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227 Notes Translator’s Introduction 1. Also called kanbun yomikudashi or kakikudashi. 2. It only lists Hoshina 1934 and Hoshina 1949b in the bibliography. 3. While the title of the book is An Encyclopaedia of Nihongo, and the chapter title is “Gengo [language] Policy and Education,” the section about policy is titled “Kokugo Issues and kokugo Policy.” 4. On p. 404 in Nomoto Kikuo’s “Gengo seisaku” (Language Policy) (Kokugo Gakkai 1995, 399–413), Hoshina is mentioned as the author of a “radical article.” 5. http://www.culturalprofiles.net/japan/unit/2258.html. Accessed February 25, 2009. 6. As a language teacher, I am pleased and hopeful about the current movement in the field towards more critical and interdisciplinary approaches to teaching Japanese. Lee’s book has been influential in such movements. For example, in Bunka, kotoba, kyōiku (Culture, Language, and Education, ed. Sato Shinji and Neriko Doerr, [Tokyo: Akashi Shobō, 2008]), a very recent publication on language education, many of the contributors list Lee’s book in their references. 7. Ironically, Haga himself used the English phrase “way of life” in defining minzoku as membership by those who share the same language, that is, Japanese. 8. Interestingly, the association’s original name in English was the Association for Japanese Linguistics, and this remained unchanged. 9. http://www.jpling.gr.jp/n_hakkan.html. In his inaugural statement as chair, Maeda said that the universities with the old department or major name (kokugo) numbered 66 percent in 1992, but by 2002 those with the new name (nihongo) increased to over 72 percent; http://www.jpling.gr.jp/aisatu.html. Prologue 1. (Translator’s note) Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts: King Francis I legislated in 1539 that French would replace Latin as the official language of France. French Academy: An academic organization established in 1635 with authority in matters related to French literature and language. 2. (Translator’s note) Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves), compiled during the eighth century, is the oldest collection of poetry in Japan. 3. (Translator’s note) Yamato is an old name for Japan. Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), compiled in the early eighth century, is the oldest existing writing about ancient Japanese history. Introduction: The Japanese Language before Kokugo 1. (Translator’s note) Archibald Henry Sayce (1846–1933), British philologist and Orientalist. 2. (Translator’s note) The writings by Mori and Whitney quoted in this section are all in their original English, not my translation. 3. Mori’s comment is prescient: “There are some efforts being made to do away with the use of Chinese characters by reducing them to simple phonetics, but the words familiar through the organ of the eye are so many, that to change them into those of the ear would cause too great an inconvenience, and be quite impracticable” (Mori 1873, 265–266). As we will see in the next chapter, when the rōmaji activists who initiated the romanization movement during the late second decade of Meiji used direct romanization of kanbun-style texts, their sentences were unintelligible. The movement did not go forward until B. H. Chamberlain, who was invited to the linguistics department of Tokyo University, criticized such practices and pointed out the need for genbun itchi as a prerequisite for romanization of Japanese. 4. Florian Coulmas remarks as follows about Mori Arinori in Sprache und Staat: “Japan enjoys remarkable homogeneity in its language, very rare in world languages. Therefore, such an audacious proposal as Mori’s to abolish Japanese and replace it with a Western language, that is, English, is out of the question” (Coulmas 1985; Japanese translation 1987, 331). However, the “linguistic homogeneity ,” if such a thing ever exists, was a result of language policies after Meiji, and thus Coulmas’s remark is an anachronism, obviously confusing the cause with the result. Such remarks have repeatedly and blindly reinforced assumptions about national language and script. Modern Japanese linguistic consciousness thus had to protect its ground by depicting Mori’s argument as absurd. The myth of kokugo is so deeply engrained even among foreign scholars that they no longer think to question it. 5. (Translator’s note) Baba’s writings quoted in this chapter are all in his original English, not my translation. 6. Baba seemed to be profoundly informed by John Locke’s theory of language and made frequent reference to Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding. Locke speculated on the arbitrariness of signs and attempted to refute the absolute and universal hegemony...

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