The Land od the Rising Yen

of people who cannot consult the telephone book properly.
All Japanese telegrams are written out in katakana — a reasonable but
unusual way — and there are countless people who receive urgent telegrams but
cannot read them.
    I must make it clear that learning
the 881 or the 1,850 ideographs does not mean learning so many complicated,
unconnected and illogical signs. There is a clever, logical system (mostly
based on radicals — the same basic signs appearing in many words which
are vague synonyms or belong to the same group) and thus the situation is that
the more ideographs one knows the more one can learn with increasing ease.
Radicals help one; but — as always in Japanese writing — they may also confuse
one and make life a little more difficult. But even if the system is built on
logic, it remains unwieldy and almost insuperable. Literacy in Japan is high, indeed, the highest in the world. There are no people who are completely
illiterate; but there are no people who are fully literate either. Even great
scholars, as I have said, are beaten by the odd kanji ; or in other
words, even the most learned come across words in their own language which they
cannot read. A situation unimaginable in the case of a Swedish or Spanish child
of average intelligence, above the age of seven.
    (3) Because of these difficulties
only very few foreigners learn Japanese and an already isolated language is
condemned, by its script, to eternal isolation. Japanese writers can scarcely
communicate with the rest of the world. Few Japanese know English or French
well enough to translate into these languages; and if I put the number
of first-class translators (Japanese and foreign-born) at a dozen, I am
exaggerating vastly. Lucky or exceptional Japanese writers — a handful — may
speak to the world; the rest are condemned to silence outside their own
country.
     
    The question arises: why don’t they
scrap the system and introduce something else? It is the Latin alphabet
Westerners think of first. Of course, it goes against the grain to throw out a
considerable part of your national heritage and see it go down the drain. No
nation, however, is more accustomed to wiping its slate clean and starting anew
than the Japanese. Besides, it is not the introduction of the Latin alphabet
that is advocated, but the use of kana. Kana is eminently suited to
their language, is actually in use and — unlike kanji — is their own
invention, the truly Japanese script.
    There is no great fight on; no
movement presses hard for an immediate change. But the issue lurks in the
background and is bound to be raised effectively sooner or later. Opponents of
any change have mustered many arguments — the main being a sentimental
attachment to the past and a natural objection to such thoroughgoing,
unsettling reform.
    (1) They say that if they used only kana no one would learn kanji, and the entire pre-reform literature of Japan would remain unread and would consequently die. It would have to be reset in kana for the sake of new generations. The truth, however, is that the 1948 reforms
condemned the old literature to partial death in any case. Few people know
enough kanji to read the classics; the
    1,850 signs are not enough to read an
author who used 4,000. The only way to bring the classics to life in any case
would be to reset them, either using the 1,850 signs or using kana. (A
similar situation arose in Greece, years ago. The Greeks went on pretending for
a long time that modern Greek was really ancient Greek with slight variations,
so Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, etc., were never translated into
modern Greek. The result of this pretence was that the Greek classics were read
less in Greece than anywhere else. As soon as the reformists got their way and
it was recognized that for a modern Greek to learn classical Greek was to learn
a new language, and as soon as the classics were translated into modern
Greek — set up in kana, so to say — they came to life again.)
    In Japan the old classics are not
reset in any way and remain unread except by a devoted and dedicated minority.
    (2) It is also said that the
advantages to be gained would be small. I can only mention one or two facts
pointing to the contrary. Hardly anyone uses a typewriter in Japan. A Japanese typewriter is only slightly smaller than the Jodrell Bank
radio-telescope, looks like a mixture of a computer and a self-propelled gun,
but is a little more complex than either.