the man himself was a problem. Ando's words did not dissuade the USEM from recommending that eventual romanization of the script be explored. A subcommittee chaired by George S. Counts drafted this part of the USEM's report, which was presented to General MacArthur on 30 March 1946 (Hall 1949, 356-58). The USEM took the position that elimination of kanji and introduction of romanization was in the long-term interest of the Japanese people but that any changes should be made not by the Occupation authorities but by a Japanese "commission of scholars, educators, and statesmen" (USEMJ 1946, 20-23). (F°r details on the drafting of this part of the report, see Tsuchimochi 1993,112—22.) The final product was a compromise insofar as it incorporated both the pragmatic essence of Hall's report (divested of its strident rhetoric) and the method of implementation favored by Nugent. Yet according to Trainor, any committee of qualified Japanese would, if it took any steps toward language modification, reject the abandonment of the Chinese characters as a crack-pot idea and would tackle more practicable schemes for improving language practice. If the language was to be changed through the abolition of Chinese characters and the substitution of a complete romaji system, there existed during the occupation years exactly one way by means of which it could be done and that would have been by Occupation edict, by a directive ordering the Japanese government to make the change forthwith. (1983, 306-7)

It is ironic that Trainor makes this assertion, for if Hall had a tragic flaw, it was his idee fixe that an American edict was not only possible but was probably the only way meaningful script reform could be achieved. Evidently, neither side in the internal debate over romanization was willing to learn from the other or cede any ground.

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Not surprisingly, Trainor and Hall interpreted the USEM recommendations on language in diametrically opposite ways. According to Trainor, Hall and his colleagues in the Language Simplification Branch took the USEM recommendations as "a victory for their point of view" and proceeded to develop a five-year plan (which is Hall 1946^, starting with the establishment of "a Japanese Commission on Language." When Nugent (who by then had replaced Dyke) rejected the plan, its authors "requested what was then known as 'redeployment' to the United States" (Trainor 1983, 307-8). Hall saw things differently: The conservative faction in occupation headquarters had won. The conservatives in the Japanese Government and educational system next took up the fight to stop a voluntary adoption [of romanization]. They followed a four-fold strategy: advance a barrage of technical arguments, many of them unsound, which would require time to demolish by controlled tests and investigations; conduct a delaying campaign in the functioning of all official and semiofficial committees, such as the Romaji Kyoiku Kyogikai [see p. 81]; divert attention from the fundamental objective of adopting a phonetic writing system, preferably romaji, by conducting a campaign for the improvement of literary style, and reduction in the number of ideographs as a "necessary preliminary" to more fundamental reform; and initiate long-term studies to "verify" the conclusions on which the need for reform is based. Time, the Chinese influence in FEC [Far Eastern Command], 65 and a stronglyentrenched conservative element in the United States forces in occupation headquarters, were working on their side. It is one of the amazing evidences of a growing Japanese self-direction that this reform has not been entirely submerged in the face of such formidable opposition. (Hall, quoted in University of London 1949, 649)

According to Nishi (1982, 203-4), the USEM recommendations on language were warmly received in Washington despite dissent from some quarters. Hilldring, who had been appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Areas in April 1946, "changed his mind." With his support, the State Department drafted a policy paper backing the USEM's position, entitled "Reform of the Japanese Writing System and Language Problems," for submission to the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, or SWNCC (rhymes with "mink").66 Hilldring wrote George Atcheson, Jr., senior political advisor to MacArthur in Tokyo (Perry 1980,45), "urging him to solicit MacArthur's support" for the policy in order to overcome army objections at the SWNCC meetings that it "would place MacArthur in an awkward and definitely unpopular position," but Atcheson replied: "It has been General MacArthur's feeling and that of the Civil Education and Information Section that this is a mat-

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Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

ter which should be left to the Japanese themselves" (Nishi 1982, 204). And, indeed, aside from one uncharacteristically noncommittal statement of 6 April rg46, MacArthur seems never to have spoken to the issue of script reform again (Hardesty 1986,139,141).67 In the final analysis, however, Hall himself was his own worst enemy. His thinking was too radical to be acceptable to his superiors in the Education Division. His military status undoubtedly worked against him. He could not claim to be a linguist or a true Japan expert. There were no intervening layers of command between him and his chief adversary. Above all, he was young; his energy and self-confidence became a liability rather than an asset. His successor, Abraham Halpern, could speak up courageously when necessary, as we shall see, but he was more tactful, a civilian, a bona fide expert in linguistics, and he communicated with Nugent through Mark Orr.

Abraham Meyer Halpern Abraham Halpern (1914-1985) replaced Hall after the episode that culminated in Hall's "redeployment." Halpern had received an A.B. from Harvard in 1933 and was connected with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, from which he received a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1947. He advised on "language simplification" matters in the Education Division of CI&E from late 1946 to late 1948. After working for the government, he moved, in succession, to the Carnegie Institution, the Rand Corporation, and the Council on Foreign Relations, where he published several books on China. Better schooled in linguistics than his predecessor and therefore more aware of the need to educate his superior officers, he took a more tactful and practical approach to the problem of romanization and attained correspondingly greater results. Unfortunately, little has been written about Halpern; most of the foregoing information was provided by the Rand Corporation. Most sources do not even give his full name. 68 Virtually the only published mention of Halpern's work at CI&E is a few paragraphs by Roy Andrew Miller in his preface to a collection of essays by Yale University professor Bernard Bloch. On 3 October 1946, Halpern wrote to Bloch that he did not want to circulate Bloch's "Studies in Colloquial Japanese" among linguists in Japan because "matters of linguistics here have a curious way of becoming embroiled in politics, and the situation here is such that your most recent view would have an unfortunate effect" (Miller 1970, xxxviii). In his reply of 9 October 1946, Bloch was a bit peeved: "If you mean that the Japanese would regard these views as nonsensical, that is something I can well understand; but I don't see why such a reac-

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tion is to be called unfortunate" (xxxviii). Miller, assuming the worst, continues as follows: Subsequent correspondence with this official in Tokyo [i.e., Halpern] made it clear that his objections to Bloch's work on Japanese and his fixed, and apparently quite successful, resolve to keep it from coming to the attention of Japanese linguists actually had nothing to do with the details of Bloch's description itself. Rather (and, when viewed from the vantage point of today, almost incredibly) his objections were based upon nothing more than the style of romanization Bloch used in the first of the "Studies" papers. In the first three parts of this series Bloch used a slightly adapted version of a romanization scheme originally worked out by Japanese scholars in the late rg^os. The American military occupation officials generally seern to have believed that this romanization had nationalistic, or even militaristic, implications and that it must by all means be suppressed. In order to build a "democratic Japan" they urged instead the use of the older Hepburn romanization. The arcane reasoning by which they had reached this absurd position can hardly be reconstructed today, but at the time it was an important part of occupation "education and information" policy. For this completely trivial reason, Bloch's publications on Japanese came under the extremely effective ban which the occupation officials were then in a unique position to enforce, (xxxviii-ix)

Miller thus makes it appear that Halpern was a petty functionary, unschooled in linguistics, who suppressed Bloch's writings in Japan out of prejudice. 69 This is a gross distortion. Although, as we shall see, Nugent was virtually obsessed with a desire to prevent Nippon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki romanization from gaining acceptance, Halpern himself was true to the underlying SCAP policy of not giving the Japanese orders unless necessary: if the Ministry of Education favored Kunrei-shiki as the vehicle for carrying out the USEM's recommendations on romanization, then CI&E had no reason to object. As for Bloch's discomfiture, Halpern was just telling the truth: had Halpern thoughtlessly circulated Bloch's writings among Japanese linguists, Nugent would have made it impossible for Halpern to work in Tokyo, just as he had made it intolerable for Hall. Bloch, ensconced in a tenured position at Yale, where he enjoyed the luxury of academic freedom, simply did not appreciate the humor of Halpern's understatement. On 4 October 1946, the day after he wrote to Bloch, Halpern sent a position paper to his immediate superior, Lt. Col. Mark T. Orr, head of the Education Division. This long document establishes several key facts and is therefore reproduced in full in appendix A. It amply demonstrates Halpern's awareness of the tightrope he was walking, the pressure he was under to take a

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stance on all "language simplification" issues quickly, his sure grasp of the chaotic situation that Hall was leaving in his wake, his independence from Hall (note the reference to Arimitsu), and his aplomb both as a linguist and as a civilian advisor. It also represents the genesis of the romanization education experiment, the neglected but culminating event among all the Occupation activities in the area of script reform. General MacArthur's directive of 3 September 1945 specified that "transcription of names into English shall be in accord with the Modified Hepburn system" (Kitta 1992, 65; "Development" 1950, 6). Conflated in that one sentence are the many assumptions that dominated American thinking about script reform in Japan: using the alphabet meant writing English; the purpose of romanization was to effect a kind of translation from Japanese; the written form of language was the form that counted; there was no kanagaki option; and Kunrei-shiki romanization was unacceptable. MacArthur's directive, coupled with the USEM report and Hall's public statements, fostered rumors that romanization would be imposed, which in turn led to public controversy over which system of romanization would be chosen. Advocates of Kunrei-shiki and Nippon-shiki were denounced to SCAP as latent militarists, and editorials in Tokyo's English-language press demanded that only Hebon-shiki romanization be allowed. On the other side, proponents of Kunrei- and Nippon-shiki understandably saw the attacks being mounted against them as unfair and vengeful. In the meantime, the USEM report had recommended that decisions on script reform be left to the Japanese themselves, a policy Nugent was quick to invoke whenever the opportunity arose, even after Hall was long gone. In notes and memoranda, Nugent also questions the political inclinations of Nippon- and Kunrei-shiki supporters, as we shall presently see. One gets the strong impression that he was personally opposed to any sort of romanization but could not say so out loud because of the USEM recommendation and therefore adopted the strategy of using SCAP policy to throw obstacles in the path of those within CI&E who were more open-minded on the romanization question. Halpern must surely have been made aware of all this, as well as the reasons for Hall's "redeployment," soon after he set foot in Tokyo, if not before. One of Halpern's first assignments was to render an expert opinion on the Hepburn/Kunrei-shiki dispute. This was needed because the Ministry of Education wanted to begin instruction in romaji in April 1947 and was contemplating the issuance of textbooks. In a memorandum to Orr dated 18 November (part of which is presented here), Halpern grasped the bull by the horns:

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4. Hepburn and Kunreishiki: Hepburn Romanization is an adequate broad phonetic notation; the Kunreisiki Romanization is an adequate phonemic notation. 5. Pedagogical use. In teaching Japanese to Westerners, all types of alphabetic writing (including Kana, as a traditional spelling) have been used. The success of such teaching depends on a variety of factors other than the type of writing system employed. On the whole, it seems fair to say that either Hepburn or Bloch-Kennedy (almost identical with Kunreisiki) Romanization, once explained to a student can be used without ambiguity. The use of Kunreisiki imposes certain initial handicaps not encountered in the use of Hepburn, but leads to a clearer and simpler formulation of the grammar than is possible with Hepburn. Hepburn was used during the war by Military and Naval Intelligence, in several ASTP programfs], and at CATS Michigan; Bloch-Kennedy was used by most CAT schools and at the Yale ASTR For use by the Japanese themselves, it is my opinion that the initial handicap encountered in using Kunreisiki with Westerners would simply not occur, while the later advantages would be retained, 6. For the above reasons, it is my feeling that the Division has no scientific or pedagogical grounds for objecting to the use of Kunreisiki Romazi in the Japanese education system. . . . (Halpern 1946^ Halpern goes on to summarize the opinions of American scholars and remarks that only Serge Eliseeff of Harvard would probably disagree. The first name he cites in support of his opinion, incidentally, is Bernard Bloch of Yale. Discussions within the Education Division were held, and on 22 January 1947, Orr wrote Nugent to inform him that "it was agreed that the Division staff members preferred the Hepburn style of Romaji, but that there was no valid reason for objecting to fCunrei-shiki, or for requiring the use of Hepburn." He added, "The Ministry of Education has reported that a great many schools are now teaching Romaji at the elementary level, and both the Hepburn and Kunreishiki styles are being used. As a matter of fact, it has been said that some schools are using both styles. Our own school inspectors substantiate this report" (Orr 19473). Later on, he says, "Dr. Halpern believes that Kunrei-shiki, from the linguistic point of view, is the soundest of the various Romaji systems." Nugent's response of 27 January 1947 (part of which follows) is characteristic. 2. Referenced memorandum states that a great many schools are now teaching Romaji at the elementary level and that both the Hepburn and Kunreishiki styles are being used. Question is raised therefore, as to whether the new edict of the Ministry will not, in effect, outlaw teaching of the Hepburn style by schools already using that system. . . .

