Entirely Rest – Greatly Enlarged Complete Course of Japanese Conversation-Grammar. By Oreste Vaccari and Elisa Enko Vaccari The Encyclopedia of Japanese Language.
[In 1885, a society was organized by foreigners and Japanese for the purpose of effecting a substitution of the Roman system of writing for the Chinese and Japanese scripts. However, the romanization of the Japanese writing is still very far from being a reality, its use being at present restricted to a few books, a very few magazines and to Japanese bilingual dictionaries.]
It then proceeds to say-
[There are three systems of romanization of the Japanese writing, but the one adopted for this book is that followed by almost all the rōmaji ローマ字 (roman characters) dictionaries.]
What exactly did it mean “effecting a substitution of the Roman system”, “However, the romanization of the Japanese writing is still very far from being a reality”. Isn’t romaji what is used? What else were they trying to do exactly? Thank you.
3 comments
They probably wanted to replace the Japanese writing system with romaji
Oh I’m not an expert in this topic, but there was definitely a movement historically to have Japanese abandon kanji and adopt the Latin alphabet. It wasn’t completely a foreigners being like “kanji are too hard. Accommodate me,” thing either. Basically a lot of languages used the Chinese script for a long time, regardless of whether or not it made sense with their langauge. Korean scrapped Chinese characters in favor of their own phonetic script, Vietnamese dropped Chinese characters in favor of Latin letters with diacritics to better represent their language’s sound system. The shift to a more phonetic script actually seriously helped with raising literacy rates in Vietnam. There was a school of thought that believed that Japan should similarly drop kanji and use the Latin script (not sure if “hiragana but with spaces” ever gained a following). After the war, the American occupation championed romanization, which more or less led to the idea’s death
Yes, there were some people who thought Japan should switch over entirely to some sort of romaji, including some fairly distinguished Japanese academics of the period. They never made much headway in the replacement side, although they did have a lot of influence on the format of romaji (e.g. Hepburn vs. Kunrei-shiki).
One of these groups was, somewhat ironically, known as 羅馬字会 and was indeed [founded in 1885](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9E%E5%AD%97%E8%AB%96).
An example of one of the texts they produced: https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/862485/1/4