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155 CHAPTER 10 The Ideology of Hyo -jungo 10-1. Hyōjungo and Kyōtsūgo The term hyōjungo seems to carry a special emotional connotation. The institution of hyōjungo before the end of the war degraded dialect and afflicted its speakers with a sense of inferiority. Dialect was severely suppressed in schools through “penalty” rules, which mandated hanging a humiliating placard around the neck of a student who used dialect.1 The word hyōjungo implied a crusade against dialect. Its dark connotations lingered even after the war, and even academic discussions about hyōjungo today have to be careful not to summon up the public’s neurosis about their experience (Sanada 1987, 203–205). Thus the term hyōjungo (standard Japanese ) was gradually replaced by kyōtsūgo (common Japanese) for the transparent reason of obliterating unpleasant memories. The Kokugogaku jiten (Kokugogaku Dictionary) of 1955 (Shōwa 30), the first edition after the war, defines kyōtsūgo as “the common language, which can be used for exchanging ideas everywhere in a country,” and “hyōjungo” as “the ideal kokugo, constructed by refinement and control of kyōtsūgo according to a certain standard.” Therefore, strictly speaking, these two terms refer to different concepts. Nonetheless, kyōtsūgo was allowed to replace the term hyōjungo for the reasons explained below. Shibata Takeshi maintains that “the term ‘kyōtsūgo’ was welcome because the implication of ‘control,’ which hyōjungo had, fell into disfavor” and that this switch “allowed kokugo education to achieve its goal more easily, since ‘kyōtsūgo’ merely meant the common language used nationwide, and didn’t have to be a specially ‘refined’ or ‘ideal’ language” (1977, 23–24). If this was the case, the only reason for the changeover was an extremely practical one, to lower the goal for its easier achievement; that is, kyōtsūgo was a step down from hyōjungo. Moreover , the thorough dissemination of kyōtsūgo was a consequence of hyōjungo education since Meiji, only stripping away the connotation of control. The new term concealed the continuity of linguistic institutions before and after the end 156 Hoshina Kōichi and His Language Policies of the war, diverting people’s attention from the problem of linguistic hegemony . Therefore, we must reexamine carefully the ideology of hyōjungo rather than rejoicing at the spread of kyōtsūgo. As discussed in section 2 of chapter 6, Ueda was probably the first to use the word hyōjungo in its official sense in his 1895 (Meiji 28) lecture “Hyōjungo ni tsukite” (About Hyōjungo): the language created by artificial refinement on the one “of Tokyo, the capital of the Great Empire,” especially the one “spoken by educated people in Tokyo” (Yoshida and Inokuchi 1964, 502–508). This was the first step towards the centralization of kokugo. In 1904 (Meiji 37), the Ministry of Education further defined the term and its usage in Jinjō shōgaku tokuhon hensan shuisho (Prospectus for Editing Readers for Normal Elementary Schools) as colloquial language “used mainly by middle-class people in Tokyo,” and called for schoolchildren “to learn the standard of kokugo” and thus eventually “to bring unity” to kokugo. Now the goal of kokugo education was clearly to teach children “the standard of kokugo.” How, then, would the dissemination of hyōjungo affect regional dialects? And what was the relation between hyōjungo and dialects in the unity of kokugo? Ueda did not discuss these problems and left them for Hoshina to tackle. 10-2. Dialects and the Standard Language Each of Hoshina’s early works on linguistics and kokugogaku, such as Hoshina 1900, 1902, and 1910, contains chapters on the relationship between dialects (hōgen) and the standard language (hyōjungo). His perspective on dialect was founded on the principles of linguistics that all languages are equal in terms of the complexity of inner structure and that no language is better than or superior to any other. As seen in section 3 of chapter 8, Hoshina defined language as the representation of ideas with phonetic segments, and therefore no dialect “is different from an ordinary language in its form and content” (Hoshina 1900, 161). The distinction between the national language and dialects “is merely a matter of degree, and only made artificially. . . . It is a mistake to label them as hōgen, ‘dialects,’ to treat them as if they are incorrect or vulgar languages” (1910, 667–668). Then did...

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