As someone intimately familiar with this topic, the article here is mostly correct but gets a lot of the small details wrong.
Probably the most important missing part here is the reason non-Hepburn systems like Kunrei stuck around for so long: they were designed to replace the Japanese script completely. This sounds outlandish today, but they were invented during the early Meiji years when Japan was adopting Western innovations and abandoning ancient traditions at breakneck speed. And because their target was thus Japanese people, not foreigners, they didn't need to worry about English phonology.
Incidentally, the Chinese pinyin system was also designed to replace Chinese writing, and Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution. Which also explains why it uses letters like x, c and q in ways that English readers find wildly unintuitive.
> Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution
This was indeed the Communists’ original plan, but the real story is more interesting. Before taking over the country the plan was to replace characters with a pinyin-like system Latinxua Sin Wenz[1] and a whole generation in the north was taught to read this. After 1949, Mao was talked out of Romanization by none other than Stalin, who told him the Chinese language deserves its own script. Pinyin was designed after that, officially as a teaching tool, but probably by people who secretly still believed in more radical writing reform.
It is remarkable that some countries actually have switched writing systems in modern times. Turkey did it in the 1920s after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, for example (replaces an Arabic alphabet with a Roman one).
Not to mention numerous ex-Soviet countries have replaced their Cyrillic system for Latin ones to demonstrate their independence from Russian colonialism.
I'm wondering what script the North American Indians† would have replaced the one given to them by their English-speaking colonizers with had they been given any in the first place and not been all but exterminated instead.
Well, anyway … “evil Russians colonialists”.
† I know the PC term in North America is “first nations” or some such but for those outside NA using the old term is perfectly fine.
> I'm wondering what script the North American Indians
The Cherokee syllabary [0] and the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics [1] are both scripts designed for use with North American indigenous languages, and both are still widely used (relative to the usage of indigenous languages in general).
> the one given to them by their English-speaking colonizers with had they been given any in the first place
Well, history is complicated: it's certainly true that the vast majority of the colonizers were trying to ban the indigenous languages, but there have always been a few people working with the local groups to understand and develop their languages, even hundreds of years ago. And over the last 50 years or so, there's been lots of support for language preservation and education.
> and not been all but exterminated instead
I'm not sure if you're talking about the languages or the people here, but there are some 6 million Indigenous people [2] and 700k speakers of indigenous languages [3] [4] [5] in North America today, so I wouldn't quite call either "all but exterminated".
Yes, my comment was a bit over the top. The moreless catastrophic decline of their languages was perhaps unavoidable. And I know there are always good people even when the dominant force is bad.
« there are some 6 million Indigenous people » — Now where have I seen that figure before? ^^ ChatGPT tells me there are even 9.7 million people in the USA who identify as "American Indian or Alaska Native" (2020 census). I was wrongly exaggerating in claiming they had been "all but exterminated".
Instead, they were removed from the territories that underwent English colonization (in which they had not yet been confined to reservations, but gradually driven from their ancestral lands "by treaty") to what was to become Oklahoma (part of the 1803 Napoleon purchase) by the aptly named 1830 "Indian Removal Act", which is why today OK has the highest absolute number of Indians (730k), followed by Arizona, New Mexico and California (annexed from or "ceded" by Mexico, formerly Nueva España).
So, I exaggerated. They were not exterminated, but they were uprooted or eradicated from the lands of their forefathers under English colonization.
> The moreless catastrophic decline of their languages was perhaps unavoidable.
Yup, this is unfortunately the case. Colonization definitely made things vastly worse than they were before, but the modern world has become so connected that it's challenging for small languages to survive: young people want to read books, watch TV, and get an education, but it's hard to support all that in a language with only 50k speakers. Bilingualism helps a lot here, but if people can only use their languages to speak to their families, then they're less likely to teach it to their children.