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3. The statement that "There was no valid reason for objecting to Kunreishiki" might well give rise to a similar statement concerning other subjects which we feel either undesirable or untimely. . . . The announcement by the Ministry [to begin teaching romaji] has had only the effect of confusing the Japanese press and the Japanese public and of making it apparent that the Hepburn system is to be outlawed in favor of Kunreishiki. 4. Since it has been stated that Kunreishiki is not in itself nationalistic, it is requested that investigation be made into the Diet Proceedings at the time of its adoption, especially of the incident in which Dr. Batchelor, famous for his work with the Ainu, appeared before the Diet attacking Kunreishiki, and was answered by Dr. Tanakadate. It is the remarks of the latter in which I am interested. (Nugent 19473) It seems that Hall's assessment of trie situation following the USEM report was more accurate than Trainer's. Orr shot back a response the following day, taking the opportunity to point out to Nugent that the U.S. Army's own instructional manual in Japanese used Kunrei-shiki romanization (Orr 19470). Orr attached a statement in which Halpern details the history of the various romanization systems and pointedly remarks Accusations of militaristic and ultra-nationalistic purposes underlying adoption of Kunreishiki, when made by Japanese, usually refer to the deliberations of the Rinji Romaji Chosakai [see p. 53]. A copy of the first of two volumes of the proceedings of this committee has been obtained with difficulty by the Language Simplification Branch and is now being translated. It is anticipated that this document will provide reliable information on which to base an evaluation of the motives actuating the committee. Accusations made up to now have been vague, and when substantiation was requested, the only evidence provided was citation of a few statements by some adherents of the Nipponshiki and Kunreishiki systems that their opponents had a "colonial mentality." (Halpern 1947) Halpern concludes by strongly supporting the Ministry of Education's decision to use ICunrei-shiki romanization in the schools.70 As has already been remarked, Nugent was never persuaded. On 24 November 1947, he sent clown a letter dated 18 November from (to quote the GHQ transmittal check sheet) the "Japan Roman Letter Association" (that is, Nihon romaji kai) to Mark Orr, chief of the Education Division. The letter, which was accompanied by a copy of a booklet entitled "Sintei Romazi Tokuhon" (the use of Kunrei-shiki romanization corroborates the source), sought a relaxation of MacArthur's directive prescribing the Hepburn system. Nugent took the opportunity to let Orr know that he still had doubts about the politics of Kunrei-shiki supporters:

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Chief: EducDiv It's about time to tell these boys that any further requests to change SCAP directives will result in action on our part—and I'll initiate it. Also—point out to them that prior to 1939 and its nationalistic concomitants, all station signs were in the Hepburn system. Letters like these make one feel that there IS a tie-in between Kunrei-shiki and nationalism. These boys are going to defeat their own ends. DRN (Nugent i^4jb)

When the Ministry of Education needed to produce romaji textbooks, it was instructed to produce parallel editions in the three different systems. The ostensible reason for this was fairness: the ministry supported Kunrei-shiki; the advocates of Nippon-shiki were well organized, dedicated, and highly active; without special help, the Hepburn camp was the weakest of the three. The same policy could, however, be justly viewed as an indirect way of hindering efforts to develop a national consensus behind romanization in general. Because of Nugent's refusal to allow a single standard in the schools, the costs of textbook production were artificially increased and an air of uncertainty was created. Indeed, Orr wanted the Education Division to formulate a position on the Hepburn/Kunrei-shiki controversy precisely because the Ministry of Education wished to follow up on the USEM's recommendations by officially teaching romanization in the schools; this made a single standard a logical necessity. The Ministry of Education set up a Romaji kyoiku kyogikai (Romanization Education Consultative Board), which met from June through October 1946 and produced a report in which it suggested how the ministry should proceed. As a result, it was announced in January 1947 that romaji would be taught in elementary schools starting in April (the beginning of the Japanese school year). It should be noted that many schools on their own initiative previously had commenced instruction in Romaji. An affirmative reaction was received from 90 percent of the elementary schools which replied to a questionnaire circulated in February 1947 on the proposal to inaugurate instruction in Romaji. On 28 February the Vice-Minister issued an official notification to schools stipulating that the decision as to whether Romaji would be taught in any given school was to be left up to the principal. If taught, it was directed that Romaji be studied mainly by pupils of the fourth grade or above, but also by pupils of the third grade if so desired, during the hours allocated for Japanese language or free study. ("Development" 1950, 7, emphasis added) Since the Romaji kyoiku ky5gikai no longer existed, the Minister of Education created a Romaji chosakai (Romanization Study Committee) on 12 October 1948 to advise him; in June 1949, it was renamed Romaji chosa shingikai

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Table 9. Opinions on Romaji in the Regular Curriculum: 1949 Responses of Teachers Are your students interested in Romaji? Yes No Undecided No reply Is Romaji easy to teach? Yes ' No No different from other courses No reply Should the study of Romaji be continued? Yes No Undecided No reply What do you think of the number of hours allotted to Romaji? Need more Sufficient Need less No reply Do you think Romaji is useful to the students? Yes No Undecided No reply

64.1% 2.3 31.1 2.5 41.2% 8.4 48.1 2.3 74.2% 6.7 r6.8 2.3

27.4% 60.1 7.6 4.9 77.4% 2.1 18.0 2.5

Responses of Students Do you find the study of Romaji interesting? Yes No Undecided No reply Do you wish to continue studying Romaji? Yes No Undecided No reply What do you think of the number of hours allotted to Romaji? Too few (continued)

72.8% 9.3 15.5 2.4 52.8% n.o 35.2 i.o 44.0%

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Table 9. Opinions on Romaji in the Regular Curriculum: 1949 (continued) Just right Too many No reply What do you find most difficult about Romaji? Writing Roman letters Spelling Separating words Use of diacritical signs

46.5 6.8 2.7 35-1% 20.5 20.0 24.4

Responses of Parents Does your child read or speak of Romaji at home? Yes No No reply Do you think that Romaji is useful to your child? Yes No Undecided No reply Do you want your child to continue studying Romaji? Yes No Undecided No reply

61.0% 36.7 2.3 78.2% 5.0 r5.o 1.8 79.6% 4.6 13.6 2.2

Source: "Development" 1950, 9-11.

(Romanization Study Council) and was to report to the Research and Publication Bureau of the ministry. In April 1950, it was folded into the Kokugo shingikai (Japanese Language Council) (see page 57). Halpern was not involved with the literacy survey of 1948 (Yomikaki Noryoku Chosa linkai 1951, 32-33), but one development that came to fruition in 1949 seems to bear his imprint. This was a survey conducted from March through October 1949 by the Research and Publication Bureau of the Ministry of Education after instruction in the use of romaji had been underway for two years. The results, reported by CI&E ("Development" 1950, 9-11) and reproduced in table 9, show a high level of support for this innovation in the curriculum among the 544 teachers, 21,638 students, and 19,654 parents who responded from the 280 elementary and lower secondary schools canvassed.

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Halpern's crowning achievement, however, was to plant the seeds of the romaji education experiment in the Kyoiku kenshusho (Education Research Office) of the Ministry of Education, the forerunner of the Kokuritsu kyoiku kenkyujo (National Institute for Educational Research). Once again, Halpern was not in Japan to see his ideas implemented, but the first report on the experiment (Rdmaji Jikken Chosa linkai 1950) and a study by Ishiguro Yoshimi published in 1952 give him the credit for providing the necessary encouragement and direction. The basic concept was to set up experimental classes in subjects other than the Japanese language itself in which romaji would be used in all reading and writing tasks. The hypothesis to be tested was that students who did not have to learn kanji as a concomitant part of studying mathematics or the like would make faster progress than students who did. In other words, the experiment was not about "teaching romaji" but rather about "teaching by means of romaji" The importance of this elementary distinction cannot be overemphasized. For one thing, the very phrases "teaching romaji" and "teaching by means of romaji" are found in the translation of the minutes of the first meeting of the Romaji kyoiku kyogikai, held on 29 June 1946. Both Americans and Japanese knew about this distinction even before Halpern had appeared on the scene. Furthermore, whereas a large number of Japanese children were exposed to romaji as a result of the initiation of instruction in romaji in 1947, only the children in the experimental classes would be using romaji in place of kana and kanji for a major school task. Since the experimental class would not provide reinforcement in reading and writing traditional script, compensatory work would have to be done in Japanese (kokugo) classes so that these children would not be disadvantaged when they returned to the regular curriculum after the experiment. Ideally, the only difference between the experimental group and control group would have been that one learned romaji and the other kana and kanji, but this was impossible ethically. All this is made clear in the report of September 1950. Later complaints that the experiment lacked rigor must be viewed against this background. Although much remains to be learned about Flalpern's work in Japan, it is clear that he understood the value of the unique opportunity that the Occupation afforded: perhaps for the one and only time in Japanese history, an experiment could be conducted that would cut through the "miasma of halftruths, speculation, irrational and tangential reactions" (see p. 128) that surrounded the romanization question. Even if, for political reasons, script reform went no further than limiting the number of kanji and introducing a phonetically grounded kanazukai, the experiment was worth conducting; not only might it finally settle a dispute that lay at the heart of calls for script reform in

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Japan, but also it could produce results of more general applicability. After all, whatever the state of literacy in Japan, the situation in China was clearly far more desperate. Unfortunately, few in CI&E or the Ministry of Education shared Halpern's dedication to science.

sThe Romaji Education Experiment Evidence Jrom Trainor and the GHQJSCAT Archives Although the results of the romaji education experiment have remained largely a mystery, the experiment itself was no secret at the time. Walter C. Eells, who had served as an advisor on higher education in the CI&E section of GHQ/SCAP mentioned it in passing in an article he published shortly after returning to the United States. In addition to introducing Romaji instruction in the regular school system, the Ministry [of Education] has developed a program of experimental Romaji education under the administration of the National Institute for Educational Research. Extending over the school years 1948-49, 1949-50, and 1950-51 this program is seeking to compare the effectiveness of the use of Romaji with that of the combined use of Kanji and Kana as instruments of reading and learning ability, and also to measure the relative effectiveness of the three systems of Romaji. The program included 89 experimental classes the first year, 120 the second, and 101 in the final years of 1950-51. The results of this threeyear experiment are being awaited with interest. (Eells 1952, 212)

In fact, some data from the experiment were published on i March 1951 by the Japanese Ministry of Education, but the report was not widely circulated and lay virtually unknown until 1991, when Banno Yuichiro and I independently found copies of it in the National Diet Library and the National Institute for Educational Research, respectively. Furthermore, the report was neither the only nor the most revealing document about the experiment. The experiment is of course mentioned in the memoirs of Joseph Trainor. His version of the events may be thought of as "official" in that it probably reflects not only Trainer's attitudes but also Nugent's. It is reproduced in appendix B. Especially noteworthy is Trainor's reference to the report pre86

