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The Complexity of Modernization: How the Genbunitchi 
and Kokugo Movements Changed Japanese

by Mark Laaninen

In 1914, the novelist Natsume Soseki published 
his novel Kokoro. Incorporating themes of isolation 
and detachment into the tragedy of the main 
character Sensei, Kokoro solidified Soseki as one 
of Japan’s earliest and greatest modern Japanese 
writers.1 Yet more than their themes made Soseki’s 
novels modern. By 1914, writers like Soseki used a 
simple, colloquial style of writing which radically 
differed from the more complex character-based 
system used by writers even thirty years prior. What 
fueled this change? Many point to the language 
reform movements of the Meiji Era, especially the 
genbunitchi and kokugo movements. These language 
reforms attempted to pioneer a new Japanese, one 
united and tailored for a modern world. Although 
they had a far-reaching effect in their own period, 
the long-term impact of these movements is more 
difficult to assess. Academics and politicians were 
most receptive to the calls for change, often leading 
the campaigns themselves. However, those in other 
circles had different, occasionally hostile attitudes 
towards the movements. Those involved in literature 
usually disliked the idea of script reform that would 
render their mastery of old styles obsolete. Educators 
in rural regions, though open to Western influence, 
resisted the attempted suppression of their local 
dialects. Due to the debates in academia, politics, 
literature, and education, the general public ended 
up accepting some of the ideas of the movements 
while rejecting others. Despite the attempts of the 
intellectuals and politicians to impose their language 
reforms upon the populace, the genbunitchi and 
kokugo movements only successfully modernized 
language once writers, educators and, most 
importantly, the general public adopted some 
of the reforms and drove a bottom-up linguistic 
modernization.

1 David Pollack, “Framing the Self. The Philosophical 
Dimensions of Human Nature in Kokoro,” Monumenta 
Nipponica 43, no. 4 (1988): 417. 

Of the many linguistic crusades of the Meiji 
Period, the genbunitchi and kokugo movements had 
the largest and most vocal following. Genbunitchi 
focuses on unifying written and spoken Japanese 
into one easily learnable language.2 Advocates 
of genbunitchi argued that the old Tokugawa 
wakankonkobun, kanbun, and sorobun were far 
too complicated for anyone without huge amounts 
of time to learn. Instead, they wanted a simplified, 
colloquial style that allowed for greater literacy and 
ease of communication.3 The desired form of writing 
varied among genbunitchi advocates, however. Some, 
like Fukuzawa Yukichi, simply reduced the number 
of kanji, or Chinese-style characters, in their writing, 
while others like Nishi Amane wanted a wholesale 
adoption of romaji, or a Latin alphabet.4 Yet for many 
reformers, changing written Japanese could only be 
useful after spoken Japanese had been united. The 
kokugo, or “national language” movement, pushed to 
eliminate the dialectical variance that had existed in 
Japan for so long.5 Men like Ueda Kazutoshi wished 
to “exterminate” the dialects of Japan by imposing 
Tokyogo, or Tokyo dialect, over the entire country.6 

2 Nanette Twine, “The Genbunitchi Movement. Its Origin, 
Development, and Conclusion,” Monumenta Nipponica 
33, no. 3 (1978): 333. 
3 Twine, “The Genbunitchi Movement. Its Origin, 
Development, and Conclusion,” 337. 
4 Nanette Twine, “Toward Simplicity: Script Reform 
Movements in the Meiji Period,” Monumenta Nipponica 
38, no. 2 (1983): 121-132; Nishi Amane, “Writing Japanese 
in the Western Alphabet,” in Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the 
Japanese Enlightenment, ed. and trans. William Reynolds 
Braisted (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 
1976), 1. 
5 Hiraku Shimoda, “Tongues-Tied: The Making of a 
‘National Language’ and the Discovery of Dialects in Meiji 
Japan,” American Historical Review 115, no. 3 (2010): 720-
721. 
6 Shimoda, “Tongues-Tied: The Making of a ‘National 
Language’ and the Discovery of Dialects in Meiji Japan,” 
723. 