For some further background, I took a class in a local indigenous language last year, so I know a tiny bit of one indigenous language [0], but that language has less than 10k speakers in total. Everyone is putting in a lot of work to preserve it, and it's universally taught in all the schools on the reservation, but unfortunately that's not even enough people to sustain a local newspaper. And to make matters worse, there are two other completely distinct indigenous languages spoken in the same city, so the indigenous people can only use English to speak to each other if they're from different tribes.
> I was wrongly exaggerating in claiming they had been "all but exterminated".
To be fair, there are cases like the Beothuk [1], but that's a rarity.
Actually, before I had looked up the numbers, I had assumed that the populations were far larger than they actually are. It looks like that the US only has twice as many Indigenous people as Canada, yet 10× the overall population. I live in Canada, so I had assumed that the proportions were similar, so you're not the only one here who was surprised by the actual numbers :)
> Instead, they were removed from the territories that underwent English colonization […] but they were uprooted or eradicated from the lands of their forefathers under English colonization.
Ah, I wasn't aware of that. Canada has plenty of its own atrocities, but we've thankfully never done anything like that.
Not numerous but specifically Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – all four countries speak Turkic languages, and they chose to do so to align themselves with Turkey. The adoption has been rather slow, and previous Cyrillic based scripts remain in wide use, though.
Moldova switched for a similar reason as Moldovans speak Romanian, and they did so to align themselves with Romania.
That is a total of five countries.
The actual history is rather more nuanced, as after the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks – intent, at least in principle, upon eradicating Great-Russian chauvinism and weakening the Russian cultural dominance – introduced the policy of «korenizatsiia», or «nativisation».
The new policy encouraged non-Russian populations to cultivate distinct national identities, use their own languages in administration and education and, where indigenous languages had previously lacked established writing systems, develop scripts and literary standards of their own:
«Politically and culturally, the nativization policy aimed to eliminate Russian domination and culture in Soviet republics where ethnic Russians did not constitute a majority. This policy was implemented even in areas with large Russian-speaking populations; for instance, all children in Ukraine were taught in the Ukrainian language in school. The policies of korenizatsiia facilitated the Communist Party's establishment of the local languages in government and education, in publishing, in culture, and in public life. In that manner, the cadre of the local Communist Party were promoted to every level of government, and ethnic Russians working in said governments were required to learn the local language and culture of the given Soviet republic»[0].
For that reason, nearly all new writing scripts developed between 1920's and mid-1930's were Latin based.
Joseph Stalin, a Georgian himself, ended and reversed the policy in the mid-1930's and instructed the Latin-based scripts to be replaced with the Cyrillic-based ones.
This somewhat counter-intuitive bolshevist policy of regionalization and decentralisation starts making sense if Richard Poe is right, who says they (them being mostly Jews) were working for the British.
How the British invented Communism (and blamed it on the Jews) • Richard Poe @ RTF (Matthew Ehret) • 2h01 • https://youtu.be/Cxen-IzX-Gw
I don't know if this is from the perspective of having learned Mandarin in elementary school first or if Japanese folks feel similarly, but reading words like, e.g., だいがくいんせい versus 大学院生 is actually a little more annoying because I have to scan more of the line to read the word in question. This is notwithstanding the effect that hiragana has in highlighting grammatical structures; it's a lot like setting off Finnish case endings and verb conjugations in a different color.
At least, that's the reason why I prefer still having kanji around.
Japanese as it currently exists is just really hard to read when written without kanji. A couple reasons: it has TONS of homophones, and it doesn't use spaces, and also it has tons of common words that are only 1 or 2 characters long. So if you're parsing a stream of kana, in the general case there will be several different ways to interpret the next couple characters and you'll constantly be backtracking.
So at a minimum, dropping kanji would mean the language needed to develop a system for where spaces go (which is less trivial than it sounds IMO). But also it would need to abandon a lot of homophones or find some way to disambiguate them. It could happen I guess, but I'm not sure how it could happen gradually.
Korean could serve as a point of comparison, as modern Korean is written mostly without Chinese characters (you could mix them in if you really want to, but approximately nobody bothers), but it does have spaces between words. And yes, when you have a highly inflecting language, "where do the spaces go" is a very nontrivial problem.
