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Language and Politics: The Reversal of Postwar Script Reform Policy in Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2010

Nanette Gottlieb
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Extract

The period since the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan has seen a number of attempts to reverse several Occupation policies. Some, such as the revoking of administrative decentralization of education and the police force, have been successful, while others, such as constitutional revision, have not. In general, the period since the 1950s has seen a pattern of conservative social change backed by the Liberal Democratic Party. An area that illustrates this trend is that of language policy, specifically the policy toward script. The partial revision of the immediate postwar script reforms that occurred over a twenty-year period from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1980s, most notably the revision of the 1946 list of recommended characters, is an example of a policy that, while not imposed by the Occupation authorities, had been arrived at during the Occupation and was later reversed to some extent in a conservative direction through direct LDP intervention.

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Articles
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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , November 1994 , pp. 1175 - 1198
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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1994

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