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sented to CI&E in September 1950 (Romaji Jikken Chosa linkai 1950); this document does not support Trainor's comments on the role of math education in the experiment. Likewise, Trainor's assertion "that ROMAJI is PRIMARILY A FORM OF LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION and was so conducted in the experiment" (emphasis added) is at odds with the actual goal and implementation of the experiment. These two points, among others, strongly suggest that although Trainor knew about the September report, he was confused about the experiment. Most likely, when he wrote his memoirs, he did not consult the report but relied instead on the covering memo dated 9 October 1950 to Arthur K. Loomis (who had by then replaced Orr as chief of the Education Division) from Howell V. Calhoun, Education Research Officer: 1. The National Institute for Educational Research commenced a three year program of experimental Romaji education in September 1948. The purpose of the program is to measure the effectiveness of Romaji as compared with the combined use of Kana and Chinese ideographs and also the relative effectiveness of the three systems of Romaji in common use. 2. In March 1950 the Committee on Experimentation in Romaji Education, which directs the program, conducted a test to measure the progress that had been made during the first two years. On 18 September 1950 the Head of the Institute submitted to Education Research a report on the findings of this test, a translation of which is appended to this memo. 3. It is hard to find words to describe how completely this project has been bungled. At a total cost of over ¥1,000,000 there are practically no results to speak of. The report itself is largely an apology for the failure of the schools and teachers concerned to carry out the program successfully. 4. The decision as to what schools were to participate in the program was made by the Committee in 1948 on the basis of lists submitted to it by the leaders of the three systems of Romaji. The main criterion was to secure wide geographical distribution. No attempt was made by the Committee to visit the schools participating, although in the course of three years, some Committee members have visited schools on an individual basis. 5. Despite the fact that it has been a three year experimental program, the basic unit has been only a one year period, as schools were permitted to drop out after the end of the first year and new schools were enrolled in the program at the beginning of the second and third years. Of the money expended, all that above the cost of text books went toward the payment of bonuses to teachers engaged in the program (¥500 per teacher in the first year; ¥200 per teacher in the second) and for travelling expenses for the Committee members. 6. Perhaps the most discouraging feature of the entire program is the test that was devised to measure the program's progress at the end of two years. In spite

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of the fact that 60% of the time of the classes participating was spent on Romaji, the test consisted merely of a one page sheet of questions in arithmetic. This sheet was written in Hepburn, Nippon, and Kunrei Romaji, and in Kanamajiri, respectively, and formed the sole basis for measuring the relative effectiveness of these four writing mediums. The test in kanamajiri for second year students contained only two Kanji outside of the Chinese numerals, although pupils learn a total of 130 Kanji by the end of the second year. 7. The whole purpose of the program was to measure the ability of the students as developed by the Romaji systems and the combined use of Chinese characters and Kana, and the test, therefore, is the whole apex of the program. After the expenditure of over ¥r,ooo,ooo, a test was produced which was a measure not of reading, but of mathematical ability, and which probably did not take more than one hour to compose. 8. There is some hope of salvaging matters by the development of a sound, scientifically devised test for use at the end of the third year in March 1951. But the whole program had been conducted in such a slipshod fashion that it is doubtful that any findings would be valid or reliable. (Calhoun 19503) As a comparison of this memo with the text in appendix B makes plain, Trainor relied heavily on what others within CI&E relayed to him. Though he passed strong negative judgments on both the idea of script reform and its backers, a genuine personal understanding of the events or the individuals involved appears to have played less of a role in his thinking than his perception that both were causing needless difficulties for his organization. On 4 November 1950, Loomis sent the September report to Nugent, together with Calhoun's assessment, on which he expanded: It is believed necessary to discuss this matter with the Vice Minister of Education very frankly. Authority is requested to tell him that the experimental program has involved waste of funds under a misleading caption as an experimental program. While it may be necessary for the Minister to permit the preparation of a report at the end of the three year period in March 1951 the findings can carry no weight whatever because of the slipshod methods used in the project. (Loomis 1950) Nugent's handwritten response, also dated 4 November, can be found at the bottom of the page: "This is a truly sad story. To be frank, I hardly expected anything more. I agree that the matter should be discussed with the ViceMinister." Nevertheless, as noted in the report that caused all the consternation, "Outline of the Experiment in Romaji Education" (Romaji Jikken Chosa linkai 1950), the experiment had been officially launched at Nugent's own request:

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Col. Nugent of CI&E sent a letter to the [Education Research] Office, dated 9 December 1947 worded as follows: "It is desired to have an institute for scientific research into the question of Romanization. We understand that the proposed program is to provide such data. The number of students to be tested and observed is going to be rather small, but this small number is advantageous for thorough observation. We hope there will be many cooperators in this program."

Other passages in the report (cited later) likewise suggest that while Nugent had felt compelled to let the experiment move forward, he had no real interest in seeing that it was carried out properly. The story may have been "sad," but it did not displease him. From the very beginning, the experiment was plagued by logistical problems. "It was decided that the experiment in Romaji education would be started in the 1948-49 fiscal year. But the budget for that year was already fixed." As a result, everything had to be financed through special appropriations. In March 1948, the Education Research Office organized a 25 member committee (see table 10) to oversee the experiment, but not until December was the committee able to organize a sufficient number of experimental classes. "To find competent teachers was particularly difficult." In addition, suitable textbooks were not produced in a timely manner. Romaji texts for the fourth year came out as late as August 1948. But these books were for the ordinary classes, and not sufficient for the experimental classes. Arithmetic textbooks were therefore transcribed into each of the three systems of Romaji for the use of the experimental classes. The cost of printing the textbooks consumed the greater part of the appropriations, leaving very little for the operation of the experiment.

As a result, when experimental instruction began on 8 September 1948, only arithmetic textbooks for third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classes were available; all other subjects had to be taught from regular textbooks, and students were "requested to use Romaji on blackboards and in their notebooks." Halpern returned to the United States soon after instruction began. Perhaps that was why, despite better planning and an increase in the number of schools that sought experimental classes in the second year, "the desired amount of appropriations again was not secured." Textbooks were needed for second- and sixth-grade classes (which had not been included the previous year), but none could be provided. In the meantime, changes in the arithmetic curriculum for the third, fourth, and fifth grades rendered the remaining stock of textbooks virtually useless. Staffing changes in the schools and on the committee also complicated matters. For the third year, the entire experiment was

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Table 10. Members of the Romanization Experiment Survey Committee. Chairman Hidaka Daishiro

Chief, National Education Research Institute Vice-Chairmen

Hatano Kanji Ishiguro Shu

Professor, Ochanomizu University Member, National Education Research Institute Members

Miyazaki Katsuji Maeda Shizuo Kito Reizo Aoyama Masaji Saeki Kosuke Mio Suna Okunaka Kozo Hattori Fujio Hattori Shiro Kobayashi Hideo Doi Kochi Endo Yoshiki Sakuma Kanae Umezu Hachizo Shimazu Kazuo Kido Bantaro Hara Toshio Hosoi Fusao Kitaoka Kenji Murakami Toshisuke Nishio Minoru Iwabuchi Etsutaro

Instructor, Attached Middle School, Tokyo Higher Normal School Instructor, Hiroo Elementary School, Tokyo Chief, Education Section, Romaji Campaign (Nippon system) Instructor, Kinuta Elementary School, Tokyo Director, Japan Romaji Society (Kunrei system) Director, New Education Research Institute Director, Romaji Hirome Kai (Hepburn system) Professor, Senmonbu Meiji Gakuin Assistant Professor, Tokyo UniversityProfessor, Tokyo Technical University Professor, Tsuda-juku University Professor, Kyoto University Former Professor, Kyushu University Assistant Professor, Tokyo University Member, National Education Research Institute Member, National Education Research Institute Chief, Japanese Language Section, Research and Publication Section, Ministry of Education Official, Publication and Research Bureau, Ministry of Education Chief, General Affairs Section, Japanese Language Research Institute Member, Japanese Language Research Institute Chief, Japanese Language Research Institute Member, Japanese Language Research Institute

Note: Ishiguro's name was Yoshimi, not Shu or Osarau, as given in several CI&E documents. Source: Trainor Collection, Box 37. (Corrections, JMU)

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to be moved from the Kyoiku kenkyujo to the Kokugo kenkyujo (National Language Research Institute), but the Ministry of Education once again failed to provide funding; the Kyoiku kenkyujo therefore decided to pay for the final year out of its own operating budget. When one considers the power that Nugent wielded through his control of the paper supply71 and the clout that his directives to the Ministry of Education carried, it is obvious that neither he nor anyone responsible for budget in the ministry was enthusiastic about the experiment. Furthermore, the difficulty of finding suitable teachers cannot be overstated. In order to test the experimental hypothesis properly, teachers would need not only to have experience in elementary education but also to feel at home with romaji themselves, understand the purpose and protocol of the experiment, stand up to unsympathetic principals if necessary, and give reassurance to parents. Teachers with such qualifications would obviously have to come from the ranks of the organizations that supported one of the three competing systems of romanization. Given the virtual suppression of these organizations by the wartime government, the loss of life and dislocations caused by the war, and the grim economic situation during the late 19405, the fact that competent volunteers could be found at all is, in itself, remarkable. Finally, Nugent was unwilling to let the Ministry of Education select a single romanization standard. Superficially, this was just to be fair, but in reality, there was an ulterior motive. Intrasection memoranda and notes cited earlier (Halpern 1946^ 1947; Orr 19473,1947^ Nugent 19473, i947b) make it clear that Nugent believed that supporters of Nippon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki were cryptonationslists, despite persistent attempts by Orr and Halpern to disabuse him of his misconceptions. The true effect of insisting that textbooks had to be prepared in all three systems was to squander money on a relatively unimportant aspect of the experiment and thus starve its more deserving components. Despite all the obstacles thrown in the path of the experimenters, and in direct contradiction of vvhatTrainor and Calhoun both state, the report of September 1950 contained some positive results: In the second year grade, the Romaji classes using the Nippon System gave a better showing than the ordinary classes both in calculation and applied questions. Kunrei system classes did the poorest work. In the third grade, the Kunrei classes did the best work both in calculation and applied questions, and the Hepburn classes did the poorest. In calculation questions, the Romaji classes generally did better than the KanjiKana classes. In the fourth grade, the Nippon class showed the best achievements in both types of questions with Kunrei, Kanji-Kana and Hepburn classes following in this order.

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Except for the calculation questions for the second grade, the KanjiKana classes gave better showings than the average of the Rornaji classes of three systems throughout the grades. But when broken down to three systems, classes using one of the three systems of Romaji [viz. Nippon-shiki] were invariably at the top or ahead of the Kanji-kana classes. This signifies that instruction in Romaji could bring out better results than in Kanji and Kana if it is properly given. Compared to instruction in Chinese characters and Kana, Romaji education is heavily handicapped with respect to teaching materials and teaching circumstances. Therefore, the fact that the Romaji classes showed any better achievements whatever than the ordinary classes counts for much (especially in view of the fact that some teachers were sub-standard, resulting in the lowering of the average scores). They could have done better jobs if they had been guided properly. (Romaji Jikken Chosa linkai rgjo) A document from another part of the Trainor Collection casts additional light on the experiment up to the autumn of 1950.1 quote from it here at length because of its relative inaccessibility; it has not been cited in any previous scholarly treatment of the period as far as I am aware. It was written by Kito Reizo, a member of the Romaji jikken ch5sa iinkai, and is dated 5 September 1950; it is a report from the grass roots. The following excerpts have been edited to untangle the often garbled English, 72 but the original wording has been preserved as much as possible. Kito begins with some pertinent history: The principle underlying these experimental classes is that, with the agreement of parents, romaji is to be used by teachers and pupils in their reading and writing except in lessons on the Japanese language. The object is to compare the results obtained under such conditions with those that are observed when Chinese and kana characters are used exclusively. The National Institute for Educational Research set about this experiment in 1948; at the strong urging of Dr. Halpern of CI&E, Mr. Bantaro Kido, former head of the Institute, bravely undertook this task and was assisted by Mr. Osamu Ishiguro. (Kito rgjo, 26) (Ishiguro had been the chief statistician for the massive literacy survey of 1948, published in 1951 and produced with the assistance of CI&E.) Kito then makes some remarks that clarify why the budget situation was as bad as it was: The Education Ministry and Finance Ministry did not supply funds sufficient for the experiment; they drew up an estimate for two years although the experiment was scheduled for three. This year, therefore, there is no budget for the experiment; it was about to cease but on account of the recommendation of Dr. Stalnaker of CI&E and our entreaties, it has been given a reprieve. . . .