It's a bit easier for Korean as it has far more available syllables (so fewer homonyms), but you could easily imagine these languages making different tradeoffs and ending up in different places.
Agreed, I think that's a close analogy and it's wild to me how recently Korean dropped kanji. But I imagine having a lot more vowel sounds made it a lot easier. I've wondered whether the two interacted - e.g. if there were word pairs that had previously used the same vowel sounds, but changed after the switch to Hangul to be distinguishable. Do you know by any chance?
Sino-Korean words are different from Sino-Japanese words in that the sounds are very "rigid": most Chinese characters have one canonical sound, and it is pronounced that way regardless of where it appears (modulo some mostly predictable sound change rules). So, you can't just take a Sino-Korean word and "tweak" its sound to disambiguate - when such a word changes its sound it will no longer be perceived as Sino-Korean at all, which actually happened for some examples such as 산행 (san-haeng, 山行, "mountain + go" = "hike on a mountain") which gave birth to 사냥 (sanyang, "hunting"), a separate word.
What did happen was that we lost obscure words that could only be understood by looking at Chinese characters (because they're used so rarely, or because they sound the same as another more common word) - you could still use them if you wanted to, but unless you also write them in Hanja, it would be confusing, and if you mix gratuitous Hanja into your writing just because you like those words, most young readers will find it pretentious, and I fear, mostly unreadable.
I can't say we lost much by losing these words. Rather, I think it actually forced writers to select less ambiguous words, which is usually a good thing.
A lot of material for younger readers uses similar spacing to Korean, like the Pokemon games. It works well enough when you know the vocabulary being used is limited, but even there it gets frustrating.
When you're reading, you're trying to identify a substring and map it back to the unit of meaning, which is effectively the kanji. That works seamlessly with Hangul, because it mostly blocks the same way as kanji, and, as you mentioned, the extra vowels and silent consonants provide more disambiguation. With kana, the length you have to scan to read, and then guess at (using only context to disambiguate), a root word, is a lot more arbitrary.
Mechanically kana is just less compressed, less aligned, and makes it harder to visually identify/scan for units of meaning. Obviously Korean shows that you can make different tradeoffs, but for Japanese losing the kanji would probably necessitate reworking Kana as well.
Japanese could be written with the Latin alphabet very well, if a set of kanji radicals were retained and inserted before a part of the words, to disambiguate their meaning.
This is a not a new method of writing, but this is how writing was done in the past, for many millennia.
The oldest writing systems, like the cuneiform and the Egyptian, also used, besides signs that indicated the pronunciation of a word, determinative signs, which indicated the semantic domain of the word, e.g. it is a name of a human profession, it is a name of an animal, it is a name of a tool made of metal, it is a geographic name, and so on.
The determinative signs could be Chinese radicals to continue the tradition, or they could be a special set of emojis.
Sure - it's probably safe to say that any language can he written in any writing system, if one is willing to change both the language and the writing system :)
> Japanese could be written with the Latin alphabet very well, if a set of kanji radicals were retained and inserted before a part of the words, to disambiguate their meaning.
Sort of. The adoption of a Latin script would risk severing cultural continuity – a likely deal breaker in a society such as Japan, where history, tradition, and inherited form are not decorative artefacts but active components of cultural identity.
Consider the following two Japanese surnames that – today – are spelled as Kanō and Gotō (I happen to have a close Japanese friend with this surname).
They can be rendered as:
Kanō: 狩野 and 加納
Gotō: 後藤 and 五島
Leaving the historical pronunciation aside, the issue that we have here is that each Kanji rendition represents a distinct lineage (or a medieval family/clan).
The medieval 狩野氏[0] of Izu was an established warrior lineage. Its members occur in the Azuma Kagami, and the family was active by 1180. It belonged to a Fujiwara-derived lineage.
加納[1] is explicitly recorded with historical kana カナフ. A separate 加納氏 belonged to the Miura–Sawara grouping that divided control of Aizu after Yoritomo's Ōshū campaign. The official history of Kitakata lists 加納氏 separately amongst these medieval families.