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Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201832

To understand the extent to which the genbunitchi 
and kokugo movements actually changed language 
in Japan long term, one must first analyze whom 
adopted the recommendations of reform.

Academics and politicians often led the charge 
for linguistic change, probably because they stood 
the most to gain from the reforms. Academics, 
especially those in Western studies, had to grapple 
with introducing new ideas into Japanese. Scholars 
struggled to find translations for Western ideas that 
had not previously existed in Japan, such as liberty, 
civilization, and even separations between fields 
such as religion and philosophy.7 The genbunitchi 
movement often found its most passionate leaders 
from this group, as these scholars saw a clear need 
to make dissemination of Western thought easier.8 
Although scholars held differing ideas, a majority 
of the advocates wanted a full-scale conversion to 
romaji.9 Academics used the new and extremely 
popular newspapers as their main platform, 
publishing articles and sparking debates.10 While 
politicians could also see the benefits for script 
reform in terms of aiding mass communication, they 
showed much less enthusiasm for the movement 
than the academics.11 Politicians more vehemently 
fought for kokugo, or the national language. This 
idea posed a clear political advantage as uniting 
the nation under one dialect would help promote 
a sense of “Japanese-ness” and patriotism that 
would help hold the country together in the face 

7 Douglas Howland, “Translating Liberty in Nineteenth-
Century Japan,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 1 
(2001): 161-181; Nishimura Shigeki, “An Explanation 
of Twelve Western Words: Part One” in Meiroku Zasshi: 
Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment, ed. and trans. 
William Reynolds Braisted (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 
University Press, 1976), 446-449; Gerard Clinton Godart, 
‘“Philosophy’ or ‘Religion?’ The Confrontation with 
Foreign Categories in Late Nineteenth Century Japan,” 
Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 1 (2008): 71-91.
8 Nanette Twine, “Standardizing Written Japanese. A 
Factor in Modernization,” Monumenta Nipponica 43, no. 
4 (1998): 429-454.
9 Twine, “The Genbunitchi Movement. Its Origin, 
Development, and Conclusion,” 341-356.
10 Twine, 341-356.
11 Twine, “Standardizing Written Japanese. A Factor in 
Modernization,” 429-454. 

of rapid modernization.12 Scholar-officials like 
Ueda Kazutoshi, a linguistics professor and Head 
of the Ministry of Education, described a national 
language as the “spiritual lifeblood” of Japan if it 
wished to unite and compete with the West.13 The 
kokugo movement reached a fever pitch after the 
Sino-Japanese War, and the government seriously 
began to implement policies to promote kokugo.14 
Clearly, the ideas of linguistic reforms took great 
hold of those in academic and political circles in the 
Meiji Era.

Literature had a far more lukewarm response to 
the Meiji Era language movements. Most of those 
involved in literature held the traditional Tokugawa 
period style of writing in the highest regard and 
therefore resisted linguistic change.15 This meant 
a considerable number of writers continued with 
Tokugawa-style fiction well into the end of the 
nineteenth century. To start, political novels of the 
early Meiji period relied heavily on Tokugawa story 
structures to introduce new Western ideas and 
terms in a familiar way.16 Even the old Tokugawa 
style booksellers survived through the Meiji 
period.17 In fact, P.F. Kornicki argues literature 
changed more in the Tokugawa period due the 
introduction of the modern printing press than the 
Restoration and related movements.18 Many writers 
used their works to criticize the unabashed and 
rapid devotion to material progress that colloquial 
language represented, and by the 1890’s, a strong 

12 Shimoda, “Tongues-Tied: The Making of a ‘National 
Language’ and the Discovery of Dialects in Meiji Japan,” 
717.
13 Ueda Kazutoshi, “Kokugo to kokka to,” cited in Hiraku 
Shimoda, 721.
14 Neriko Musha Doerr, “Standardization and Paradoxical 
Highlighting of Linguistic Diversity in Japan,” in Japanese 
Language and Literature 49, no. 2 (2015): 393. 
15 Twine, “The Genbunitchi Movement. Its Origin, 
Development, and Conclusion,” 350. 
16 Christopher Hill, “How to Write a Second Restoration: 
The Political Novel and Meiji Historiography,” The Journal 
of Japanese Studies 33, no. 2 (2007): 337-356.
17 P. F. Kornicki, “The Publisher’s Go-Between: Kashihonya 
in the Meiji Period,” Modern Asian Studies 14, no. 2 (1980): 
331-344.
18 P. F. Kornicki, “The Survival of Tokugawa Fiction in The 
Meiji Period,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 41, no. 2 
(1981): 461-470.



