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212 CHAPTER 15 Conclusion The coerciveness of kokugo policy in modern Japan was a sign not of the strength of kokugo but of its weakness, just as the coercion of the Great Japanese Empire indicated Japan’s tenuous modernity. Japan was not able to establish a consistent language policy for its colonies, or even for itself. Mori Arinori was not the only one who despaired of the plight of kokugo. Shiga Naoya, for example, is also well known for his suggestion after World War II that French be adopted as the national language. And there was Kita Ikki, who had even more radical ideas than these two.1 Kita’s Kokka kaizōan genri taikō (Outline of the Principal Ideas for Nation Reform) of 1919 (Taishō 8; in Kita 1959), a bible for fascists of his time, has a section headed “Eigo o haishite Esuperanto o kashi dai-ni kokugo to su” (Discard English and Adopt Esperanto as the Second National Language; 251), in a chapter titled “Kokumin kyōiku no kenri” (The People’s Rights to Education). There Kita explained that there was no need for the Japanese people to learn English because Japan was not a British colony. Then why did he feel the need to choose a second national language? And why Esperanto? The phrase “second national language” indicated that the language was not merely the object of learning but was presumed to have a certain public function, and Kita’s proposal was an astoundingly radical one: The fact that we have had numerous disputes on script reform, abolition of kanji, genbun itchi, adoption of rōmaji, and so forth, which are not found in other Western countries, indicates that the entire nation has suffered greatly from the extreme inferiority of the Japanese language and script. If we decide to practice rōmaji, the most radical script of all, we may be able to diminish some of the inconvenience in writing we have had before. Nevertheless, when we translate English or Chinese [into rōmaji], we realize that the Japanese sentence is inverted, that is, the structure for expressing ideas in the [Japanese] language itself goes against the laws of psychology. The problems in kokugo are not only Conclusion 213 about script or words. The structure of the language must be revolutionized at its foundation. (252) Kita’s complaint about the Japanese language’s inferiority to English and Chinese and the “inverted” word order of Japanese might simply indicate his limited view of language and might be regarded as absurd within the discipline of linguistics, which considers all languages equal in their grammatical complexity . What is most notable here, however, is that Kita so despaired of the “inferior” Japanese that he proposed a revolution in the fundamental structure of the language. As the Japanese people use Esperanto as a second language in order to avoid the painful inconvenience of kokugo, according to the laws of natural selection they will all be using Esperanto as their first national language in fifty years. The Japanese language we are using today will then become a research object for specialists , like Sanskrit or Latin. (253) Though equating it with such highly esteemed languages as Sanskrit and Latin, Kita was handing the Japanese language off to the specialists as a dead language , that is, predicting its extinction. Japanese was not the only language Kita wanted to extinguish. In his view, when Japan expanded its territories to Siberia and Australia in the near future, it could not let people there continue using Russian or English, nor could it force them to use Japanese, because “it would be impossible to force our aggravating language, as we did upon the Koreans, upon those Westerners who have relatively better languages” (253). The “inferior” Japanese language might be forced upon the Korean people, but not upon other people, especially Europeans , who had “better” languages. Koreans were the miserable victims of oppression by an “inferior” language. And the language Kita believed that could unite the vast territory of the Japanese Empire was not Japanese, but Esperanto: The laws of natural selection, that the superior survives the inferior, will also determine the fate of the Japanese language and Esperanto. Within the next hundred years, languages in Japan’s territories, whether in Europe, China, India, or Korea, are to become extinct and be replaced by Esperanto. Vast lands with no uniform language are like a morning glory destined to wither overnight. (253)2 By adopting Esperanto as the second national...

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