In the articles so far, we’ve seen Kanazawa Shōzaburō’s stories of word origins. His work has another side. Near the end of Kokugo no kenkyū (1910) is included a piece written for a political occasion, “Chōsen ni okeru kokugo mondai” (“The National-Language Question in Korea”). The book came out in 1910 (Meiji 43), the year Japan annexed Korea. In this article we check in the original what that piece says. Without praise or condemnation, we read what was written at the time. (The English renderings of the quotations below are ToL translations.)
What Kanazawa saw as the problem
Kanazawa first says that among the various questions about Korea, none is as weighty as what its language of use should be in future. And he says:
我等が此際最慎重に考慮すべき問題は、一千万の民衆が遠古以来用ひ来つた朝鮮語を、如何にして帝国語と融和せしむるかといふことである。
(The question we should consider most carefully at this juncture is how to bring the Korean language, which ten million people have used since remote antiquity, into harmony with the imperial language.)
Kanazawa says that many argue for the necessity of spreading Japanese in Korea, but that this is common sense and not worth making a new fuss about. What he made the issue was how to treat Korean.
Opposition to “all in Japanese”
The central part of this piece is opposition to a view that apparently existed at the time. Kanazawa writes:
Some say, “Ordinary (primary) education should be conducted entirely in Japanese.” But Kanazawa says he would like them to think a little about whether that can actually be done. Even in present-day Okinawa Prefecture, first grade of primary school can in practice only be taught in Okinawan. Japanese people, he says, have a fault of taking language too lightly.
He also opposes the view that, if only the language of schools is limited to Japanese, then in twenty or thirty years the national language (Japanese) will come to be used across the whole peninsula in place of Korean.
どんなにしたとて、自然の天則に支配せらるゝ言語の発達を左右することは出来ぬ。
(No matter what one does, one cannot steer the development of language, which is governed by natural law.)
Kanazawa says that Korean, so long as no cause for its extinction arises within it, will persist indefinitely. He even says that, handled badly, it might turn out that Japanese is instead overwhelmed.
Kanazawa’s proposal
So what did Kanazawa think should be done? First, he says, it goes without saying that all effort must be devoted to promoting Japanese. At the same time, he says, full attention must be paid to Korean, and he sketches a division of roles: Korean as the home language, Japanese as the language of social life. The two must advance together in lasting amity, he says, and hateful things like jealousy, mutual hostility, and prejudice must not arise between them.
And on the language of education, Kanazawa says the following. Primary education should be centered on Korean, with an introductory step of Japanese added. In secondary education Japanese and Korean would be used together, and only at specialized education would Japanese become the center — that is the “natural order,” Kanazawa thinks.
Then comes the most important sentence of this piece.
朝鮮語は我帝国の一方言として、帝国語の中に包合せられるべきものである。
(Korean should be embraced within the imperial language, as a dialect of our empire.)
What to keep in mind when reading
What can be read from this piece has two sides.
First, Kanazawa takes a cautious attitude toward some of the radical views of the time — teaching in Japanese only and rapidly replacing Korean. He says Korean cannot easily be changed and that doing so risks breeding hostility.
Second, that caution does not mean regarding Korean as an equal language. The sentence “Korean should be embraced within the imperial language as a dialect of our empire” is a framework that places Korean beneath Japanese (the imperial language). This framework is tied to Kanazawa’s Japanese–Korean kinship theory, that Japanese and Korean are of the same lineage. Because they are of one lineage, the logic goes, Korean can be embraced as “a dialect.”
We must also confirm that this piece was written in the year of annexation, and takes the political fact of annexation as its premise. How this piece relates to the language policy in Korea that followed, we sort out in the verdict article.
Summary
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| Kanazawa’s framing | How to bring Korean into harmony with the “imperial language” |
| Opposed | Plans for all-Japanese primary education, or rapid replacement of Korean by Japanese-only schooling |
| Reasons | Language development can’t be steered at will; even Okinawa teaches first grade in Okinawan |
| Proposed | Korean at home, Japanese in social life. Primary: Korean-centered; secondary: both; specialized: Japanese-centered |
| Premise | Korean is to be embraced within the imperial language as “a dialect of our empire” |
In a nutshell — in the year of annexation, Kanazawa Shōzaburō took a cautious attitude toward a sudden replacement by Japanese alone. But his argument stood on a framework tied to the Japanese–Korean kinship theory, one that placed Korean as “a dialect of the empire.”