The Complexity of Modernization

Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201833

literary backlash against the genbunitchi  and related 
movements formed.19 This is not to say literature did 
not change, only that the rapidity with which large 
political and academic movements adopted language 
reform had a markedly slower response from the 
literary community. For example, the genbunitchi 
movement did successfully convert literature to a 
more colloquial style of writing. However, it would 
be 1908 before 100 percent of the books published 
in Japan were in the new simplified style.20 Also, 
academics like Nishi Amane and Maejima Hisoka 
would be sorely disappointed with the resulting 
colloquial style in literature. Instead of the wholesale 
elimination of kanji and adoption of either kana 
or romaji, the selected style ended up as a blend, 
with many “core” kanji remaining and everything 
else written in either hiragana or katakana, the 
traditional Japanese phonetic alphabets.21 The 
literary community settled on this style as it was the 
most accessible to readers and they found that good 
writers, such as Ozakai Koyo, could write well in this 
colloquial style.22 In short, literature did not respond 
to the top-down reformist ideas of politicians 
or academics, but its readers, who wished for a 
colloquial and accessible style, eventually convinced 
the writers to change.

Perhaps the education system responded most 
slowly to the call for linguistic reform. For the 
most part, schools did not resist Western styles 
of learning as Sapporo Agricultural College will 
attest. This small rural university brought in Dr. 
William Smith Clark, former dean of Amherst 
College in Massachusetts, to revolutionize their 
teaching methods. He introduced Western styles 
of learning, military discipline, and independent 
thought, which helped raise this agricultural college 
to an institution that would regularly send graduates 
to the best universities in Japan.23 This process of 

19 Ronald Loftus, “The Inversion of Progress. Taoka 
Reiun’s Hibunmeiron,” Monumenta Nipponica 40, no. 2 
(1985): 191-208.
20 Twine, “The Genbunitchi Movement. Its Origin, 
Development, and Conclusion,” 355. 
21 Twine, “Toward Simplicity: Script Reform Movements 
in the Meiji Period,” 130-132.
22 Twine, “The Genbunitchi Movement. Its Origin, 
Development, and Conclusion,” 352.
23 Hiroko Willcock, “Traditional Learning, Western 
Thought, and the Sapporo Agricultural College: A Case 
Study of Acculturation in Early Meiji Japan,” Modern 
Asian Studies 34, no. 4 (2000): 977-1017.

Western acculturation was not unusual to Sapporo, 
but present in many places throughout the nation.24 
Despite their openness to westernization, education 
often resisted language reform. Well into the 1880’s, 
schools continued to only teach the Tokugawa 
scripts of kanbun and sorobun, partly because no 
age-appropriate textbooks in the colloquial style 
existed, and partly because the educators, who came 
from the historical samurai class, held respect for the 
old styles.25 Only after literature began its conversion 
to the colloquial did education begin to follow suit.26 
In contrast to the slow, but eventual adoption of the 
ideals of the genbunitchi movement, many educators 
took an active dislike to the elimination of dialects 
proposed by the state. Although language education 
took up the majority of a student’s day, educators 
often avoided dialectical correction.27 Although 
government officials would repeatedly send 
inspectors to regional schools, they had little effect 
on the type of language instruction in use. As such, 
almost no evidence exists for a broadly implemented 
language reform curriculum in regional schools 
in the nineteenth century.28 When the state finally 
decided to crack down schools in regional areas 
like Fukushima to put dialectical “correction” in 
their education manifestos, the schools made sure 
to use broad terms and avoid specifics. The fact 
that similar vague statements, sometimes quoted 
verbatim from the first 1900 publication, appear 
in the yearly declaration of policy until 1931 show 
the persistence of the problem and the educators’ 
distaste towards the attempt to eliminate dialects. 
Some schools actively promoted dialects, calling 
them the “wild grass that grows naturally in this fine 

