The mustachioed romanizers of the Meiji period — from the Roman Character Association (羅馬字会) and their 1885 pamphlet “How to write Japanese in Roman characters” to Mori “Let’s just all speak English” Arinori — were the first to seriously make the argument that Japan’s writing system would be better abandoned than reformed. The idea was influential for the better part of a century among certain circles of Japanese society, and there’s still a Nihon Rōmaji Kyōkai (“Society for the Romanization of the Japanese Alphabet”, 日本ローマ字協会) in operation today. Shiga Naoya’s famous 1946 “Let’s all just speak French” proposal, however, was essentially the movement’s last hurrah.

1946, after all, was the year that the Ministry of Education announced gendai kanazukai (modern[ized] kana usage) and the tōyō (“general-purpose”) list of simplified kanji. These two changes swept away the most egregious archaisms and inconsistencies of written Japanese, depriving the Indo-Europhiles of the orthographic horror stories they were forced to fight against in the past. With only cerebral arguments on general principles left, groups opposing the kana-kanji-kana orthography faded into irrelevance as the Japanese economic miracle progressed.

But romanizers and modernizers were not the only ones who wanted to rebuild Japanese in the Imperial years. The Kanamojikai (カナモジカイ, “Kana Character Society”), founded in 1920 and still active, were inspired by the same issues — our children waste too much time learning kanji, our writing system doesn’t fit properly down linotype wires, etc. — but had, in a way, a more radical program than other groups worrying about these issues.

(There were no doubt many practical considerations behind the decision to spell “Rōmaji kyōkai” with as many kanji as possible — 羅馬字会 — not least the lack of public understanding at the time of how to read Roman characters, but dog food is dog food and someone has to take the first bite.)

The Kanamojikai’s aim was to convert the katakana syllabary into a form that that would let readers recognize words as gestalts, like readers of English and other alphabetic languages can. Kanji and hiragana were to be locked in the basement and never spoken of again.
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