Why didn't Japan excise Chinese characters from the Japanese language, when Japan hated China so much?

Submitted by 3cana t3_10sfeek in history

1. Can anyone source the history book, written in English that claimed that Japan tried to excise Chinese characters (kanji) from Japanese? Particularly in WW2, at Japan's worst of anti-Chinese hatred and sentiment?

2. Why didn't Japanese eradicate all the kanji from Japanese? It appears contradictory to hate the Chinese so much as to commit war crimes against Chinese, but for the Japanese to keep using Chinese characters. It appears contradictory to use characters from a language and people that the Japanese consider "completely inferior", in the Japanese language.

This eradication appears linguistically possible. Korean and Vietnamese succeeded in removing Chinese characters without loss of semantics.

My Research

>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The Japanese showed similar cruelty to the Chinese, but without the secrecy of the Nazi Holocaust. Apparently their goal was to lessen Chinese resolve through terror. Tens of thousands of women were not only raped but also, typically, mutilated and killed. Men were frequently forced to rape members of their own families. "Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them torn apart by German shepherds."<sup>50</sup> The behavior of the Japanese was so atrocious that a Nazi living in Nanking at the time described the massacre as the operation of "bestial machinery."<sup>51</sup>
Unlike the Germans, the Japanese have yet to come fully to grips with responsibility for the acts of their army in 1937, and those Japanese veterans who have faced up to their behavior and asked forgiveness have been targets of hate and violence from right-wing groups in Japan.

>Journalist Iris Chang, who wrote the definitive work on the rape of Nanking, placed the blame for the genocidal actions of the Japanese army on indoctrination by "a dangerous government, in a vulnerable culture, in dangerous times, able to sell dangerous rationalizations to those whose human instincts told them otherwise."<sup>53</sup> She believed, as have many others, that the behavior of the Japanese troops traced in part to the brutality, often in the form of severe physical abuse, that the Japanese army of the time inflicted on its own soldiers and officers.<sup>54</sup> When turned loose on helpless civilians whom soldiers had been indoctrinated to believe were lower than pigs and ordered to massacre them, Chang wrote, it "is easy to see how years of suppressed anger, hatred, and fear of authority could have erupted in uncontrollable violence at Nanking."<sup>55</sup> Such behavior does not seem so hard to explain when people (the teachers) in a known experimental environment, subject to no abuse, indoctrination, or coercion and under no obligation to authorities, could be led to inflict punishment that might (in their minds) lead to the deaths of colleagues in an experiment.

Paul Ralph Ehrlich. Human Natures Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect (2000). Page 262.

>There was no top-down effort to demonize the Chinese, but anti-Chinese sentiment was constantly running high still as an easy boogeyman and object of frustration. Japanese troops wrote, during the Manchuria occupation and beforehand, that the Chinese were 'lower than pigs' and a 'completely inferior people'(4). In this light, it wasn't hard to see why the Japanese would have developed an outlook which completely dehumanized the Chinese. For example, Unit 731 referred to the prisoners as maruta, which is Japanese for 'log of wood'. They weren't even prisoners to them.

<sup>4</sup> The Second World War by Antony Beevor, p. 60

https://history.stackexchange.com/q/70885

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Goetterwind t1_j7192lr wrote

The Kanji used in Japanese are basically the old school versions of the traditional Chinese characters. There are even specific Japanese Kanji. So while technically they are of the same origin as the Chinese ones, they are not exactly the same nowadays and back then (they are very close to traditional Chinese, though) Afaik.

it makes no sense to eliminate them, as they are 'distinctive' enough. You also have to understand that every fascist Ideology heavily relies on religion, heroism and tradition. You cannot rely on traditional values, if you kill the historical inscription, seals and so on.

How do you want to explain to the common people that their emperor, the direct descendent of God, now has to write his name in the peasant signs? ;)

Would you give up the Arabic numbers, the Hindu '0', the Latin alphabet even if you hate them all? I don't think so, as they are such old, that they are basically a part of your own identity, history and culture.

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perrothepotato t1_j73p509 wrote

China didn’t introduce simplified characters until 1949, before then they were using traditional characters. If you read one (simplified or traditional), you can generally read the other. So they’re not that distinctive and while pronounced differently, their meaning is the same.

I haven’t looked into it - but I imagine it’s linked to cultural identity and nationhood. If the Japanese abolished Kanji, they would also be restricting access to some of their greatest works of literature and their written history. During periods of nation building, these soft powers are needed to construct the national narrative.

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Goetterwind t1_j73utql wrote

I don't know if your reply is a criticism on my comment, so maybe I was not exact enough about the differences of traditional/simplified Chinese vs. Kanji. You can correct me, if I am wrong, as my knowledge of Chinese is (extremely) limited, but I have been several times to Japan. So this is bascially my (limited) knowledge from about 12 years ago.