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In order to secure suitable teachers, we wrote to persons connected with our association. Because of wartime policies, there are few persons who have taught romaji for any length of time; many candidates were mere amateurs when it came to teaching, so we decided to train teachers on the job by making the rounds of the schools where experimental classes were being conducted. It was a great burden on us to expend our own money and labor in order to visit every class from Hokkaido to Kagoshima, but gradually we were able to locate teachers in every district willing to join the experiment. All of them are working hard and with enthusiasm. We were frankly surprised by our success in this area. (26—27)

Although CI&E documents make it appear as if Occupation and Japanese authorities were footing the entire bill, such was not the case: It was difficult for us to be passive bystanders when we observed the eagerness of teachers and parents to participate in romaji education. One outstanding example was Mr. Ichiji Konishi, principal of Matsugae Elementary School in Kanazavva City. He is not usually in charge of a class, but he worked hard in his experimental class while performing his duties as principal. Almost everyday for the two years he taught the experimental class, he did not return home until around 9 or ro at night. When we started off, we had only introductory books for fourth grade and a reader for the seventh or eighth grade. Somehow, we managed to raise money and began to try to produce textbook or supplementary material, but were unable to make much progress: in the first year, we printed only 326 pages and created two mimeographed pamphlets; the following year, fortunately, we were able to add 1,845 Pages an d another mimeographed pamphlet; this year, 4,800 pages were added between April and July. (The estimated number of pages is based on octavo format.) Because parents would have to pay even if we were to sell these materials to students in the experimental classes at cost, we solicited special donations so that those parents who could not afford more could pay only a half or a third of cost. In the end, the number of words in the romaji textbooks for the first and second grades has now grown as great as or greater than the number of words in the conventional kanamajiribun textbooks. In the textbooks for the upper grades, however, the number of words of text is still considerably less. In science and mathematics, we have taken the initiative and begun systematic editing of materials; we predict an increase in publication in a year. Consequently, the problem of having an insufficient volume of text should be solved within at least one or two years. (27-29)

While acknowledging that there was prejudice against the use of romanization and antipathy to the experiment, Kito makes clear where the resistance was coming from.

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Misunderstanding among parents about romaji is virtually negligible, for parents are satisfied as long as their children do well. That, of course, does not mean they will quickly discard the centuries-old belief that the learning of the traditional writing system lies at the very core of education. It is difficult for them to understand that the essence of learning lies in increasing the content of one's knowledge and in increasing one's powers of judgment, for which purposes romaji are as serviceable as traditional script. The problem of misunderstanding the goals of using romaji was more urgent among principals. Local boards of education and educational leaders were generally indifferent and sometimes prejudiced against this experiment. (29)

The examples Kit5 produces to illustrate this point, though rather lengthy, are worth quoting in full because they convey a strong sense of the pressures under which adult participants in the experiment worked. The following incident, which occurred in the experimental class of H. Elementary School in H. City, Y. Prefecture, is illustrative. In March 1948, the principal of this school agreed to hire Mr. T. Y. for the experimental class, but remained adamantly opposed to all aspects of the experiment; at last, the PTA yielded to his blandishments and decided to oppose the experimental class. But because the children in the experimental class had done excellent work, the PTA couldn't find grounds for terminating the class. As a matter of fact, Mr. T. Y. was so diligent and earnest that he had given his charges mathematics textbooks for the sixth grade that he had transcribed at his own expense (no such romaji textbooks had been printed). As a last resort, the principal decided to examine the children's ability in kanji in the experimental class and in a regular class, but notified only the regular class beforehand; the children in the experimental class were given no chance to prepare. Even so, the results of this kanji test have never been released, perhaps because the children in the experimental class actually performed as well as or better than the children in the regular class. Because educational leaders in Y. prefecture at that time understood romaji very well, Mr. T. Y. was not subject to ill treatment. A more grievous incident also occurred, but as it is in the process of being settled at this time, I will not discuss it here. Another example occurred in ^48, when Mr. N., principal of N. Elementary school in H. City, not only participated in an experimental class, but also tried to teach romaji earnestly to non-experimental classes. In March 1949, I received a letter from him to the effect that he wanted to know the plans for next year's experimental classes as he wished to continue this work. Shortly thereafter, he was ordered to retire and another principal was appointed to succeed him who was completely uninterested in the romaji experiment. As might be expected, the experimental class stagnated. There are many reasons for principals to retire and teachers to be transferred, so it

The Romaji Education ExperimentT 9^

was not hard to find rationalizations for Mr. N.'s retirement, but judging from the way the Board of Education settled upon his replacement, it was clear to us that the prefecture had no understanding of the romaji experimental class; this had a strong, negative influence on how things proceeded. H. City decided to use the fourth grade romaji textbook only just at the time of Mr. N.'s retirement. I asked Mr. N. by letter if there were a link between his retirement and romaji; without answering my question directly, he replied simply that he had done his duty. In Japanese offices, there are no procedures for grieving against the misconduct of senior officials. If we complain to our supervisors about such conduct, our complaints are in most cases hushed up, and those who complain are generally subject to retaliation. Because "might makes right," it is likely that those who confided the foregoing information to me would not have done so had they known I would report it here. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for higher officials to try to cool enthusiasm for giving romaji a try. When we made our grand tour, we tried to hold teacher's workshops to enlighten the general public on the romaji experiment in each school. Whether someone starts off liking or disliking romaji, it is reasonable to assume that all would want to have an experiment to see for themselves what the results of using romaji really are. Yet in most cases when we were allowed to run a workshop, the funding had to be charged against the budget for the experimental class itself. The National Institute for Educational Research sent only ¥500 a year to every teacher in charge of the experiment; the school, PTA, and teacher had to pay from their own pockets for all other expenses. Any service, however slight, we could provide was therefore of help. No urban board of education or education department lacks the money for an experimental class, but they say, "We will pay for this work only if the Education Ministry or the NIER [National Institute for Educational Research] orders us to do so." In fact, very few subsidize this experiment. At the [planning?] meeting concerning this experiment, I urged that the NIER ask boards of education to take over some of the expense of this work, but they answered that Japanese habits of government business would not permit this. (29-32) Favorable comments on the degree of acceptance of romanization by the pupils themselves were potentially self-serving and are therefore harder to believe, but they probably have a basis in fact, for here, as in other places where Kito wishes to protect those who confided in him, he uses initials instead of full names: When children understand romaji, they like it very much. The key lies in the introductory period: the "learning through reading" approach and "analytic" method, though originally developed for languages like English that have

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difficult, irregular spelling systems, produce excellent results even when applied to simple systems such as that of romanized Japanese. The lively atmosphere in the experimental classrooms would never be seen in classes that must study using Chinese characters and kana. The children at K. Elementary School in N. City who were members of an experimental class during their first year in school found fault with Chinese characters in their second-year classes. The fifth-grade pupils who had been in the experimental class at O. Elementary School in I. Prefecture for a year, had to cease their romaji when they entered sixth grade as a result of the actions of school inspectors and the lack of understanding shown by fellow teachers and the school's principal; these students complained, "Why can't we write romaji in our notebooks? It is easier for us to write in romaji" Indeed, similar opinions may be heard among students even in non-experimental classes where teachers teach romaji diligently. (33)

This passage and the one that follows show that Kito was no amateur and had considerable familiarity with elementary pedagogy. (Notice too that here Kito gives full names.) The romaji experimental classes revealed that many academically weaker children could be saved from failure. There are basically two large groups of children unable to read in traditional Japanese schools: one group are those who have not grasped the fundamental idea that characters stand for words; the other are those who are unable to identify word-forms. The teachers in the romaji experimental classes were able to help many such children by adopting a "learning through reading" approach and an "analytic" method of instruction. Because they were using romaji rather than Chinese characters or kana to write Japanese, it was virtually inevitable that their students would have fewer difficulties. At Okidate Elementary School in Aornori City, for example, one teacher began teaching romaji one day in April 1950, even though his was not an experimental class. On the third day of romaji instruction, he was visited and thanked by a parent of one of his pupils. The pupil had been unable to write or read even his name in Chinese characters or kana for the past year, but could write romaji from the second day of instruction. AtAsoda Elementary School in Aichi Prefecture, the ability to read and write romaji shown by a child who had suffered from meningitis (and was therefore understandably the poorest student in the class) was on the same level as the average result in a literacy test involving Chinese characters and kana. Children who hated to study other lessons worked at romaji willingly and sometimes improved in other subjects as well — such stories can be heard about nonexperimental as well as experimental classes. For these children, it is almost magical that mastery of a handful of alphabetic characters provides a foundation for extensive cognitive development. (33-34)

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The experiment at least partially confirmed the experimental hypothesis: The romaji experimental class showed that gifted children can read even difficult books to the full extent of their ability. In the experimental class of Kojima Elementary School, Nagasaki City, there are three children who read fifth-grade textbooks in romaji before they entered second grade, a cause of much surprise since there are not a few teachers who have trouble reading romaji textbooks at the fifth-grade level themselves. In November 1949, even more impressive results were reported from the first-year class of the elementary school attached to Sakaide Normal School: after six months' instruction in romaji, one third of the pupils were reading books aimed at third-year students, and another third were reading books for second year. At the end of a whole year, many children easily read books for the fourth or fifth year students. This is probably the most dramatic example in all of Japan, but similar results, albeit on a lesser scale, have been observed in many of the experimental classes. They contrast sharply with the situation in classes where the use of Chinese characters and kana prevent students from reading at the full extent of their linguistic abilities.73 (35)

Kite's comments about the transition from experimental to regular classes show that he was by no means doctrinaire and understood that, practically speaking, the most that could be hoped for in the short run was to gain legitimacy for romaji as a complement to traditional orthography, not as a replacement for it. Parents with children in an experimental class are often afraid that their children might be held back because of poor training in the use of Chinese characters and kana. We were also concerned about this possibility, but were of the opinion that children could compensate for time lost studying Chinese characters and kana during the experiment if they developed other language abilities through the study of romaji. Fear is greatest among those parents whose children joined an experimental class in first grade, but results showed that these worries were groundless. The children usually had no trouble with the traditional curriculum after an adjustment period of six to eighteen months. In the case of the first-year experimental class of Sakaide Elementary School, pupils learned kana within half a year by studying picture books at home, and their parents appreciatively said that their study of romaji at school had been a good bargain. In the case of Kojima Elementary School in Nagasaki Git}', parents whose children are now in third grade are pleased for the same reason. Indeed, in the case of the second and higher grades, the ability to read and write Chinese characters and kana often shows better progress among students from experimental than from regular classes. If a child's language skills and ability to verbalize have been enriched through the use of

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romaji, these will be of use when they read sentences written in traditional script. The more difficult the Chinese characters are, the more keen the interest and positive the attitude toward reading in general shown by the pupils. This suggests that even if students study traditional script later, the initial use of romaji is a desirable way to introduce reading because it allows for the early development of language skills and the enrichment of the ability to verbalize thoughts. . . . Another source of anxiety for parents was that their children would suffer on their entrance examinations for middle school if the children learned to read with romaji, since romaji would not be used in middle school. It was found, however, that as long as students were not evaluated with tests of the prewar kind, which required the rote memorization of Chinese characters, there was no basis for this anxiety. In 1948, Mr. Odawara's class at the Kugahara Elementary School in Tokyo and Mr. Tanaka's class at Hanagai Elementary School in [B]ofu City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, showed good scores on entrance exams. After entrance, these students got especially high marks in English. This fact tells us that if romaji and English are taught correctly, the fear that romaji may become a hindrance in the study of English is misplaced. Indeed, we often heard from both children and parents, for example at Matsugae Elementary School in Kanazawa City or at the Third Fukuda Elementary School in Okayama Prefecture, that the failure of middle schools to continue instruction in romaji was regrettable. (36-38)

One of the important aspects of the overall education reform instituted by the Occupation was the introduction of Parent Teacher Associations into Japanese schools. Kito refers extensively to PTAs in the following series of anecdotes. Again, though lengthy, these stories bring out the human side of the experiment and are therefore worth citing in their entirety. A mother of one of the students in the Sakaide experimental class complained to me in November 1949 that her child's was the only class in which romaji were being taught. Why, she asked, doesn't the Ministry of Education increase the number of classes to one or two hundred? I later learned that the first-grade class in this school, while not an experimental class, was scheduled to use romaji in 1950: this decision was clearly the result of the strong feelings of the parents and the support of the teacher. At the Third Fukuda Elementary School in Okayama Prefecture, the enthusiasm of the PTA for assisting schools with experimental classes, the foremost of which are under the direction of Mr. Kataoka, grew considerably; the PTA decided to double its contribution to these schools before the principal was aware of what was happening. "4 In fact, PTA meetings on the experimental classes were held in every precinct of the town and the lively discussions sometimes lasted until dawn.

