By J. Marshall Unger
This ebook demanding situations the common trust that overzealous americans pressured pointless script reforms on an unprepared, unenthusiastic, yet helpless Japan in the course of the career. Unger offers overlooked ancient proof displaying that the reforms applied from 1946 to 1959 have been either priceless and reasonable. even if the us schooling venture of 1946 advised that the japanese provide severe attention to the creation of alphabetic writing, key American officers within the Civil details and schooling element of GHQ/SCAP not on time and successfully killed motion in this suggestion. eastern advocates of romanization however controlled to procure CI&E popularity of an test in straight forward faculties to check the speculation that schoolchildren can make speedier growth if spared the need of learning chinese language characters as a part of non-language classes corresponding to mathematics. although now not conclusive, the experiment's effects supported the speculation and instructed the necessity for extra and higher checking out. but paintings was once dropped at a halt a 12 months prior to agenda; the Ministry of schooling used to be ordered to arrange a record that misrepresented the objective of the test and claimed it proved not anything. the total episode dropped from reliable and scholarly view--until the ebook of this publication.
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Additional info for Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan: Reading between the Lines
Example text
The ability to write kanji from dictation (kanji no kakitori), which was identified as the single most important skill tested, was found to be "remarkably low" in ALL groups surveyed. Performance was closely correlated with levels of formal education; subjects whose education had been disrupted by the war did significantly poorer in all areas than those whose education had not been disrupted. This showed that mastery of the basics, without years of supplementary instruction in kanji, was inadequate for full literacy.
If one is interested primarily in the development of institutions, the rise of popular movements, and the economic transformations often collectively referred to as "modernization," then it may be enough to establish the role of the spread of literacy in the overall process of modernization and move on. But one must be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that just because Japan has, by all accounts, succeeded in becoming a "modern" nation, Japanese literacy before the Pacific War must ipso facto have been a more or less uniform package of skills with which virtually every citizen, from the highest to lowest, was equipped as he or she entered adulthood.
The foundation for the first assumption was laid by Ronald Dore (1965, 321), who ventured a very cautious but nevertheless optimistic estimate of literacy at the end of the Edo period on the basis of school attendance figures from that time. Herbert Passin, a bit more confidently, made estimates of literacy for various groups within the general population that work out to an overall literacy rate for the same period of 39 to 47 percent (Passin 1982, 56-57; Unger 1987, 87). The second assumption is implicit in the work of historians of the Meiji period such as Carol Gluck, who emphasize the growth of the press as a factor in social change at the end of the igth century.