24 Willcock, “Traditional Learning, Western Thought, 
and the Sapporo Agricultural College: A Case Study of 
Acculturation in Early Meiji Japan,” 977-1017. 
25 Shimoda, “Tongues-Tied: The Making of a ‘National 
Language’ and the Discovery of Dialects in Meiji Japan,” 
727; Nanette Twine, “The Genbunitchi Movement. Its 
Origin, Development, and Conclusion,” 341.
26 Twine, 341.
27 Patricia E. Tsurumi, “Meiji Primary School Language 
and Ethics Textbooks: Old Values for a New Society?,” 
Modern Asian Studies 8, no. 2 (1974): 247-261; Shimoda, 
“Tongues-Tied: The Making of a ‘National Language’ and 
the Discovery of Dialects in Meiji Japan,” 727.
28 Shimoda, 727. 



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Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201834

pasture called national language.”29 These teachers 
insisted that dialects needed to be managed, but 
they kept the “pasture” of Japanese language healthy.  
Even when language correction was taken on in 
earnest, students continued to use their local tongue 
when speaking and no teaching efforts seemed to 
remedy this. This was perhaps because the teachers 
themselves often struggled to maintain the official 
speech, as they usually hailed from the same region in 
which they taught.30 Inspectors lamented this failure 
of instruction, but had little power to do anything 
about it, as bureaucratic inactivity meant that almost 
no oversight in regards to dialect education could 
actually be enforced.31 As such, the high ideas of 
the language reforms often met dead ends in the 
educational system, as they found forcing a top-
down method of linguistic regulation increasing 
difficult. As Hiraku Shimoda put it, “‘Wild grass’ 
would not be weeded out so easily.”32

Despite their influence or lack thereof in 
academics and politics, literature, and education, 
the real changes to the language reform movements 
came from the public’s shifting attitudes. To start, 
the political encouragement of kokugo struggled to 
gain any real traction, mainly because of the attempt 
to eliminate dialects. As the reluctant response of 
the education system to the imposition of Tokyogo 
shows, people do not let their dialects go that easily. 
Because of its lack of success, the push to eliminate 
dialects faltered after only a few years, with even 
its main supporter, professor Ueda, admitting it 
was a mistake.33 Although kokugo did not take the 
shape its founders necessarily intended, the idea of 
encouraging a unified language did reach the public. 
Dialects actually were encouraged as parts of a 
romanticized Japanese diversity, which allowed the 
idea of kokugo as a form of Japanese encompassing 
all dialects to take hold in the public imagination.34 
Despite its survival as an idea, the kokugo movement 

29 “Shogakunen jidö toriatsukai ni kansuru kitei,” in 
Fukushima-ken kyoiku jiseki (Fukushima, 1914), cited in 
Shimoda, 728.
30 Shimoda, 727.
31 Shimoda, 728.
32 Shimoda, 728. 
33 Shimoda, 729-731.
34 Doerr, “Standardization and Paradoxical Highlighting 
of Linguistic Diversity in Japan,” 389-403.

failed in its attempts to unite Japanese into one 
dialect. Interestingly enough, some people in the 
public did take to an idea of a unified language, albeit 
not a unified Japanese. Esperanto found a remarkably 
large and diverse following in Japan from the 1880’s 
on. Although support came in waves, Esperanto had 
followers from the intelligentsia to working men and 
women with clubs often meeting at nights in coffee 
shops and rural homes.35 Esperanto found uses in 
magazines, religious settings, and radio programs 
just to name a few.36 In this, the public showed a 
great desire for Japan to take its place in the modern 
world, an idea which can be traced all the way back 
in kokugo. Although the public only had a limited 
response to kokugo, the genbunitchi movement 
had far more success. The battle of ideas waged in 
newspapers like Meiroku Zasshi brought the ideas of 
intellectuals to the public, as scholars and academics 
like Nishi Amane, and Nishimura Shigeki debated 
their ideas for script reform.37 Although not all 
recommendations for the new writing style were 
adopted, the genbunitchi ideas did reach the public. 
As such, newspapers publishing in the colloquial 
script began to appear as they discovered a new, 
greatly expanded market.38 This in turn led to and 
was accelerated by a switch to the new colloquial 
script in literature and subsequently education. This 
would come to form the simplified modern Japanese 
script that exists today. From this, one can see that 
the success or failure of the linguistic movements 
of academics and intellectuals hinged largely on the 
public’s willingness to adopt their ideas.