The Romaji Education Experiment

At Sasayame Elementary School in Kurume City in March 1950 and Enomoto Elementary School in Osaka City in March 1949, there were plans to add a further experimental class, and the schools were greatly embarrassed when they could not meet the demands of parents. There were no unhappy parents of children in the classes of Mr. Tochinai at the Hosui Elementary School in Sapporo City, of Mr. K. Sato atYuza Elementary School in Yamagata Prefecture, off?] at Anagimi Elementary School in Kofu City, and of Mr. Katsuji Konishi at Matsugae Elementary School in Kanagawa City. At Ogori Elementary School in Yamaguchi Prefecture, a hopeless class that had been left to itself by a teacher who taught nothing for two full years, took part in the experiment. By March ^49, after only six months, this class has made such great progress that it was hardly recognizable as the same group of students. Parents therefore voluntarily contributed the necessary funds to keep the experiment going. Mr. Yukunari Tanaka, the teacher of this class said, even with these children, it was easy to teach romaji but was very difficult to recover the two years of learning of Chinese characters that had been neglected by the previous teacher. The chief director of the Prefectural Board of Education visited the class of Mr. Ota at Asoda Elementary School in Aichi Prefecture and tried to dig up complaints about the romaji experimental class from parents. His manner of questioning was so blatantly unfair that anyone who had heard it would have been angry, but no complaints were forthcoming. In fact, after observing lessons in the experimental class, the director began to revise his thinking about romaji entirely. At Himi Elementary School in Nagasaki Prefecture, the principal and vice-principal called together parents opposed to the romaji experiment and discussed their concerns with them at length. As a result, these parents have become absorbed in the experiment and supporters of. romaji education. Similar anecdotes can be gleaned elsewhere as well. It would seem that the satisfaction of parents and pupils with mastering romaji is related to the fear and uncertainty they originally had about the experiment. At the same time, we should give full credit to the self-sacrifice, determination, and humanity of the teachers who have joined the experiment and brought forth their results while working under unfair conditions and with poor support. We would therefore do well to consider not only a comparison of scores by students who have learned to read through romaji and through Chinese characters but also by considering the difference in attitudes among the teachers. We should also consider the need for education of parents in romaji, which has been called for in some locations. If such measures are not taken, if the number of romaji experimental classes is not increased in the years ahead, or if the classes are not continued until objectively reliable data can be collected, then the hard work of these pioneer teachers will have been in vain. (38—40)

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Although some may find all this hard to believe, it is inconceivable that Kit5 was guilty of more than excessive enthusiasm. It is significant that Trainor had this document in his possession when he composed his memoirs. As has already been noted, Trainor chose to rely heavily on communications from Calhoun instead. Calhoun held fortnightly meetings with Hara Toshio, who was chief of the Japanese Language Section (Kokugo ka) of the Ministry of Education and also a member of the Romaji jikken chosa iinkai. Calhoun's conference reports are key documents for tracing the history of the experiment. In his report of 21 December 1950, he relays information from Hara stating, "The Panel on the Spoken Language | of the Kokugo shingikai] met on 18 December and heard an address by Mrs. W. J. Jorden, wife of the AP Correspondent, on syntax. Mrs. Jorden assisted Prof. Brooke [sic] of Yale University in writing the book Spoken Japanese. She will attend the meetings of this Panel from now on" (Calhoun i95oc). The former Mrs. William Jorden is Dr. Eleanor Harz Jorden, who earned her Ph.D. in linguistics at Yale under the direction of Bernard Bloch in 1950. When interviewed in 1991, she not only had no recollection of having addressed a group of Japanese on the subject of syntax in late 1950, but said frankly that at the time, she was not fluent enough in Japanese to have put on the performance attributed to her. She denied having been invited to attend regular meetings by this or any other official panel of experts. The cause of the mistaken report is a mystery; it could be attributed to garbled interpretation, a conflation of two different documents by an unknown typist, or misleading information intentionally planted by Hara. Whatever the reason, it seems that Calhoun took a perfunctory attitude toward his job. 75 Loomis, it will be recalled, believed that it would be a waste of time and money for the Ministry of Education to prepare "a report at the end of the three year period in March 1951" summarizing the experiment, but Nugent's note of 4 November 1950 called for discussions with the Vice-Minister. As Trainor observes, steps were taken to "salvage" the experiment. Calhoun's conference reports show that plans were afoot within a month. On 5 December, he wrote: Mr. Hara further reported that a plan for measuring the results of the three year experimental program in Romaji education which will come to a close in March 1951 will be prepared jointly by the National Language Research Institute, the National Educational Research Institute, and the M/E [Ministry of Education] Japanese Language Section. The plan will be carried out by the present Committee on Experimentation in Romaji Education and will include a national survey of the experimental classes and separate surveys of individual classes. (Calhoun ig5ob)

The Romaji Education Experiment

ioi

To this he added, "The new program of experimental Romaji education to commence in April 1951 will be conducted by the National Language Research Institute, the National Educational Research Institute, and will be coordinated by the M/E Japanese Language Section," which showed that Hara, at least, assumed that funding would be available for a continuation beyond the original three-year time frame. In Calhoun's report of 21 December, more details are given: It was further reported by Mr. Hara that a preliminary test for the third and final year of the Romaji Experimental Program will be held on 10 January at the Kyugen Elementary School in Tokyo. From 20-31 January one Hepburn and one Nippon class will be examined individually, and a random survey on the ability to read, write, and understand Chinese characters will be held in six primary schools towards the end of January. (Calhoun 19500)

Here it becomes apparent that "salvaging" the experiment involved altering its original intent. Halpern's idea had been to find out whether or not Japanese children could make faster academic progress if they were spared the need to learn kanji as part of their studies. The experiment was to compare achievement in subjects OTHER THAN the Japanese language itself, but the message that was evidently communicated from CI&E to the Ministry of Education between 4 November and 5 December 1950 was the opposite. Children were to be tested to determine to what extent participation in the experimental classes had impaired their ability to read and write Japanese in traditional script. This is why Trainor pedantically added, "It must be kept in mind that romaji is primarily a form of language instruction and was so conducted in the experiment," which is and was false. Recall too that Trainor complains, "The test in the traditional written forms for the second year students contained exactly two Chinese characters, although by the end of the second year pupils are expected to have learned some 130 of them." That could not have been a problem if only students in the control group were presented with problems in kanamajiribun; it would have been a problem only if the students IN THE EXPERIMENTAL GROUP were to be tested on kanji reading ability, contrary to the experiment's original design. After the start of the new year, the schedule of tests had undergone some changes, as is indicated by Calhoun's report of 9 January 1951: Mr. Hara also stated that a preliminary test for the third and final year of the Romaji Experimental program will be held at the Kyugen ElementarySchool on 12 January and at the Kuromon Elementary School on 13 January. Both of these schools are in Tokyo. The questionnaire to be used in the

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Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

main test will be finalized on the basis of the findings of the preliminary test. The main test will be held on 30 January at the following elementary schools (systems of Romaji being taught are indicated in parentheses): Ogimachi Elementary School in Tokyo (Kunrei); Enomoto Elementary School in Osaka (Nippon); and Torimachi Elementary School in Sendai (Hepburn). These three schools are considered to be the best among those teaching the three systems. (Calhoun 19513)

By 23 January, the first results were in hand: Mr. Hara also reported on the results of the preliminary test on the basis of which the final test for measuring the results of the three year Romaji experimental program will be worked out. Three Tokyo classes all using the Nippon system were tested altogether, one experimental class at the Kyugen Elementary School, and two Romaji classes not participating in the experimental program, at the Kuromon Elementary School. At the Kyugen School, a sixth grade class considered average in Romaji, which had been studying it for two years, made the following scores on the examination (appended to this conference report). A total of 37 students took the test. No. of Students 6 11 6 7 i 1 3 2

Grade 5 (perfect score) 4 3 2 2.5 1.5 i O

At the Kuromon School, a sixth grade class considered below average in Romaji, which had been studying the subject for two years, made the following scores on the examination (appended to this conference report). A total of 48 students took the test. No. of Students 8 1

Grade 4 (perfect score) 3

7 9 6

2

3

o-5

5

°

i

A fourth grade class at the same school which had been studying Romaji for less than a year made the following scores on the examination (appended to this conference report). A total of 44 students took the test.

The Romaji Education Experiment

Parti No. of Students i o 5 i i

3 33

Grade 3 (perfect score) 2

Part 11 No. of Students Grade 3 (perfect score) 3 2

1

1

1.5

103

38

2 1

o

O.y 0.3 O

The poor showing of these students was attributed to the fact that Question 2 of Part I, and Part II were apparently unintelligible to a majority of those taking the examination. (Calhoun ig5ib)

Unfortunately, the material "appended" is not in the folder with the copy of the report. Calhoun continues: Mr. Hara stated that the main test will be held according to the following schedule: System Kunrei Nippon Hepburn

Location Kyoto Osaka Sendai

Name of School Seishin Elem. Sch. Enomoto Elem. Sch. Torimachi Elem. Sch.

Date 5,6 Feb. 4,6 Feb. 4, 5 Feb.

In addition to the type of material used in the preliminary test, reading, comprehension, dictation, and composition will be added in the main test. Sections in kanamajm will also be given to serve as a basis for comparison with the Romaji. Interviews will be held with principals, teachers, and PTA officials to evaluate the experimental program. (iQ5ib) Hara reported progress to Calhoun, who noted it in his report of 21 February: Mr. Hara further reported that the final tests to measure the results of the three year Romaji experimental program were held in Kyoto, Osaka, and Sendai during the first week in February. Interviews were held with teacher consultants, teachers, principals, and parents in each area. These were followed by reading comprehension, oral comprehension, dictation, and composition tests in the three systems of Romaji. Classes not studying Romaji were given identical tests in kanji and'kana for purposes of comparison of scores. The results of these tests will be available by the end of March. (Calhoun 19510) Hara met again with Calhoun according to a report dated 13 March (igjid), but did not mention the romaji experiment. There is, however, a report, dated

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Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

26 March (igjie), of a meeting at which Kito promised to present a written statement to Calhoun on the status of the experiment. This statement must be the one appended to the following memorandum of 23 April from Calhoun to Loomis: 1. Appended to this memo is a translation of a statement written in Nippon Romaji by Mr. Reizo Kito, a leading advocate of this system. Mr. Kito discusses the details of the M/E's plans for conducting a new Romaji experimental program in the 1951-52 fiscal year. An appropriation of ¥685,000 has been appropriated for this purpose in the M/E's budget. The new program, which is scheduled to commence in September, will be conducted by the National Language Research Institute and the National Educational Research Institute, and will be coordinated by the M/E Japanese Language Section. 2. While the undersigned made no comment on this matter to Mr. Kito, it is his feeling that because of the poor manner in which the three year experimentation program just concluded was administered, it would be preferable to exclude classes which participated in it from the new program. It is also felt that one of the reasons for the failure of the previous program was the inordinately large number of classes participating. A smaller number of closely supervised classes is definitely to be preferred. 3. The results of the tests made to measure progress in the 1948-1951 program are in process of publication by the M/E and will be submitted to you as soon as they are received. (Calhoun 1951!)

