Multilingual Matters The Making of Monolingual Japan: Language Ideology and Japanese Modernity (Multilingual Matters): 146

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Making of Monolingual JapanLanguage Ideology and Japanese ModernityBy Patrick HeinrichMultilingual MattersCopyright © 2012 Patrick HeinrichAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-84769-657-1ContentsPreface, 1 Language Ideology as a Field of Enquiry, 2 The Call of Mori Arinori to Replace Japanese, 3 The Creation of a Modern Voice, 4 The Unification of Japanese, 5 The Linguistic Assimilation of Ryukyuans and Ainu, 6 The Most Beautiful Language in the World, 7 Language Ideology as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, 8 Current Challenges to Modernist Language Ideology, 9 Language Ideology in 21st-century Japan, References, Index, CHAPTER 1Language Ideology as a Field of EnquiryLanguage ideology is an ever-present component of our communicative behaviour, for it regulates the way we talk. Yet this is something of which most of us are unaware, and so we assume our linguistic choices and attitudes to be entirely natural. The term 'ideology' is therefore a fitting one, and while language ideology escapes the attention of many of us most of the time, once one purposefully starts looking for it one encounters it everywhere. Consider the following examples of language ideology at work in Japan.On 18 January 2000, a consultation body organized by the late Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo published a booklet which proposed the establishment of English as a second official language in Japan. In the resultant discussion on the appropriateness of such a proposal, linguist Tanaka Katsuhiko (2000) drew attention to the fact that Japan does not actually have a first official language.On 20 February 2009, the evening edition of the daily newspaper Asahi shinbun led with the headline, 'Hachijo Language'?, followed by the statements, 'UNESCO: 2,500 languages world-wide threatened by extinction', 'Eight languages in Japan endangered' and 'Also [Japanese] dialects are independent languages'. Such was the response of Japan's most influential newspaper to the publication of the latest UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, which identified eight endangered languages in Japan (UNESCO, 2009).On 26 May 2009, colleagues and friends of mine met at my office at the University of the Ryukyus. Frustrated by the lack of a language policy supportive of Ryukyuan languages, radio presenter Fija Byron commented, 'if we had a governor who said, all of a sudden, 'From now on, I will speak only Uchinaaguchi' (Okinawan) ... Someone with that kind of faith ... That would be it'!In February 2009, Florian Coulmas handed me a copy of Tomasz Kamusella's The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe and asked me for a review. On the plane from Tokyo back to Naha, I read Kamusella's words:The most ethno-linguistically homogenous nation-states (that is, almost without any native speakers of other languages than the national) are Iceland, Japan, and Poland. In the cases of Iceland and Japan, this unusual homogeneity was achieved by the long lasting maritime isolation of both parties. (Kamusella, 2009: 60)It is easy to find such conflicting attitudes and opinions when dealing with the issue of language in Japan, yet few people take the time to consider the reasons for this incongruity, where it originated and how it might be resolved. Here, the issue of language ideology is crucial. As will be demonstrated in the course of this book, incongruity arises from the fact that the dominant language ideology in Japan is far removed from the country's sociolinguistic situation. To understand this disparity, we must trace the social and historical genealogy of dominant ideas about language in Japan, for by doing so we will find that there is a single ideology present in all the vignettes above which was proliferated towards the end of the 19th century. The idea is that of language nationalism. Of course, language nationalism is in no way unique to Japan, nor is it exceptional that the creation of a modern nation-sta