The Ideology of Kokugo: Nationalizing Language in Modern Japan

Chapter 3 The Creation of Kokugo

54 CHAPTER 3 The Creation of Kokugo 3-1. Conception of Kokugo The debates about genbun itchi and national script and the linguistic turbulence in the Meiji era became closely tied to consciousness of the “nation-state” and the “empire,” triggered by the Sino-Japanese War. The rallying point of these debates was the ideology of kokugo, and the central person who promoted it was Ueda Kazutoshi. Before discussing Ueda’s philosophy of language in part 2, we will investigate in this chapter how the concept of kokugo had developed before his time. The word kokugo itself existed before Meiji. However, kokugo with a modern connotation, used in opposition to kango in its modern sense, was a child of modernity born out of the intense determination of Meiji Japan. And the process from its conception to its birth must not be overlooked—though tracing its historical origin is a considerable intellectual challenge today when the word kokugo is widely accepted as self-explanatory. Such an intellectual challenge might start with examination of the violent potential in the ideology of kokugo, or it might take the form of an academic critique of the field of kokugogaku (the study of kokugo) as a truism. In fact, both of these approaches are necessary in order to clarify the origin of the ideology of kokugo in history because kokugo has been not only the political apparatus that controls the nation-state but also the intellectual apparatus that casts a spell over the spirit of modern Japan. A pioneering work in tracing the historical background of the concept of kokugo is Kamei Takashi’s essay “Kokugo to wa ikanaru kotoba nari ya” (What Kind of Language Is Kokugo?). As an example of early sources for the concept of kokugo before Meiji, Kamei quoted Kawamoto Kōmin, a scholar of Western learning with an 1855 book on physics, Kikai kanran kōgi (Outlook of Nature), who explained why he avoided kanbun in his writing: “If I translated [the foregoing ] into kanbun, it might be misinterpreted. Therefore, I wrote it in ‘kokugo’ The Creation of Kokugo 55 so that it will be easily understood” (Kamei 1971, 240; emphasis on “kokugo” in original. See also Kyōgoku 1986). Kamei pointed out that kokugo here was used obviously as a contrasting concept with kanbun (Chinese-style Japanese), but that it also referred to the parts of sentences that were written in kana and jikun, kanji words in Japanese pronunciation. Kamei suspected that Kawamoto attempted to choose the character ᅗ [koku or kuni, meaning a country] over ࿰ [wa, the traditional word for Japan or Japanese] and to shift the focus from the sentential to the lexical level in explaining Japanese. That is, he took a position in his own writing style by choosing neither wago [࿰ㄊ, classical Japanese words] nor kokubun [ᅗᩝ, Japanese texts], but kokugo [ᅗㄊ, Japanese language]. There was another idea of kokugo at that time that was completely different from Kawamoto’s. It was the Japanese translation of the Dutch word tale (“language ” in English), which appeared at the opening of Waran bunten: Zenpen (Dutch Grammar Book: Volume 1), first published in Dutch in 1842 and translated several times during the late 1850s. In its Japanese edition (Waran bunten zenpen yakugosen) in 1855, the word tale was translated as ᅗㄊ [with no kana transcription] and in the 1856 edition (Waran bunten dokuhō) as ᅗㄊ with kana transcription kuni kotoba (Yamamoto M. 1965, 71). It is obvious that ᅗ ㄊ here, either as kokugo or kunikotoba, did not refer to the Japanese language per se, nor to lexical elements opposed to kanbun, but were used as a common noun for a nonparticular “language” as a whole. The characters ᅗㄊ, however, were not used as a consistent translation of “language.” For example, Kunten Waran bunten (Dutch Grammar with Japanese Translation, 1857), another Japanese edition of Waran bunten: Zenpen, translated tale as ᅗペ, probably read as kunikotoba (71). In Sōyaku Igirisu bunten in 1867, the translation of Igirisu bunten (English Grammar, 1866, published by Kaiseijo1 ), “language” was written as ᅗゕⴝ and ᅗペ [both probably read as kunikotoba] (83). To further complicate the matter, kunikotoba was also used, as mentioned before, as furigana, the kana transcript, of ᅗㄊ. In other words, it is possible that the kanji ᅗㄊ were used merely as the kanji transcript, say, as furi-kanji [as opposed to furigana] for the word kuni kotoba. The intricacy of the concept of ᅗㄊ can also be found in English-Japanese dictionaries during early Meiji. For example, Fuon sōzu ei-wa jii (EnglishJapanese...