The translation of the statement from Kito, dated 16 April, does quite a bit more than Calhoun says. It asks that CI&E compel the Ministry of Education to stop dragging its feet: As the Ministry of Education is more influential than the Educational Research Institute, it is good to transfer the work of experimental classes from the Research Institute to the Ministry. We want the Ministry of Education to formulate a definite plan and translate it into action as soon as possible, especially in view of the slowness incidental to bureaucratic work. (1951!)

In addition, as alluded to in Calhoun's second paragraph, the Ministry of Education was intent on dropping classes that had participated up to that time. Kito acknowledged that there was some logic in starting with new classes, but pointed out the shortcomings of this approach, particularly the ministry's desire to reduce the number of experimental classes, eliminate participation of "civilian organizations," and alter the basic structure of the experiment that had been in place "since Dr. Halpern initiated the program." Unknown to Kito, Calhoun had already decided that his pleas would be ignored. A second memorandum from Calhoun, dated 22 June 1951, accompanied the Ministry of Education report of March 1951 on its way to Loomis. This

The Romaji Education Experiment

ioj

memo (the first in appendix C) can be considered the official CI&E assessment of the experiment. In view of earlier criticisms of the experiment, it is a little contradictory because it implies that the negligible differences between the experimental and control groups tested could be a significant finding and could serve as evidence against the alleged merits of using romaji. The English translation mentioned in the memo is not attached to the copy of the memo I found, but the Japanese original is the report that Banno and I discovered in 1991.76 It was the ministry's attempt to supply CI&E with a substitute for the report of September 1950 that would placate those in CI&E who found the latter objectionable. Ironically, despite Kit5's complaints, not everyone in the Ministry of Education was hostile to the experiment as it was originally conceived. In a memorandum dated 26 June 1951, Calhoun supplements his earlier report to Loomis as follows: a. Mr. Hara stated that the fact that the children taking the tests in Romaji did not do as well as those taking the tests in Kanji and Kana was to be expected. In his mind, there could have been no other result. In support of this point of view, Mr. Hara offered the following explanations: (1) The students studying Romaji are at a disadvantage in that they do not use Romaji at home while the others read material printed in Kanji and Kana after school hours. (2) The Romaji students have no textbooks in Romaji, but use texts printed in Kanji and Kana. While the teacher writes material on the blackboard in Romaji, and the students take notes in Romaji, this still puts them at a disadvantage in comparison with the other students. [The sole Romaji textbook Sansu (Mathematics) had to be discarded because the course of study changed]. (3) Many of the teachers of Romaji are inferior and possess an inadequate knowledge of their subject. There have never been any teacher training courses in Romaji. b. Mr. Hara stated that the report presented was a special one made by the M/E, and that a complete report on the three year program is currently being prepared by the National Institute for Educational Research, which is responsible for the program. (Calhoun 19511)

The importance of this last paragraph cannot be overstated, for it proves that a third report was on its way. When that report came in, Calhoun transmitted it to Loomis in a memo (the second in appendix C) dated 23 August. A comparison of the two memoranda in appendix C makes clear that Calhoun, at least, had a preconceived set of specifications for the "right" results from the experimental classes.

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Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

Interlude: The Strange Case of the Romazi Sinbun Judging from the interfiling of copies of memoranda in the GHQ/SCAP archives, it seems that Calhoun shared responsibilities for language matters with J. Mitchell, a civilian who served in the Education Division and whose full name is not known. An incident is recorded in Mitchell's and Calhoun's memoranda around the time in question that not only corroborates Kite's testimony on popular support for romaji but also reveals much about CI&E's stance on romanization and the methods it used to get things done. On 25 January 1951, Ueda Hanjiro and his assistant Sumitani K. had a meeting with Mitchell and Calhoun at which Ueda sought "to solicit CIE's assistance in arranging a meeting with John D. Rockefeller III of the Dulles Mission in order to request Rockefeller Foundation aid in carrying on the work of publishing the Romazi Sinbun (Romaji Newspaper)" (Mitchell 19513). Mr. Ueda has been sending copies of the paper to the Rockefeller Foundation regularly. A representative of the Foundation who came to Japan in 1947 expressed an interest in the paper, according to Mr. Ueda. This enterprise is not a paying proposition, and in the opinion of Mr. Ueda, will not be one for the next two years. The use of the printing plant to produce Roman letter foreign language publications is the chief source of income, while the issuance of the Romaji newspaper is more or less of a sideline. Of the newspapers 48,000 copies are distributed free to elementary and 10,000 copies free to lower secondary schools. Although the paper utilizes the Kunrei system of Romaji, Mr. Ueda stated that this is only because this system is the most widely used, and he would utilize any system adopted officially. (Mitchell 19513)

Ueda invited Mitchell and Calhoun to visit his plant on Monday, 29 January. At that time, Sumitani escorted the Americans around. The building housing these facilities was occupied in January 1950, and is now 80% complete. The main source of income is the printing of the Keio and Waseda University newspapers and the Christian Logos magazine. The press is capable of turning out 50,000 copies an hour. At present 20 people are employed by the company. Mr. Sumitani estimates that the building will be completed in six months. (Mitchell i95ib)

Ueda took the opportunity to explain his ideas about romaji and language reform.

The Romaji Education Experiment

107

He desires to spearhead a campaign for popularizing Romaji through increasing reading material printed in this medium and inaugurating lectures and radio broadcasts on Romaji. Mr. Ueda stated that in his opinion members of the Japanese Language Council should be appointed from among persons who have not published books in any of the three systems, as such persons tend to be motivated in their views by considerations of the selling potential of their publications if the system they have utilized is or is not adopted officially. One of the main factors retarding the development of Romaji education according to Mr. Ueda is the lack of proper teacher education. Sixty schools visited by him in Tokyo taught an average of only four Romaji pages per term. He feels that most of the antagonism against Romaji stems from those who are ignorant of its nature. He also holds the opinion that language reform is basic to the adoption of Romaji as a sole medium of writing Japanese. (Mitchell ig5ib) Mitchell and Calhoun promised Ueda's request for a meeting with Rockefeller "would be passed on to higher echelons." We hear nothing more of the Romazi Sinbun until 5 June, when Ueda visited Calhoun to report that his press had been sealed by the Special Investigation Bureau of the Attorney General's Office because it had been used to print Laborer, a publication of the Japan Metal Worker's Union (Calhoun i95ig). In a pathetic letter dated 8 June 1951, appended to Calhoun's memo, Ueda implores Nugent for relief: As you and your people know well, we, Romaji Newspaper, have been publishing newspapers in Romaji for a couple of years as a sole publishing and printing agency in Japan. We have been distributing Romaji papers to practically all elementary schools of this country in hope of facilitating Romaji education by providing pupils with supplementary reading materials in Roman letters. We have also been taking orders of printing text books in Roman letters. This, we believe, is of some help to the popularization of Roman letters and eventual simplification of the Japanese written language. We have a high-speed rotary press of our own. But as our Romaji newspaper is a weekly publication, we have to leave the press idle for the most part of the week. We wanted to operate the machine more efficiently. So we made a contract, through the good office of Mr. Takuzo Furukawa, owner of Furukawa Iron Works, with the Japan Organ Printing Co. LTD to rent the press on the hour basis. The written contract included the following clauses: a. Under no circumstances, any publication which is or liable to be against the Occupation policy or Japanese laws and regulations or detrimental to public peace will be printed. b. When the Japan Organ Printing Company prints its publications, the machine will be operated by the workers of the company.

108

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan c. Romaji Newspaper holds priority in using the press under any circumstances. The Japan Organ Printing Company had been using the machine in accordance with the above clauses, or it seems so to us at least. However, at about 6:30 a.m. May 24, 1951 officers of the Special Investigation Bureau, Attorney General's Office came over to our plant and sealed the press and the cutter in the presence of the caretaker. I was reported of this about 9 that morning and promptly visited the Investigation Bureau for explanation. They answered that they sealed the machine on suspicion of our printing, Japan Metal Workers Union's organ "Laborer" with our machine but said they did not know the fact that our press and cutter were rentjed] to the Organ Printing Company on time basis. Since the Japan Organ Printing Company is printing so many organ papers and other kinds of commercial publication —more than one hundred different papers —we did not practically know that and how many papers it was printing. We just entered into a contract to rent the machine on the agreement that the Japan Organ Printing Company would not print any dangerous materials. Although we did not know of the union paper "Laborer" at all, our press was sealed because the organ was printed with it. And we cannot use our machine for the purpose of printing our own publication, Romaji Newspaper. We cannot distribute the only Romaji papers we have in Japan among elementary school children. However, the Organ Printing Company which is directly responsible for the printing of the organ "Laborer" is not inconvenienced at all by the sealing of the press. It is our company that was seriously affected. We cannot understand such a step of the Investigation Bureau. We assume responsibility for renting the press. But this is merely an economical activity. Besides, we had to consider that machinery gathers rust if we leave it idle. We requested the authorities to break the seal by submitting a written statement of the whole affair. It would be the greatest pleasure to us if you kindly look into the case and help us resume our work of printing the waited Romaji Newspapers which has been suspended by being involved in other's trouble. (Calhoun

Wg) There follow two postscripts, the first of which states that Ueda had canceled the contract with the Japan Organ Printing Company on 27 May because it had violated the contract. "We are especially worried," he then adds, "about the Romaji textbooks we were ordered by Zemmaro Toki to print in time for the textbook exhibition to be held in July." Almost two months later, Sumitani visited Calhoun to report that the press was still sealed and express "concern that the machine will rust if it is not put

The Romaji Education Experiment

109

back into use in the near future" (Calhoun 1951)). The second and third item numbers from Calhoun's report on the visit follow: 2. Mr. Sumitani explained that the Attorney General's Office in the course of its investigation found as a suspicious circumstance the fact that a machine capable of printing at such high speed had been set up by the Ronrazi Sinbun to print only a weekly paper of small circulation, and questioned whether it had not been installed originally for the purpose of printing Communist literature. However, Mr. Sumitani said that he explained to the Attorney General that the plan originally had been to print a Romaji daily, but that it was deemed more expedient to wait until one system of Romaji was decided on for official use before proceeding with this project. When such an official decision is reached, the printing press will be used to turn out a large amount of Romaji literature. 3. Mr. Sumitani further stated that the Chief of the Investigation Section of the Attorney General's Office, Mr. Takahashi, informed him that he had recommended to Government Section that the printing press be unsealed. Mr. Sumitani said that he wished the above facts to be known by CIE in case Government Section consults CIE on the matter. (Calhoun 1951))

Evidence Jrom Japanese Sources As far as I have been able to determine, copies of the uninteresting, unimportant third report to which Calhoun refers in his memo of 23 August to Loomis no longer exist.77 Although it is possible that a copy may some day be found in Record Group 331 of the National Archives or in some Japanese collection, the fact that it is not readily available has meaning in itself. Fortunately, some of the information that the third report must have included can be deduced from an article (Ishiguro 1952) that appeared in Japanese the following year. The arithmetic problems to which Trainor scornfully refers are presented by Ishiguro in Nippon-shiki romaji. Three are reproduced below. Clearly, the object of these problems was not just to test knowledge of arithmetic. Purely computational problems, in which only figures are used, were, in fact, included on each test to provide a simple measure of ability in arithmetic independent of reading ability. Sannen Sansu (4) Gakko no Niwa ni okina Ki ga arimasu. i m 40 cm no Himo de sono

Third-year Arithmetic (4) There is a large tree in the schoolyard. A string i m 40 cm in

110

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

Mavvari wo hakatte mitara, 15 cm dake Himo ga amarimasita. Ki no Mawari wa doredake atta desyo?

length goes around the circumference with r5 cm left over. What is the circumference of the tree?