後藤[2] The 後藤 lineage is attested in the twelfth century. 後藤基清, born in 1155, was the adopted son of 後藤実基 and served as a Kamakura-period warrior.
五島[3] This is the most interesting example as 五島 came from the unrelated medieval 宇久氏. The 宇久 had already been established by the Kamakura period and later controlled the Gotō islands. After Ukuji was promoted to Bunroku's service, he changed his surname from Uku to Gotō, and developed into the Gotō clan, a daimyo of the early-modern times.
None of that historical lineage can be faithfully preserved through the use of a Latin script. The characters themselves carry continuity – visual (radicals), literary and civilisational – that transliteration can approximate only by discarding precisely what made the tradition contiguous in the first place and compressing them into a neutered phonetic contraption.
Then there is the separate issue that Chinese characters, their readings and the vocabulary associated with them entered Japanese through several successive waves of cultural import, with one particularly important layer having been introduced during the Tang dynasty, when Japan extensively adopted Chinese literary, administrative and cultural models. Different readings, compounds and usages consequently preserve historical or cultural nuances associated with particular periods of Japanese contact with China.
I never get this line of reasoning - so are people listening to spoken japanese just in a perpetual state of confusion because they can't see the associated intended Kanji?
Also this coming from a person on a platform who's primary language is commonly pronounced with the last syllable/letter of each word used to start the next one.
I mean, do you want to understand it or are you venting? If the former: No, spoken Japanese is not constantly confusing, because (a) some words are distinguished by intonation, (b) Japanese speakers know what the homophones are, and either avoid them while speaking, establish the context before saying them, say extra words to clarify which word they mean, etc.
Also the homophones thing is probably lesser of the things I mentioned. A typical sentence might only have 1 or 2 overloaded words, but it will have lots of substrings that can be parsed multiple ways.
Well the "native syllabary" is derived from Chinese characters, it's not something that was there and then Chinese characters were shoehorned in later.
I think at some early point most Japanese learners (that don't already know a Chinese language) think kanji should be dropped. And at a later point I think most would change their mind as the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
I don't deny that reading Japanese written in kana alone is currently more painful than with kanji. However, it seems to me that the current writing system is a local optimum and not a global one. If people started writing Japanese using kana alone, some adjustments would eventually be made to make it more readable, and the end result would in my opinion be superior to the current kana/kanji combination. The same thing happened with the latin alphabet. We don't use it the same way the romans used it 2000 years ago: we introduced minuscule letters, spacing, punctuation, accents... At the end of the day, Japanese is a spoken language like all other languages, and there are no reasons why a purely phonetic system should not work for writing it.
In a Japanese dictionary, you can find homonym clusters as long as something like 12 words.
Native speakers get confused in conversations and have to refer to kanji regarding which word they mean. Except they don't write down the kanji; they think of a very common word which has that kanji and say things like, "the shō syllable in my word is the same (kanji) as in shōrai".
The vast majority of the Japanese vocabulary consists of word roots made from the combination of two kanji. The language-making itself is not separable from kanji.
Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first.
> Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first.
I seriously doubt that. Literacy levels rose in Japan during the Meiji era and that produced pressure towards simplification of the writing system. Sure, Japan didn't go all the way to a pure kana system or to a latin-derived script, but the reasons are political and cultural (and there is nothing wrong with that) rather than linguistic.
In any cases, you didn't disprove my point, which is that the need for kanji is self-fulfilling. It feels necessary, precisely because its usage prevents the evolution of the phonetic kana system into something useful.
Lol. Flashback to me having this exact conversation with a new Gaijin-kun アメリカの人 at about his second or third month in Tohoku...32 years ago. "They could just do it all in Romaji and save so much work."
and even today some of my Japanese friends joke with me about how hard 漢字 can be, they laugh because they know its hard for them and admit they wouldnt do it if they had been born anywhere else.
So, it is absolutely baked in and kanji first. without kanji the following tongue twister is indecipherable.
