
Contents
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The Japanese Language before the Meiji Period The Japanese Language before the Meiji Period
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Synopsis Synopsis
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Significance of This Book Significance of This Book
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The Dualism of “the Japanese Language” The Dualism of “the Japanese Language”
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Translating This Book Translating This Book
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Cite
Extract
This is a translation of Lee Yeounsuk’s 1996 book Kokugo to iu shisō: Kindai Nihon no gengo ninshiki (literally, The Idea of Kokugo: Perceptions of Language in Modern Japan). In this book Lee Yeounsuk powerfully demonstrates the political nature of language. She details the history of the construction of an ideology of “the Japanese language” through a careful and meticulous reexamination of primary source materials, many of which have been neglected by mainstream scholars. She begins by questioning the very possibility of such an entity as “the Japanese language” at the beginning of Japan’s modernization—the notion of such a monolithic unity as “the Japanese language” did not exist in the early Meiji period.
Lee discusses how kokugo was created as a value-laden norm suitable for Japan as a modern nation-state, locking together a political community called a “nation” with a linguistic community that was assumed to share the same language throughout that nation. Focusing on the Ueda Kazutoshi–Hoshina Kōichi line of contributions to this history, she illustrates various efforts to overcome the state of linguistic disarray from the early Meiji period through the numerous debates and proposals for the reduction or abolition of Chinese characters, the unification of written and spoken languages, and the standardization of language and script.
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