56 - Introduction: nation building, literary culture, and language

Summary

This introduction focuses on the long three decades, from the early 1870s to the turn of the century, paying particular attention to major developments in media, journalism, the educational system, literacy, and practices of writing and reading in the larger sociopolitical context. Toward the end of 1873, a group of leading scholars and intellectuals, who played important roles in Meiji nation building as government officials, and who shared similar concerns with Fukuzawa Yukichi. The oligarchic government aggressively promoted a policy of "developing national prosperity and military strength" after leading members of the early Meiji government came back from an eighteen-month embassy to the United States and Europe, where they witnessed first-hand the modern system of industrial capitalism and its infrastructure. From the early 1900s, after Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War, the phonocentric ideology of the national language emerged as the core of systematic national language policy, in which the differences between the spoken and written languages were ideologically suppressed.