May 21, 1886.] 



SCIENCE. 



451 



the short respite we have had. The reforms that 

 were accomplished in the first period were in 

 many respects but superficial and material, or 

 concerned only larger affairs of state ; as, for 

 instance, the establishment of telegraphic and 

 postal service, opening of steamship lines, re- 

 organization of the army and navy, reforms in 

 the method of administering justice or of man- 

 aging schools. They have left the feelings and 

 thoughts of people comparatively untouched so 

 far; but such stupendous changes could not take 

 place without producing profound effects on the 

 national life. And the present aspect of things 

 makes it seem likely that during this second 

 period of activity there will be great transforma- 

 tions in the innermost life of Japan. There will 

 come to be healthier and sounder views in regard 

 to family ties ; and some, at least, of the abuses 

 which disfigure the domestic life, we may hope 

 will pass away. Woman's position will be better, 

 and the gentler half of the nation will gradually 

 come to exert more influence in society. New 

 ideas will penetrate even to the very hearth-stone 

 — or, rather, will lead to the establishment of a 

 great institution known as the ' hearth,' which 

 plays such an important part, both materially 

 and metaphorically, in the life of Europe and 

 America. The result of all these and other 

 reforms will be to draw the Japanese closely into 

 the comity of nations, and to make us share the 

 feelings and thoughts of the civilized world, and 

 to let the civilized world share our thoughts and 

 feelings. In the opinion of many, we shall surely 

 go down, if we could not accomplish this : it is our 

 only chance of survival in this world of keen 

 struggle, which seems to be raging just now in 

 this part of the globe with more bitterness than 

 elsewhere. 



Of the reform movements which have been 

 started since the last period of reaction, none is 

 likely to be more beneficial, or more wide-reach- 

 ing in its effects, than the movement initiated by 

 the Roman alphabet association (Roma-ji-kai). 

 This society has for its object nothing less than a 

 complete revolution in the manner of writing the 

 Japanese language. It proposes to substitute the 

 twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet in place 

 of Chinese ideographs now used. To understand 

 the meaning of this movement, we must explain 

 how Japanese has been and is being written. In 

 more formal kinds of writing the classical Chinese 

 style is adopted. Chinese ideographs alone are 

 used, and sentences are constructed as in pure 

 Chinese. A scholar of that country will have no 

 difliculty in understanding it. It must not be 

 supposed, however, that a Japanese reads tins in 

 the way a Chinese would. A sentence being 



composed simply of a series of symbols, each of 

 which stands for an idea, a Japanese translates it 

 offhand, and reads it in Japanese, giving to each 

 word its appropriate case-endings or inflections, 

 which are not at all to be seen in the writing. 

 This style of writing is now used much more 

 sparingly than in former days. The most preva- 

 lent form of writing at the present day is a mix- 

 ture of Chinese ideographs with the Japanese 

 Kana syllabary ; that is, ideographs are used to 

 represent principal ideas in a sentence, and what 

 might be called connectives are given in Kana. 

 For instance: in the sentence, 'A dog killed a cat,' 

 the main ideas conveyed by the words ' dog,' ' cat,' 

 and ' kill,' are given in Chinese ideographs ; while 

 the particles that make the word ' dog ' the sub- 

 ject, and the word ' cat ' the object, of the sen- 

 tence, are given in Kana, as well as the tense- 

 endings of the word 'kill.' A small part of litera- 

 ture especially meant for the illiterate is in the 

 Japanese Kana only. 



Such being various methods of writing our 

 language, it is absolutely necessary for a Japanese 

 to learn a few thousands of Chinese ideographs 

 before he can read or write at all fairly. And be 

 it understood that to know the meaning of each 

 character is not enough. To get at the complete 

 natural history of an ideograph, one must first of 

 all know, of course, its meaning or meanings. 

 Then he must know the soimds which the Chinese 

 gave to it. Of these, each character has at least 

 two, — the sound it had when it was first intro- 

 duced into Japan from Corea, the go-sound ; and 

 that which it had in a certain part of China when 

 some Japanese visited it some centuries later, the 

 fccm-sound. Then he must know various ways in 

 which this ideograph is written, — the printed, the 

 'cursive,' the 'grass' forms, — for, in writing, 

 each ideograph is not generally given with its 

 regular and full strokes, but is somewhat abbrevi- 

 ated. If there can be unreadable handwriting 

 with only twenty -six letters to work with, imag- 

 ine what it must become when there is a chance 

 of mangling thousands. In addition to all this, 

 every respectable person has to write ideographs 

 with some degree of decency ; with power and 

 feeling, if possible, for penmanship almost amounts 

 to painting, and does actually have, in the eyes of 

 many, an equal value with it as an art. The 

 simple task of mastering writing and reading be- 

 comes thus no mean one. If there were any proof 

 needed of this fact, beyond the mere statement of 

 the case, it lies in the fact that numerous as are 

 the foreigners who have lived in Japan, and have 

 fairly, or in some cases perfectly, acquired the 

 spoken language, those who have mastered writ- 

 ing and reading can be counted on one's fingers. 