> But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics!
You keep missing the point, so I'll try one last time. Look at a picture of the Rosetta stone. I can read Greek but I find the Greek part hard to read. It's written entirely in capital letters with no spacing and no punctuation. (Maybe there were people like you at the time claiming that hieroglyphs were easier to read than Greek.) Modern Greek still uses the Greek alphabet but it has evolved into something much more readable. The same thing happened to latin.
I claim that the Japanese kana system is stuck in its own figurative Rosetta era. There are no reasons why it could not evolve into something readable and not purely phonetic. With all due respect, I don't consider seriously your argument that Japanese is an exceptional language uniquely based on combination of foreign characters that can only be considered a spoken language by children and idiots. There are arguments for kanji that I find convincing, yours has to be the worst.
As for homophones, why would that be a problem? They are not unique to Japanese! For instance, in French, the only reason why 'a' and 'à' are spelt differently is to make it easier to tell them apart in writing. They are pronounced exactly the same. French has a lot more examples like that, and actually, using wrong spellings for words notoriously makes French much harder to read, even if the spelling is phonetically correct. French writing is not purely phonetic, it's only one way: if you know how to write a word, you usually know how to pronounce it but the converse is not true. Yet, it is still a much simpler system than the Japanese one. Children can fully read at age 6, although writing with few spelling mistakes take more time.
There are historical and cultural reasons for that.
Even though hiragana can be traced back to the 5th century, the educated and elites continued to use kanji exclusively until the 20th century, whereas hiragana was relegated to unofficial writing and it first became popular amongst women, hence gaining the condescending status of «female writing». Drawing parallels with hangul (as some have noticed) is not entirely correct as hangul entered the official use in the 15th century and has been in the extensive use for writing since then, even though the use of hanja has ceased only relatively recently. Hiragana entered the stage approximately four centuries later.
Katakana, on the other hand, was developed by Buddhist monks in the 9th century to translate texts from India and later to represent borrowed words. The Empire of Japan used kanji and katakana in official documents.
Then there is a distinction between the syllabary and vocabulary.
Chinese vocabulary and pronunciation has entered Japanese in three distinct waves: go-on, kan-on and tō-on. The Tang dynasty kan-on wave was particularly and enormously important as it has supplied Japanese with a major new pronunciation system, vocabulary, administrative culture and literary.
The earlier go-on wave is associated with Buddhist terminology that prefers the go-on readings, and the tō-on wave readings occur particularly in vocabulary brought through medieval and early-modern contact with China.
Therefore, the same character can therefore contain several historical layers, for example: 明 has go-on myō, kan-on mei and tō-on min as in:
明王 /myōō/ historical layer: go-on, meaning: a Buddhist «Wisdom King» (such as 不動明王 Fudō Myōō)
明王 /meiō/ historical layer: kan-on, meaning «a wise, enlightened or excellent ruler».
Even the pronunciation alone partly tells the reader which historical layer is being invoked.
明朝 is even more interesting as the reading of /myōchō/, being an older myō reading, indicates «tomorrow morning» whereas the /minchō/ reading, being a tō-on, indicates «the Ming dynasty» or related to the Ming dynasty.
Neither hiragana nor katakana can preserve such details, and, depending on whom one asks, it may or may not acceptable to a Japanese national. Perhaps the younger generation cares less but it is not all that clear cut.
I'm surprised that articles like this that are pretty clearly AI-generated get any sort of traction here. Is it because people think the topic is interesting but don't actually care about the content?
> Three Japanese words, three Hepburn transcriptions. The letters you already know, telling you what they sound like.
Minor correction on the article: Kunrei-shiki doesn't have a 1-to-1 mapping between kana and letters. You can see that directly in the table they show. Only Nihon-shiki does. Kunrei-shiki is the worst of both worlds.
That's why Nihon-shiki is and will likely always remain the best system for serious students of Japanese - if you even need it at all. But then again, if you're just starting out, the best place to start is usually to immediately start learning kana.