Yonen Sansu (6) Aru Hito wa Basya de Maki to Sumi wo hakonde kimasita. Sigeru Kun ga kazoetara, Maki ga i^o-taba to Sumi ga 3o-pyo arimasita. Urine wa Maki hitotaba ga 35 En. Sumi i-pyo ga 250 En da so desu. Minna ureruto, Uriage wa awasete ikura ni narimasu ka?

Fourth-year Arithmetic (6) A man hauled in kindling and charcoal in a wagon. Shigeru counted 150 bunches of kindling and 30 sacks of charcoal. The kindling costs ¥353 bunch and the charcoal ¥250 a sack. How much will the man earn if he sells everything?

Gonen Sansu (i) Hayasi San wa Sendai ni sunde imasu. Hayasi San no Otosan wa, kino Sendai-hatu ig-zi 2,-hun, Uenotyaku yokuasa y-zi 46pun no Kisya de Tokyo e ikaremasita. Otosan kara "Kesa buzi tuita," to in Denpo ga kimasita. Denpo wa Ueno kara Otosan ga 8zi 15-hun ni uti, Sendai Yubinkyoku de n-zi 2O-pun ni uketuketa so desu. (a) Otosan wa, nanzikan nanpun Kisya ni notte ita no desu ka?

Fifth-year Arithmetic (6) Hayashi lives in Sendai. Yesterday, Hayashi's father went to Tokyo on a train that left Sendai at 7:25 P.M. and arrived at Ueno Station at 7:46 the next morning. A telegram came from Father saying he had arrived safely. Father sent the telegram from Ueno at 8:15 A.M. It was received at the Sendai Post Office at 11:20. (a) Plow long was Father on board the train?

The Romaji Education Experiment

(b) Denpo wa Ueno kara Sendai made nanzikan nanpun kakatta desyo ka? (Nippon no Romazi Sya 1991, 37-48)

111

(b) How long did it take to transmit the telegram from Ueno to Sendai?

(trans. JMU)

Tables 11 through 13 summarize the results reported by Ishiguro, with corrections for typographical errors in his article. As Ishiguro observes, with the exception of the computational problems on the third-year test, students instructed through romaji did somewhat better on average than the students in the control group, although results for each system of romanization were not consistent. Ishiguro also looks at the number of words per minute that the most able, least able, and average student using each system of romanization could read or write before and after instruction. He remarks that the responses on the first part of the survey, in which background information on students, teachers, and schools was collected, independently show the overall pattern of support for the experiment and use of romaji documented in the CI&E survey cited in chapter 4 ("Development" 1950). Although none of the results are dramatic and Ishiguro takes pains to emphasize the many handicaps under which the experiment was carried out, the overall picture is quite different from what one would expect after reading the comments of CI&E personnel. If we put trust in Ishiguro's statements, then CI&E evidently wrote off the experiment as a complete waste of time and money not because it was, in fact, a hopelessly biased piece of pseudoscience or a boondoggle, but, on the contrary, because it showed some promise of establishing the claims of romaji supporters. The fact that some of the most active among them preferred Nippon-shiki must also have figured in CI&E thinking. So far we have looked at three reports on the experiment: the one upon which Trainor based his account; the "salvage" job done by the Ministry of Education to placate CI&E; and the missing NIER report of August 1951 mentioned by Trainor and referenced by Ishiguro. There was also a follow-up studyconducted by supporters of Nippon-shiki romanization that used the same questions and procedures employed by the Ministry of Education (Romaji Kyoiku Kenkyujo Chosabu 1953). The experimental group for this "fourth report" consisted of 1,146 students in 28 classes using Nippon-shiki romaji in grades three through six, and 1,138 students in a control group of 26 regular classes in the same grades. Table 14 shows the average score on each section

11 2

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

Table 11. Experimental Results: Third-Year Students Third-Year Test Word Problems Computation Experimental Control Experimental Control Kunrei Hyojun Nippon

40.4 35.6 5!-3

46.4 34-1 32-3

60.8 58.2

65.6 65.4 67.3

Average

40.4

35.1

56.5

64.5

6!.5

Source: Data from Ishiguro 1952.

Table 12. Experimental Results: Fourth-Year Students Fourth-Year Test Computation Word Problems Control Experimental Control Experimental Kunrei Hyojun Nippon

45.2 40.5 53-3

44-9 36.0

Average

47.5

39-5

55-i 60.1 68.2

55-4 5i-9 56.2

39.2

63.4

554

Source: Data from Ishiguro 1952.

Table 13. Experimental Results: Fifth-Year Students Fifth-Year Test Computation Word Problems Experimental Control Experimental Control Kunrei Hyojun Nippon

50.4 48.7 67.6

65.0 52.1 55.8

57.6 60.2 66.2

63.7

Average

58.4

56.3

6!.5

56.2

Source: Data from Ishiguro 1952.

54-7 55-4

The Romaji Education Experiment

113

Table 14. Follow-up Survey of Experimental Classes Section of Test Grade Third Fourth Fifth Sixth

Group

I

II

III

IV

E

6.7 3-7 7-9 64 6.4 5-7 6.0 5- 1

7-5 6.7 7.8 8.1 7.8 8j 3-7 3-7

6.2

6.3 4-3 7-1

C E C E C E C

2

57.6 6.8 7-4 48 4-5 3-9

&2

4-4 4.6 4.8 4-7

Mean

Years of Study

6.5 5.2 7-5 6.9 6.0 5.8

1.8 3

4.8a

4-5

!-7

4 2

5 3 6

0

Value is 4.7 in the text. E = experimental. C = control. Note: Scores above and below the single bars in each of the columns headed I through IV were based on the same problem sets. Source: Data from Nippon no Romazi Sya, 1991, 67

of the test, and for the test as a whole, for both groups at each grade level. A perfect score on the third- and fourth-grade tests was 13 points; on the fifthgrade test, 17 points; and on the sixth-grade test, 14 points. Raw scores were normalized by conversion to a ro-point scale. The bar graphs in figure 6 (reproduced from the report itself) are based on the data in table 14. The superimposed curves show the distribution of scaled scores. Fortunately, besides aggregated and graphed data, the report also includes tables from which one can recover the score of each test-taker. The authors of the followup study, however, working "by hand," did not have time to do a thorough analysis of the data and discuss only aggregate figures. When the report was written, the effort involved in checking for correlations from raw scores was prohibitive; today, with statistical packages on computers, little more than data entry is required. Of the discrepancy between their findings and the ministry's, they note that the latter compared only three sample classes whereas they gave the same test to all experimental classes that were using Nippon-shiki romanization. They also observe that the lower the grade level, the better the experimental group performed in relation to the control group. This might be because (i) the difference in the number of consecutive years devoted to the study of the script

Figure 6.

Data Graphs from Nippon-shiki Follow-up Survey. Source: Nippon no Romazi Sya 1991.

The Romaji Education Experiment

r 1$

tested in each group increased with grade level, (2) there were comparatively more supplementary materials in mmaji for the lower grades, and (3) the lower the grade level, the greater the burden ofkanji for students in the control group. It should be repeated that the Ministry of Education test that was used a second time in the follow-up study of Nippon-shiki classes was different from the test reported by Ishiguro, the one used in the missing "third" report of August 1951. The problems in the ministry's test were designed essentially to measure reading comprehension, not achievement in a subject other than the Japanese language itself that had been taught by means of a particular script. Consider, for example, the stimulus for the reading comprehension part of the ministry test for third- and fourth-grade subjects, transcribed here in Hepburn romanization. (The italics show where furigana were attached to kanji.) Nihon de vva hajimete tetsudo no dekita no wa, Meiji go-nen go-gatsu de, Shinagawa-Yokohama-kan ni feujita no desu. Kore ga honto ni okyakusan o noseru yo ni natta no wa, sono toshi no ku-gatsu juninichi de, sono koro ni wa, Shinagawa kara Shinbashi made mo tetsudo ga shikarete, ShinbashiYokohama-kan o hashim yd ni narimashita. Sono koro no tetsudo wa, Igirisu ga sensei de, kikansha wa mochiron Igirisu-sez' de, kikans/ju mo Igirisu-jin deshita. Tsuzuite Hokkaido ni mo tetsudo ga shikaremasita ga, kore wa Amerika ga otehon deshita. Sore kara ma mo naku, kondo wa Doitsu o sensei ni shite, Kyushu ni tetsudo ga dekimashita. (Nippon no Romazi Sya 1991, 59)

The first railroad in Japan was built in May of Meiji 5 1872] and covered the distance between Shinagawa and Yokohama. It actually began carrying passengers on 12 September of that year; soon, track was laid from Shinagawa to Shinbashi, so trains could run between Shinbashi and Yokohama. Since England was the model for railroads of the time, the locomotive was naturally English, as was the engineer. Later, a railroad was laid in Hokkaido, but following an American pattern. Soon thereafter, a railroad was built in Kyushu on a German model.

(trans. JMU)

116

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan

Students were asked to indicate, with a number, the order each of the following rail lines was constructed: Shinagawa-Shinbashi; Shinagawa-Yokohama; Kyushu; Hokkaido. That third-grade students in the experimental group, which had, after all, studied only arithmetic using romaji, did a full three points out often better than students in the control group on this part of the test is truly remarkable. So striking was this particular result that the authors of the follow-up study, who felt obliged to bend over backward to be fair, suggested that the poor showing of control group third-graders might reflect the fact that they were not used to seeing furigana. They called attention to the fact that control group fourth-graders, who had more exposure to furigana, did better. This argument is doubtful for two reasons. First, students in the experimental classes were learning how to read and write kanamajiribun texts in kokugo classes just as the students in the control group were; presumably, they would have turned in the same performance as the control group students if given the problem in the same format. Second, a statistical analysis of the raw data (using the fr-distribution) shows that differences in the mean scores of both third- and fourth-graders were highly significant (p and , in which the individual letters, though only crudely phonographic, are certainly not logographic; the distinctive sequence of the letters in each string adds morphological and syntactic information about the syllable /rayt/ that both strings represent. 38. Tanakadate himself denied he had proposed the Nippon-shiki system to the Romaji kwai (Romanization Association) in r886 (which rejected it in favor of Hebonshiki); he credited "Professor Terao" and noted that the system had been used before then in an edition of the famous poetic anthology Hyakunin isshu "probably by Professor Kurokawa" (Tanakadate 1920,17-18). Terao Hisashi (1855-1923), who became chief astronomer at the University of Tokyo Observatory, was one of more than 70 romaji advocates who, on 2 December 1884, founded the Romaji kwai; Kurokawa Mayori (1829-1906), a Japanese studies (kokugaku) scholar and professor at the University of Tokyo, published a romanized Hyakunin isshu in March 1873. Tanakadate may have been deferring to his senior colleagues. 39. For example, should one transcribe the verb /iu/ 'say' (pronounced [yu:]) as it sounds ( or ), transliterate the traditional kana spelling V\|» ( or ), or opt for a compromise similar to the morphophonemic representation ()? 40. One feature of Nippon-shiki romanization is the capitalization of all nouns. 41. The question here is not only whether to drop katakana or hiragana or to continue using both, but also which of several competing forms (particularly in the case of hiragana) for the same syllable should be adopted as standard. The Ministry of Education did not address the latter problem until 1900, and many Japanese continued to use hentaigana 'irregular kana for decades after that. 42. In order to save money, Mitsui Bussan adopted the rule of using Hepburn romanization for each syllable unless there is a shorter form in Nippon-shiki. Thus, <ja> (not or ), and (not ), but <si>, , and (not <shi>, , and , as in Hepburn). (Table 7 lists the key differences among romanization systems for Japanese.) 43. The English translations of the Japanese names of organizations and documents given here may not be the same as those found in other sources. An official English translation is frequently lacking. Alternative translations are often possible; for example, a kai can, depending on its functions, official status, etc., be an association, board, club, committee, council, or society. Sometimes, there appears to be no generally accepted English rendering of a Japanese word; for example, the sha in Nippon no romajisha. And Japanese names change in ways hard to mirror in English: the Kanamojikai was first known as the Kanamoji kyokai, but it would be hard to find a translation of the former that would not logically be acceptable for the latter as well. It is therefore safer to rely on the Japanese terms than on English equivalents. 44. Tanakadate (1920, 25) points out that Saionji wrote his name on the Versailles Treaty in Nippon-shiki (in which it is spelled "Saionzi"), even though the Hiromekai

