'Chinese ideographs belong to a childhood age […] but Japan has now become a man': graphic ideologies and language reform in The Japan Times

This study is a diachronic investigation into how coverage of writing reform in The Japan Times used, manipulated, and discarded graphic language ideologies between 1897 and 1981. Through this novel data set and analytical focus, the study expands on extant understandings of Japanese debates over the script, utilizing a newspaper known for hosting voices and concerns absent in many other Japanese presses to evidence how ideologies about language use(rs) evolved in response to social concerns surrounding over a century of the reform debate. Ultimately, analysis of 469 articles shows that while The Japan Times generally advocated for romanization, the ideologies surrounding its coverage of script debate were not singular or static. Beliefs that scripts are ‘progressive’, ‘barbaric’, ‘Japanese’, and ‘foreign’ were used to both support and attack kanji, kana, and romanization, and the power of individual ideologies changed rapidly in response to fluctuating social conditions and power structures. As a result, we see that graphic ideologies about script were a highly flexible and important element of Japanese script discussions, with framings rapidly borrowed, reformed, and discarded by all sides of the debate to participate in changing dialogues on what made a writing style best for the future of Japan.