"…久保 becomes "Kubo" without the long vowel marked at all…" -- there is no long vowel! Just plain Kubo is correct.
"Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki optimize for a systematic, one-to-one mapping between kana and romanization. One kana, one romanization, always, with no exceptions."
(Kunrei-shiki: exceptions! 猫は庭へ魚を運ぶ Neko wa niwa e sakana o hakobu)
Also: "Romanization is a scaffold, not a destination." ? I TOO AM A HUMAN WRITER WHO WRITES WITH MY OWN FINGERS.
But the history of the Romaji movement is indeed interesting - there were influential people who were quite serious about moving entirely to romaji at one point! It would have changed everything.
> Kunreisiki is also better for serious Japanese learners as it greatly simplifies the description of Japanese grammar: cf. matu/matte/matimasu (all with the same verb stem mat-) vs. Hepburn matsu/matte/machimasu (with 3 different verb stems)."
This is a silly argument because anyone learning Japanese is going to need to learn how to pronounce it anyway. Also "serious Japanese learners" would likely be using kana.
Absolutely agree. Romaji was absolutely pointless for me and probably a detriment overall to learning a language. Japanese uses consonant + vowel pairs as a rule, and the faster you train your intuition for this, the better.
Remembering both Hiragana and Katakana took me no more than a day each. Although I have to admit that I already tried learning them around 5 years ago and gave up back then out of lack of motivation.
Have you considered that different things are difficult for different people? Learning hiragana and katakana has taken me about a month, and I found it very difficult. There is no need to make it prerequisite for starting to learn grammar, forming sentences, or pronunciation.
Notice how I didn't say that I "learned" both in a day, I "remembered" them. Of course actual learning will take some time, especially with less used characters.
But remembering shapes and differentiating between them using mnemonics should not be too hard for most people.
The pair is something of a simplification, and romaji makes certain things in the language more obvious. Like the good old mat-u -> mat-anai, mat-imasu, mat-eru. Added the hyphen to make it clearer, but this hyphen splits a kana neatly in half. The stem is “mat” but you can’t write the stem using kana (in some sense of the word ‘stem’, maybe that’s not the correct word and there’s a different word for it, I’m not a linguist).
I’m not trying to say you should avoid kana, just that there is some amount of intuition you can develop with romaji that does not work in kana.
The traditional way to develop a similar intuition with a kana-only approach is to think of it as "moving across the row" in the kana table, which works fine. I think the fact that with romaji we can represent the stem as mat- is interesting and valuable in a theoretical sense but not all that useful to a learner.
I have trouble comprehending the idea that this is only interesting in a theoretical sense but not all that useful to a learner. Could you give me something additional here? I’m not trying to be a dick here but my first reaction is “that’s just nuts” and I want to know what I’m missing.
You don’t need to visually split the consonant apart as a separate character to recognize the relationship between か/き/く/け/こ - after all, the Japanese manage to do it without Latin letters. It adds very little to do so except as a crutch to let a learner continue to think using their native orthography, which only impedes learning. And given what a small hurdle it is, especially compared to the multitude of enormous hurdles the language has in store for you, you’re better off just jumping over it and moving on to those more interesting ones.
- “Need to” is a very different criterion from “is useful”, and “visually split” is, well, kind of unexpected to me!
- The comparison to native Japanese speakers seems especially irrelevant here,
- You’re not using your native orthography here, you’re using romaji, I don’t think it’s anyone’s native orthography.
- You probably want to use the Romaji heavily anyway, because that’s how most people will use computers.
When you’re learning a language you naturally multiple approaches to understanding a single topic. You’ll see a word written, you’ll hear it. You’ll hear a sentence and then someone will give you an explanation of the grammar, and you’ll compare that with your notes. It’s multimodal and all of these different modes are useful.
Like how romaji is useful for understanding conjugations. Obviously not necessary, just useful.