Concerning the Chinese characters vs. Japanese Kanji: There is traditional and simplified Chinese, yes. The traditional Chinese had several reforms, the major ones about 210BC and starting from 1949 another one (leading to the simplifed Chinese being formely adapter in 1964 afaik). However in between these major dates, obviously a bunch of other quite minor adaptations happened (as in every language and writing) - however it is mostly static. The reforms tried to simplify writing, but there are some runnning gags nowadays, like 'the simplified love lacks the heart'...

There are traditional Kanji and (after WW2 some modifications - leading to the 'shinjitai'?) modern Kanji. However, the set of trad. Kanji are derived from roughly the 5th century AD (mainly due to Buddhist texts and trade, as Japan had no writing system) and there are additional characters Japanese-only kanji that form the so-called 'kukoji'. Those kanji don't have an on'yomi (Chinese) spelling, as they are not 'from China' - but obviously kun'yomi (Japanese spelling). An example is 込 ...

But as a fun twist of history, some Japanese kanji were even absorbed back into traditional Chinese so they 'gained' an on'yomi spelling!

But it does not end here - some kanji even have a different on'yomi as you would expect from their traditional Chinese counterpart, mainly due to the fact that they are not derived from Mandarin, but some other dialects. Some are some exapmles of different meanings, the most commonly known being 手纸/手紙 (Shouzhi? Sorry for buthering this) meaning 'toilet paper' in Chinese and 手紙 (tegami) meaning 'letter' in Japanese.

So yes, Kanji are to the vast majority traditional Chinese characters, but with some slight twist.

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perrothepotato t1_j7705b9 wrote

Oh, I’m sorry. No it wasn’t a criticism at all. Your comment just made me think.. so it was more just me thinking out loud in a response. Haha.

Yeah traditional characters have been reformed (standardized) but it was usually for unification (mostly for ease of trade and government organization purposes). Which would probably be the same reason the Japanese didn’t abolish it. It was needed for communication during a period where their leaders and scientists (unit 731 & other sites) were spread throughout the whole Asia Pacific region.

The evolution of language is fascinating. I wonder if the Japanese had won, if kanji would have been phased out… I think that would have been slightly more probable. It wouldn’t make much sense to under go a whole language reform during empire building.

And yeah, 手纸 is toilet paper/letter in Chinese/Japanese. But if you break the word apart, it literally means “hand paper”. So given the context that it’s written you’d still be able to derive the correct meaning from it (and a bit of a laugh too probably). And even 込 komi: to include. If we pulled it apart into its original radicals, it’s 辶 and 入，which literally means walk in. So again if the character is in context, you would still be able to derive it’s meaning from its semantic indicators. Which takes us back to the OP question, this example of the evolution of kanji, to use the original Chinese semantic indicators to create their own vocabulary, is a great illustration of how deeply embedded kanji is and how difficult it would be to simply remove it.

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War_Hymn t1_j7dv7oq wrote

> they are not exactly the same nowadays

I don't know about that, when I need to translate Japanese kanji, I just use a traditional Chinese dictionary.

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SushiMage t1_j7wjv9n wrote

> they are not exactly the same nowadays and back then…very close to tradditional

What. They are exactly the same characters which is the only reason I can even recognize them as someone who can only read chinese and not japanese. The characters are identical to what I see in chinese signs/books/internet forums. This is going to give a blantantly false impression to people.

Also keep in mind there are less than 100 kokuji characters while kanji numbers in the tens of thousands. It’s a weak attempt to severe the connection.

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mauimudpup t1_j71z81z wrote

I dont know that they hated the historical china and its culture and language they may have just hated modern china. There are folks who like ancient greece and rome and think the modern italians and greeks are worth their time.

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yamazaki25 t1_j75ewyq wrote

Your question is no different than “why didn’t the Americans excise all the Germanic words in English when they hated Nazis so much?”

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rbuen4455 t1_j74eyfw wrote

Japanese "hate" towards the Chinese is very very recent, and only mainly a thing during imperial Japan in the late 1800s to 1950s or so when Japan was more modernized and developed than China, which was more poorer and less modernized.

I'm pretty sure the average Japanese civilian never hated or cared about the Chinese. It was only the occupying forces (the soldiers) who were taught and trained to hate the Chinese. It's all part of "hardening" the soldier, to make them ruthless against the enemy, who was the Chinese at that time, to see them as less human, so they can succeed in their goal of conquering China.

Idk what writing system has to do with hate? It's just symbols meant to represent things. We use Arabic numerals, and yet that doesn't stop many Americans from hating the Arab world?