.Votes to pages 53—61

11, j

over which he presided had by then opted for Hebon-shiki (in which the correct spelling is Saionji). 45. For example, in the native and Sino-Japanese words of Tokyo speech, a "regular" consonant, such as [k], occurs in eight syllables, |ka, ke, ko, ki, kya, kyu, kyo, ku]; whereas [t] is heard only in [ta, te, to]; [c] (or [t5]) only in [ci,ca,cu,co]; and [c] (or [ts]) only in feu]. By treating the sounds [t], [c], and [c] as three allophones of a single phoneme /t/, all eight syllables can be analyzed as /ta, te, to, ti, tya, tyu, tyo, tu/, making the distribution of /t/ the same as the distribution of /k/ and other "regular" consonants. For further details, see Vance 1987. 46. The Ministry of Education organized a Kokugo chosa iinkai (Japanese Language Study Board) in 1902, but only after public outcry against the ministry's introduction of an ill-conceived kana spelling reform in 1900. According to this scheme, the transcription in hiragana of on syllables containing long vowels was to be made uniform with the help of the long vowel marker (bo) normally used only with katakana. This turned out to be unworkable for a number of reasons, the most important of which was that the same rules were not applied to kirn syllables. See Seeley 1991,143—44 for details. The regulations were rescinded in September 1908, and the Kokugo chosa iinkai disbanded in 1913. 47. It also pursued the idea of normalizing the transcription of on syllables, an idea that had been floated unsuccessfully in rgoo, 1924, and 1931. 48. "It was found that it was still not possible to teach school pupils to satisfactorily read and write all of them [the toyo kanji] within the nine years of compulsory education" (Seeley 1991,155). 49. Table 8 traces the changes in the ranks, titles, and organizational affiliations of Occupation personnel mentioned in this book. Both civilians and military personnel worked in CI&E. From time to time, people were promoted or left the service. In addition, the organization of the section into divisions, with their various branches, was never completely rigid, although it did not vary much after September 1946. 50. Nishi says (with sarcasm), referring to Hall's return to the United States at the end of 1946, "Robert King Hall, went home to the United States to receive a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship" (1982, 205), but Mayo (1981, 68) indicates Hall received the award BEFORE leaving for Japan. 51. Mayo pointedly remarks, "Along the way he had struggled with the Japanese language." In conversations in March iggr and April 1992, Mayo told me that she had interviewed one of Hall's Japanese language teachers, who did not rate him highly. It is quite unlikely, however, that Hall favored script reform because he had been frustrated as a second-language learner. Far more important is "the fact that as a graduate student he was strongly influenced by Charles C. Fries, one of his professors at the University of Michigan. Professor Fries was a prominent linguist who contributed to English education in postwar Japan, and his special subject was language simplification" (Tsuchimochi 1993, 112). Note too that Hall's "Tentative Study" of 1946, though by no means free of errors, shows a considerable knowledge of Japanese. 52. Tsuchimochi (1993, 109) says Hilldring "tended to favor them," but Nishi (1982, 201, 204) quotes Hilldring as writing they were "not practicable."

11,6

Notes to pages 61—72

53. Dooman retired shortly after the surrender in 1945; his mentor, Grew, "did not get along with the new Secretary, James F. Byrnes, and he resigned, replaced by Dean Acheson." It was Acheson who appointed George Atcheson (see p. 75), a China specialist, to MacArthur's staff. "Grew had vainly tried to get that job for Dooman, but Acheson did not want a Japan hand there" (Perry 1980, 45). 54. Hall discusses the Turkish script reform at length in Education for a New Japan (1949, 368-76) and cited it in his discussions with Japanese (Tsuchimochi 1993, 116). 55. In a letter to the managing director of the Kanamojikai dated 22 June, Hall (19460!) declines to provide a reimbursement of ¥6,855 requested by Matsusaka for research expenses in a letter dated 17 June 1946. Hall points out that it would be inappropriate for the Kanamojikai to publish the results of the survey (which, in fact, it had published) if they were the property of GHQ. The date of this exchange is important because Hall switched his support to romaji many months earlier; therefore, his change of mind cannot be attributed to a souring of relations between him and the Kanamojikai. 56. Nishi (1982, 354) makes the same observation. Sato Hideo, of the National Institute for Educational Research, has interviewed Mark T. Orr, who was Chief of the Education Division and therefore Trainer's immediate superior from early 1946 until his return to the United States in 1949; Sato told me that Orr grumbled about Trainer's cupidity for documents, calling him "a rather STRANGE man." 57. And as the book was published in Japan, it not surprisingly lacks an index, making it rather difficult to use. See Unger 1987, 55-57. 58. The third individual Trainer had in mind was probably Mark T. Orr. 59. Nevertheless, Arimitsu "was publicly reprimanded, fined, and temporarilysuspended" for his role in the incident (Hall 1949, 260; see also Nishi 1982,181). Hall retained a low opinion of Arimitsu and saw his eventual appointment as vice minister as "both a commentary on the short memory or indifference of the Occupation Forces and on the power and arrogance of the traditional Japanese bureaucrats" (Hall 1949, 260). 60. Kubo (1984, 188—92) cites papers in Box 52 of the Trainer Collection, which I did not check. Kubo presents the record of the meeting in Japanese; since the original must be in English, I have not attempted a "back translation." I suspect that Nishi missed this report for the same reason I did. The Trainor Collection is indexed so that the researcher can easily identify which boxes contain material on a given topic. Unfortunately, the indexing is based on the titles on the folders in the boxes; the conference report in question must be in a folder labeled something other than "language simplification" or the like. 61. Hall was not a civilian; he remained on active duty in the Navy until 1947 (Hall 1949, iii). 62. Note, incidentally, that this shows Trainor had access to the original document, which was classified Confidential and remained so until at least early 1947 (Hall 1949, v).

Notes to pages J3—&O

i t,j

63. Compare this with point i in Nugent's memo: Nugent must have been working with the first draft. 64. Neither Tsuchirnochi nor Nishi mentions Ando's status. Nishi (1982, 202) says that his "commonsense recommendation was not radical enough for Hall at this juncture. It was never raised again." On the contrary, the only kind of script reform the Japanese government has ever implemented is the sort Ando favored. Tsuchirnochi (1993, 75) believes "that his view influenced the Mission in drawing up the Report on the reform of the Japanese language" insofar as it acknowledged the need to alleviate the burden of kanji on Japanese students. 65. One result of the process of revising the USEM report was elimination of references to the Chinese situation (Tsuchirnochi 1993,113 — 17). 66. Nishi says this happened in November 1946, but the document in question, SWNCC 298, is dated 9 May 1946 (Mayo 1981, 155 n. 77). 67. However, a basic policy with respect to the USEM recommendations does seem to have been adopted, at least within the Education Division. According to Hardesty (1986,138-43), Box 5398 of RG 331 contains a memo dated 18 June 1946 from Lt. Scott George to Nugent via Mark Orr requesting a public policy statement on "Language Simplification," together with a "Statement of Japanese Language Reform" that appears to have been intended for release by MacArthur. I found what seems to be a copy of the "Statement of Japanese Language Reform" in Box 5163, Folder 8, and agree that, although undated and unsigned, it was probably written by George. Trainor (1983, 308-10) discusses a "statement of aims and policies" drafted by "new personnel" in June 1946, and Halpern (19463) refers to "Lt. George's basic policy statement." These seem to all be the same document. 68. Trainor (1983,426) got the name right, but Hardest}- thinks it was Andrew (e.g., Hardest}-' 1986, 157 n. 31), even though a key letter she cites (see note 70) gives "Abraham" (185). Hardest}' says that George refers to "Mark Halpern" in his "Statement" of June 1946 (see note 67), but the version I found mentions only "Dr. A. M. Halpern, distinguished anthropologist and linguist from the University of Chicago" ("Statement of Japanese Language Reform," 6). ("Mark" was Orr's first name.) At any rate, the basic fact is that Halpern habitually used only his initials. I suspect he may have done so to protect himself in an organization he perceived as hostile to Jews. 69. Miller also does not seem to understand the long history of Nippon-shiki romanization that led up to Kunrei-shiki (see chapter 3). It is ironic that Miller, who in many other writings has been bitterly critical of Japanese such as Suzuki Takao, who champion the continued use of kanji, should be responsible for such an unfair characterization of Halpern. 70. Hardest}' (1986, 184—85), citing Miller 1970, states, "Exactly what Halpern's position was is unknown." At least one Japanese writer has seized upon the same passage in Miller to "prove" that the Occupation was biased in favor of Hepburn romanization (Saito 1985). Nevertheless, as remarked in note 68, Hardest}' herself has located a letter in which a Japanese proponent of Hepburn romanization, Kasai Juji, states, "I went to call on Mr. Halpern in his office, and as he was so dead sure for his Romazi

i j8

Notes to pages 80—lOf)

[cf. Roma/7 in Hepburn], I told him that he was the bane of my country and retard [sic] our Japanese civilization for 1000 years" (Hardesty 1986, 185). 71. Hisayo Murakami, manager of the Gordon W. Prange Collection of McKeldin Library, University of Maryland at College Park, called my attention to Nugent's control of the paper supply and Japan's heavy reliance on wood pulp from Karafuto and Korea up to 1945, in conversations during my visit to the Prange Collection in March 1991. The bulk of the Prange Collection consists of books, newpapers, and magazines submitted to Occupation censors; many are now in extremely fragile condition. Even the Americans in Japan had to conserve paper (see p. 142). 72. It seems to have been composed in English by Kito himself, but it gives Ishiguro's name as Osamu rather than Yoshimi. This raises the possibility that it was an Education Division translation, but even Kito may not have known the true reading of the character that stood for Ishiguro's first name. 73. Similar results had been observed by Japanese immigrants to Mexico, who had used romanized texts to teach their children Japanese since the early igoos (Ishida 1973). Why Japanese immigrants to Mexico took this tack whereas those in, for example, Hawaii did not is not clear. The greater similarity between the romaji and Spanish orthography may have been a contributing factor. 74. The teacher and pupils in these classes had attempted to keep down the cost to parents by collecting broken glass and selling it for scrap. 75. For example, in view of the confusion of Bloch and "Brooke," one must wonder whether Calhoun ever saw Bloch's name in writing. He may have only (mis)heard it from a Japanese employee who pronounced it /burukku/ or /burokku/. Another possibility is that Calhoun pronounced "Bloch" as [bUk] or [blo:k] and a stenographer or typist did the rest, but this is less likely as Calhoun was probably not of high enough rank to dictate his memoranda and leave the proofreading to others. 76. I later located a copy of an English translation, on Ministry of Education letterhead, in the Trainor Collection. 77. In early rg86, through the kindness of Dr. Otsuka Haruo, I was able to meet informally with Shiraishi Daiji, a high-ranking official of the Language Section of the Ministry of Education at the time of the experiment. When I indicated interest in finding the raw data from the romaji education experiments, he expressed extreme doubt that the Ministry of Education would have saved them.

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