The reason I say it's not useful (as opposed to merely interesting) to a learner is that I think if you're ever explicitly forming a structure like "mat-" in your head while thinking about how to say something or how to interpret something in Japanese, you are doing something quite unnatural, since that form cannot actually be expressed in the language. A fluent or native speaker knows that, eg. to make "matsu" a polite order, the tsu (tu) becomes chi (ti) and then you add nasai; they are not thinking about the isolated 't' consonant (which in this example is not actually even the same consonant - and native speakers know that, considering they distinguish ティ in loanwords!).
As for why it's interesting and useful theoretically - well, Japanese is of course older than the kana chart, and if you're doing diachronic linguistics I think taking mat- to be the stem is probably a useful frame to think about the origins of the modern conjugation paradigm.
It is equally unnatural to form kana in your head when thinking about how to say something! Or, it’s unnatural to think about whether a verb is godan or ichidan when speaking, it’s unnatural to think about what particles are, etc.
You get an explanation for a concept and you internalize it. The explanation is a framework for you to internalize the concept, and once the concept is internalized, you no longer need it. The explanations are still useful, like romaji is still useful. None of the explanations are necessary, some are useful.
> which in this example is not actually even the same consonant
By that standard, the “t” in “butter” is not the same consonant as the “t” in “tap” (try it!)
People are really good at understanding and learning phonology and can really internalize it and understand it on an intuitive level, even if they can’t explain the rules for it. If you’re a native English speaker, you accept that there’s a “t” in “butter” and a “t” in “tap” even though they are not the same sounds (phones). That’s because they are the same phonemes.
Romaji is an effective way of writing down Japanese phonemes.
> Also "serious Japanese learners" would likely be using kana.
I think the exception is people using the JSL textbooks :) there is a reasonable defense to using JSL. But you’re right. I think it’s indefensible to teach Hepburn to people interested in learning Japanese.
If any aspiring Japanese learners read this, forget this article. Just start learning hiragana/katakana from the get-go. You’re going to have to eventually, assuming you want read anything (and anything worth reading certainly won’t be written in romaji). But beyond that, you want to start breaking down your instinctual pronunciations and biases that appear when reading letters you know, so that you can more accurately and efficiently learn the correct pronunciations.
This is unnecessarily pedantic advice, and I encourage fellow learners of Japanese to ignore it. You will definitely need to learn hiragana and katakana but you can do it at your own pace, and it is orthogonal to learning the basics of grammar, forming sentences, and pronunciation, so you definitely don't need to think of it as an obstacle. For pronunciation in particular, obviously watching Japanese movies etc helps. And yes, I have a native Japanese teacher who recommends the same.
Yes, learning kana is the fastest way to internalize the Japanese phonetic system.
Learning the katakana pronunciation of English learn words can be fun. There was a popular TV commercial jingle for “McDonald’s” that only works in Japanese because “makudonarudo” has more syllables.
AI slop aside, everybody seems to talk about romanization exclusively from the perspective of Japanese learners, while the biggest problem with Kunrei-shiki and Nihon-shiki is how they've been sabotaging Japanese people's ability to learn and pronounce English correctly.
Hepburn is anglocentric and that makes perfect sense given how deeply embedded English is in modern Japanese.
Both Hepburn and the fact that English is deeply embedded in modern Japanese make sense only because USA has won the War (which is a good thing otherwise, but some of its effects on Japanese are less desirable).
Besides this historical motivation, there exists no technical argument in favor of any of them.
I do not agree at all that Nihon-shiki can sabotage the ability of Japanese people to learn and pronounce English.
Except for the native English speakers, all the other people of the World who are familiar with other languages besides their own are also familiar with the fact that every language has its own system of writing and pronunciation, whose rules you must learn.
Making the rules for writing your own language more complex for your own country and for most other countries of the World, just to make them simpler for the citizens of a certain privileged country, is not a behavior that I can approve, because I find it too subservient.
Incredibly arrogant/racist take that reduces Japanese people to passive recipients of Western influence as if they had no agency of their own for more than half a century.
Incredibly stupid and misleading comment of yours, slily insinuating Adrian has taken an "arrogant/racist" attitude towards the Japanese, when in fact not the slightest trace of such an attitude can be found in his comment.
