THE JAPANESE LANGUAGE IN THE POSTWAR PERIOD NOMOTO Kikuo 1. THE JAPANESE LANGUAGE AND ITS SPELLING 1.1 The Immediate Postwar Period

For the Japanese, the loss of the war was a severe blow to their self-confi-dence as a people. Naturally, this also had an effect on the way people per-ceived their language. There were some who suggested that the Japanese language lacked an international dimension and that this had contributed to Japan's isolation in the world and the ensuing tragedy of World War 11. They favored getting rid o£Tapanese altogether and switching to French or English. It was during this period that the well-known author, Shiga Naoya, advocated the adoption of French as the national language in Japan. Although there is no way to gage how serious Shiga's suggestion really was, it was not without historical precedents. Mori Arinori had made sim-ilar proposals in the early Meiji period, advocating the adoption of English as the national language. At that time, just after the opening of Japan to the outside world, Mori and others like him were dazzled by European and American civilization which they perceived as overwhelmingly su-perior to that of Japan