Nowadays, there's no hate between the East Asian countries, except some individuals, and China nowadays is more powerful and developed than Japan.

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freeski919 t1_j71ecz6 wrote

Americans continue to use Arabic numerals, despite a large portion of the US population harboring a hatred for Arabs and Muslims.

Change is hard, regardless of motivation. The Japanese had other things to do at the time.

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Imadope_1960 t1_j79bsbq wrote

That part of the US population doesn't have a clue why they hate other than they are told to.

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indian_mofo t1_j71jka1 wrote

Firstly, they're Hindu- Arabic numerals so different Secondly, the 'hate' against Arabs and Muslims isn't mainstream in US as opposed to Japanese nationalism which was the norm at that time. Lastly, Japanese does have (sort of) native writing systems I.e Hiragana and katakana which could have replaced Kanji (which is pretty much Chinese Characters) but same can't be said for Hindu- Arabic numerals. What can they be replaced with?

So your analogy is just wrong.

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IeyasuMcBob t1_j72ayfh wrote

To try and help you understand the downvotes (actually didn't downvote your comment myself)

  1. I don't think a huge proportion of the Arab-hating USA population would be particularly fussed over the distinction between Arabic and Hindu-Arabic, though you are right that there is a difference.

  2. Roman numerals for instance.

The analogy isn't perfect, granted, but it works, let's say enough, to discuss at least.

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ada_c03 t1_j723vg8 wrote

The Japanese language has very limited sounds, many words sound the same and the meaning is only gleaned through the kanji characters used to write it or from context. Erasing kanji would make the language even harder to understand. Anyway, both hiragana and katakana were created using pieces of kanji, so Chinese characters are in all of their forms of writing.

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Goetterwind t1_j72cbv9 wrote

Yes and no. Chinese is even more limited in sound. Both however write the corresponding Chinese sign onto their hand during conversation in order to facilitate communication. Hiragana was a writing system for women (they were not allowed to use Kanji) in order to be able to write, while katakana comes from a sect in order to make sense out of the Buddhist texts written in Chinese. Both languages are fundamentally different...

In Japanese there is actually no need for the Kanji imo, but it would make the language much much muuuuch more complicated to write...

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Another_Spark t1_j7b6mpu wrote

I don't think the Chinese cultural tradition that had gone for centuries was really connected to how they were thought of in the 20th century. Japan generally had the view that while some of their traditions might have originated from China, it had since then degenerated and now Japan was the rightful heir of the "real" tradition they had built on top of the original. I mean, they had been using those characters for hundreds of years already by the 20th century, it is much more likely they saw them as their own rather than as "Chinese". Therefore I don't believe there is any contradiction between seeing the Chinese as inferior in the 20th century while using the characters.

In a general sense, why did the others eradicate the characters while Japan did not? I'm not sure, but it seems to be dependent on each country. I think the central process here was that to promote literacy, every Asian country got rid of the very difficult Classical Chinese as the main literary language in the early 20th century and replaced it with something closer to their local spoken language. In Vietnam, Latin script was introduced by the colonial French administration while in Korea the Hangul script was promoted by nationalists and suppressed by the Japanese so it gained nationalist symbolism. Still, South Korea only really gave up the Chinese characters fully in the 1990s while the more anti-Japanese North Korea abolished them in late 1940s. So, the reason for keeping or not keeping Chinese characters was mostly a political issue unique to each country.

I've never heard of any major attempts in Japan to eradicate the kanji entirely, though I wouldn't be surprised if there were some arguments in the margins for switch to a Latin script or some other form of simplification - these were debated in pretty much every country during their modernisation, as even some Chinese argued for abolishing the characters in favour of some kind of alphabet.

TL;DR: Anti-Chinese sentiment during WW2 and usage of Chinese characters in Japan are not contradictory, there is no connection between the topics.

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CaeciliusEstInPussy t1_j7dvm1o wrote

If the English got rid of the French in English out of hatred for the French, there’d be many missing holes. I assume unlearning language and vocabulary you grow up with is impractical and difficult for the average Joe or Jane. I’m not a linguist or a historian, but to me it seems unpractical, hatred or not.

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EclecticCacophony t1_ja9o7ec wrote

There's a small fringe 'movement' of sorts to remove non-Germanic words from English. This manner of speaking and writing is referred to as "Anglish." A telephone becomes a "farspeaker," a dictionary becomes a "wordbook," and so on. There are some interesting discussions about all this over at r/anglish

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enfiel t1_j8rmipw wrote

You can't be a reactionary dictatorship that goes on and on about tradition and then get rid of something as basic as your writing system. Might as well ban the national dress, music or other important cultural things.

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