The genbunitchi and kokugo movements typifies 
the difficulties Japan had in modernizing. High- 

35 Sho Konishi, “Translingual World Order: Language 
without Culture in Post-Russo-Japanese War Japan,” The 
Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 1 (2013): 91-114. 
36 Ian Rapley, “Talking to the World: Esperanto and 
Popular Internationalism in Pre-war Japan,” in Japan 
Society Proceedings 152 (2016): 89. 
37 Amane, “Writing Japanese in the Western Alphabet,” 
and Shigeki, “An Explanation of Twelve Western Words: 
Part One” in Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese 
Enlightenment, ed. and trans. William Reynolds Braisted 
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 
3-20. 
38 Twine, “The Genbunitchi Movement. Its Origin, 
Development, and Conclusion,” 333-356. 



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Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201835

minded academics and politicians tried to learn 
from Western languages, even going so far as to 
advocate emulating them almost entirely. However, 
their top-down approach meant that many of 
the changes forced on the public had little lasting 
effect. Those in literature resisted script reform and 
educators loathed the dialectical extermination 
proposed by those in government. The only real 
change occurred when the public adopted the ideas 
of the academics themselves, with cultural change 
in the public fueling linguistic reform. However, 
the public would never fully adopt the ambitious, 
sweeping ideals of the academics and politicians. 
Instead, the resulting language would end up as a bit 
of a jumble, with a blend of traditional and modern 
ideas and scripts. This patchwork modernization 
reflects the nature of the Meiji restoration as a whole. 
If we look at the literature of the late Meiji and early 
Taisho era, some contemporary voices expressed 
this same discontent as to the nature of the changes 
taking place.39 Natsume Soseki, the author of Kokoro, 
describes the modernization of the Meiji restoration 
in a speech he made in 1902 as follows: “People 
say that Japan was awakened thirty years ago, but 
it was awakened by a firebell and jumped out of 
bed… Japan has tried to absorb Western culture in 
a hurry and as a result has not had time to digest 
it.”40 In fact, Soseki’s novel Kokoro is probably one 
of the most accurate and poignant stories about the 
difficulty of Japan’s modernization. The tragic story 
of traditionally-minded Sensei and his thoroughly 
modern friend K reflects the internal conflict within 
the people and external friction of society during 
the Meiji period.41 Language in particular provides 
an important microcosm of this conflict because 
language is a cultural construct. In other words, 
the cultural nature of language necessitates that any 
change must be bottom-up or majority driven, and 
the politicians’ attempts at top-down modernization 
came into direct conflict with this. In the end, the 
language reform movements typified how much 
of the modernization during the Meiji era was 

39 Isamu Fukichi, “Kokoro and the “Spirit of Meiji,” 
Monumenta Nipponica, 48, no. 4 (1983): 469; Loftus, “The 
Inversion of Progress. Taoka Reiun’s Hibunmeiron,” 191-
208. 
40 Fukichi, “Kokoro and the “Spirit of Meiji,” 469. 
41 Fukichi, 469-488. 

superficial, with the elite’s top-down imposition of 
modern ideals clashing with public retention of old 
beliefs. Indeed, the rapidity of industrialization can 
make Meiji era modernizations appear painless, as 
though something about Japan’s people or situation 
made it immune to the internal friction that other 
nations had while modernizing. However, as the 
case of language reform shows, this rushed surface 
modernization only obscures a societal discordance 
perhaps even more acute than that experienced by 
other industrializing nations. The result is a society 
that, for all its surface progress, struggled to find its 
footing; caught mid-step, with one foot moving to 
the future and the other rooted in the past. 
 
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The Complexity of Modernization

Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201836

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