The mustachioed romanizers of the Meiji period — from the Roman Character Association (羅馬字会) and their 1885 pamphlet “How to write Japanese in Roman characters” to Mori “Let’s just all speak English” Arinori — were the first to seriously make the argument that Japan’s writing system would be better abandoned than reformed. The idea was influential for the better part of a century among certain circles of Japanese society, and there’s still a Nihon Rōmaji Kyōkai (“Society for the Romanization of the Japanese Alphabet”, 日本ローマ字協会) in operation today. Shiga Naoya’s famous 1946 “Let’s all just speak French” proposal, however, was essentially the movement’s last hurrah.
1946, after all, was the year that the Ministry of Education announced gendai kanazukai (modern[ized] kana usage) and the tōyō (“general-purpose”) list of simplified kanji. These two changes swept away the most egregious archaisms and inconsistencies of written Japanese, depriving the Indo-Europhiles of the orthographic horror stories they were forced to fight against in the past. With only cerebral arguments on general principles left, groups opposing the kana-kanji-kana orthography faded into irrelevance as the Japanese economic miracle progressed.
But romanizers and modernizers were not the only ones who wanted to rebuild Japanese in the Imperial years. The Kanamojikai (カナモジカイ, “Kana Character Society”), founded in 1920 and still active, were inspired by the same issues — our children waste too much time learning kanji, our writing system doesn’t fit properly down linotype wires, etc. — but had, in a way, a more radical program than other groups worrying about these issues.
(There were no doubt many practical considerations behind the decision to spell “Rōmaji kyōkai” with as many kanji as possible — 羅馬字会 — not least the lack of public understanding at the time of how to read Roman characters, but dog food is dog food and someone has to take the first bite.)
The Kanamojikai’s aim was to convert the katakana syllabary into a form that that would let readers recognize words as gestalts, like readers of English and other alphabetic languages can. Kanji and hiragana were to be locked in the basement and never spoken of again.
In practice, this meant:
- Horizontal writing from left to right
- Spaces between words
- Careful word choice to avoid homonym problems
- New letterforms
The first three ideas are nothing special and are actually working out quite well in modern Korean. To propose new letterforms, however, takes chutzpah.
Fortunately, the founder of the Kanamojikai, Yamashita Yoshitarō, had plenty of chutzpah. He’d been working on this idea since 1914, when he made his first attempt at a more legible katakana syllabary. In subsequent years he commissioned typefaces from Hirao Zenji and Cabinet printing office staff member Saruhashi Fukutarō, and the results were used in the first issue of the Kanamojikai’s newsletter Kana no hikari (“Kana-light” — like, sunlight), published in 1922.
The article in the right column at the above link is set in one of Saruhashi’s typefaces, and though the content is predictable (kanji are a “heavy, heavy burden” “borrowed” from China which should be “returned”) the visual effect is marvelous. If romanization can be likened to requiring that everyone abandon their wardrobes in favor of standard-issue gray overalls, the Kanamojikai were urging everyone to adopt a new one-size-fits-all art-deco kimono. I am particularly partial to the zig-zag treatment of the dots in シ (shi) and similar characters.
The most important difference between these characters and the “standard” way of writing kana is the abandonment of the one-size-fits-any-character “imaginary box” concept in favor of a Roman-inspired “character body + protrusions” approach. For example, the last three words on the first line are “オモイ オモイ ニモツ” (“heavy, heavy burden”); notice that all these characters share the same baseline and x-height, with the top of the イ and オ protruding above the meanline to reach the capline.
Now compare this with the katakana rendered by your browser in this paragraph — unless your settings are quite idiosyncratic, each one should be spreading to share an identically-sized square, with no equivalent vertical or horizontal alignment.
In other words, while Saruhashi’s typeface is clearly recognizable as katakana, it also represents a replacement of the thousand-year-old organizing principles of Japanese script with new ideas straight out of Europe. Stylish handwriting reproduced by woodblock printing, perfectly square grid layouts — all this was to be abandoned in favor of the post-Gutenberg European tradition of type, miniature skylines of letters clumped in words spread out on lines proceeding from left to right.
For Yamashita did not see language as something separate from the world it described. He understood it as part of a feedback system, inseparable from the technology and progress it enabled. Why settle for mere compatibility with the major European colonial languages and their technologies for communication when Japanese could simply strip their alphabets for parts and then blaze far, far ahead? Like the Meiji thinkers a generation before him, Yamashita wanted to be proactive rather than reactive.
So the next thing he did was travel to America and collaborate with Underwood Typewriter Company employee Burnham C. Stickney on the first kana typewriter. Yamashita’s name isn’t actually on the patent, but his agenda is clearly visible: “Katakana is usually written downwardly in vertical lines; but an object of the invention is to give added impetus to the movement which has progressed for many years in Japan, to introduce horizontal writing from left to right,” etc. More to the point, the typeface is unmistakeably Yamashitate.
He was clearly still searching, as there are innovations here unseen in his earlier attempts: the rethought descenders, for example, and the teardrop terminals. This was partly driven by necessity — the terminal on ニ and ミ help distinguish those characters from the kanji 二 and 三, for example — but the language of the patent has plenty to say about aesthetics. Yamashita’s changes “bring [the text] into harmony and enhance the elegance of the typed page”; his characters are “trim and elegant” without lacking “squareness and substantiality.” Having taken it upon himself to forge a new script for a new age, the man did not intend to settle for utility alone.
Sadly, the kana typewriter turned out to be Yamashita’s last swing at the piñata. By the time he returned to Japan in early 1923, he was already dying of stomach cancer. In April of that year, he finally succumbed. “Nothing is more urgently required right now for the development of our nation’s culture than the reform of our national writing system,” he wrote in his final testament. Maybe, with the first kana typewriters scheduled to arrive in Japan a month after writing those words, he even believed it would happen.