Name: Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan
ISBN: 9780195356380

What Hacker News says

coffeelingAug 2025

You didn't even try to do it the way Koreans did it, though. When Koreans dropped hanja in favour of a hangeul-only script, they adopted spacing because spaced text is much easier to understand than unspaced text. Likewise, products like old Japanese videogames which couldn't use kanji due to technical limitations used spaced kana because it's just much better and no one's masochistic enough to not use them if they don't have access to kanji. The Japanese mixed script doesn't use spaces largely because kanji already serve as word dividers. If you remove that function, everyone sane will use spaces, and pro-kanji arguers will leave them out to make the proposition seem mad.

Importantly, spaces also make it much easier to recognize the shapes of the words.

It's the chief reason people say kana-only writing (like in old videogames for example) is hard to read: People competent at reading any language don't spell things out in detail, even when we subvocalize we first recognize the shape of the scribbles and our brain has a shortcut from a certain set of scribbles to certain morphemes/words, where the solid feeling of meaning comes from. No one actually reads these English posts by vocalizing letter by letter to slowly build the words together.

Every competent reader of Japanese is first and foremost used to the kanji-hiragana mixed script, and has shortcuts for the kanji forms of words and the sounds of those words. The hiragana only forms? Not so much. So when they complain about hiragana only being hard to read, they're not lying. It really is harder. But it's not harder due to any inherent defect in a hiragana-only script, it's just about a lack of exposure to form those shortcuts that make reading feel easy.

Meme sentences designed to be hard to read that you'd never see in real life aren't an actual point. By that token, the Buffalo buffalo sentence argues for the urgent adoption of kanji in English.

Likewise, in my native Finnish:

  - Kokko, kokoo koko kokko kokoon.
  - Koko kokkoko?
  - Koko kokko.

ie.

  - Kokko, assemble the bonfire.
  - The entire bonfire? 
  - The entire bonfire

It's perfectly readable despite the meme value.

Similarily, "kuusi palaa" can mean:

  kuusi palaa = the spruce is on fire
  kuusi palaa = the spruce returns
  kuusi palaa = the number six is on fire
  kuusi palaa = the number six returns
  kuusi palaa = six (of them, or six pieces of something) are on fire
  kuusi palaa = six (as above) return
  kuusi palaa = your moon is on fire
  kuusi palaa = your moon returns
  kuusi palaa = six pieces

Do we need to urgently adopt kanji in order to avoid homophony?

  > Chinese and Japanese have too many homephones to use a spelling system like Korean.

Curiously, it's possible to write books entirely in pinyin: https://pinyin.info/readings/pinyin_riji_duanwen.html

Similarily, I highly doubt people would've printed the Roumaji Zasshi if they believed it to be incomprehensible: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035...

  > Third time: After World War II, General MacArthur commissioned a team of American education specialists to work with Japanese experts to discuss whether to abolish kanji entirely, and to consider the possibility of fully romanizing the Japanese language. Yet, they decided to keep Japanese.

J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan goes into details on this. There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system. This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.

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coffeelingAug 2025

J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan goes into details on this.

There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system.

This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.

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coffeelingAug 2025

Japan has had pro-romanization societies since the 1920's, and even during the last attempt at large-scale script reform after the war, it wasn't just the Americans pushing it: Many Japanese were enthusiastic about moving to a phonetic script because they perceived it as more efficient and modern. Likewise, not every American administrator was in favour of reforming away the kanji, far from it.

J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan is a good treatise on the subject.

EDIT: Also, this was published in 1877 if I did my date conversions right: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035...

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wrpJul 2016

The above post repeats some widely believed but inaccurate statements about literacy in Japan. The frequently mentioned 9x% literacy rate is a myth. In the premodern period, it was much less than 1% of the population. In 1948, the rate of full literacy was reported to be 6.2% of the population. In 1955, a literacy census reported that functional illiteracy ran at 60% of the adult population. See Rubinger[1] for the premodern period and Unger[2] for post-WW2. Unger also maintains a bibliography on Japanese literate on his web site.[3]

[1] Richard Rubinger. 2007. Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan.

[2] J. Marchall Unger. 1996. Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan.

[3] https://u.osu.edu/unger.26/books/literacy-and-script-reform-...

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