Rather, he (rightfully) criticized the generally negative effect caused by the deployment of anglocentric teaching methods (exclusively for the convenience of the Anglo world).
In addition, he observed a negative feedback of such strategems on the Anglo world itself, in as much as it forms an "impediment by convenience" for them to learn about other cultures (and thus rise a bit on the scale of human development).
So in a way what he said is the opposite of what you claim he did. Might that have been what triggered your inadequate reaction?
As for "arrogance", you stated that Kunrei/Nihon have been "sabotaging Japanese people's ability to learn and pronounce English correctly", as if there was any value in that for a civilization that culturally stands much higher than, say, the USA.
And as for "racism", it is well known that was an important factor on the "no prisoners" approach the US took against Japan, and also in terroristically and sadistically napalming one city after another (then repeated in Korea and Vietnam).
Maybe the subset of japanese content I'm exposed to is biased, but personally I encounter doubled vowels (obaasan) more often than macron vowels (obāsan). The latter is explicitly "modified hepburn romanization". Even if the latter is more common in general, it's worth noting that the former is the original. The article seems to say that the former is weird and nonstandard, which afaik is completely false.
Using doubled vowels instead of diacritics is just one more concession to Americans, who are unfamiliar with the use of diacritics and whose software frequently does not work correctly when text contains characters with diacritics.
Hepburn is an inappropriate method of writing Japanese, which nonetheless has become the dominant way of writing Japanese, just because it caters to the inability of most Americans to learn how other languages than English are written and pronounced.
This is interesting but as always these days the slop effect just makes it feel like I'm reading Claude which sucks too much and makes me not want to read this. Sad face.
Add to that, that this is content marketing, and the whole thing really collapses. I'll consume interesting content marketing, I may even consume interesting slop, but I can't consume slop content marketing.
About a decade ago I became a fan of the young Japanese drum prodigy Kanade Sato. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYpFL08m5fQ This lead to me learning the amazing fact that Japanese has 4 writing systems: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and romaji. And now I am learning that there are actually several different romanization systems. What a confusing situation.
67 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 19.8 ms ] threadProbably the most important missing part here is the reason non-Hepburn systems like Kunrei stuck around for so long: they were designed to replace the Japanese script completely. This sounds outlandish today, but they were invented during the early Meiji years when Japan was adopting Western innovations and abandoning ancient traditions at breakneck speed. And because their target was thus Japanese people, not foreigners, they didn't need to worry about English phonology.
Incidentally, the Chinese pinyin system was also designed to replace Chinese writing, and Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution. Which also explains why it uses letters like x, c and q in ways that English readers find wildly unintuitive.
This was indeed the Communists’ original plan, but the real story is more interesting. Before taking over the country the plan was to replace characters with a pinyin-like system Latinxua Sin Wenz[1] and a whole generation in the north was taught to read this. After 1949, Mao was talked out of Romanization by none other than Stalin, who told him the Chinese language deserves its own script. Pinyin was designed after that, officially as a teaching tool, but probably by people who secretly still believed in more radical writing reform.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinxua_Sin_Wenz
https://archive.org/details/chineselanguagef0000defr/
Well, anyway … “evil Russians colonialists”.
† I know the PC term in North America is “first nations” or some such but for those outside NA using the old term is perfectly fine.
The Cherokee syllabary [0] and the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics [1] are both scripts designed for use with North American indigenous languages, and both are still widely used (relative to the usage of indigenous languages in general).
> the one given to them by their English-speaking colonizers with had they been given any in the first place
Well, history is complicated: it's certainly true that the vast majority of the colonizers were trying to ban the indigenous languages, but there have always been a few people working with the local groups to understand and develop their languages, even hundreds of years ago. And over the last 50 years or so, there's been lots of support for language preservation and education.
> and not been all but exterminated instead
I'm not sure if you're talking about the languages or the people here, but there are some 6 million Indigenous people [2] and 700k speakers of indigenous languages [3] [4] [5] in North America today, so I wouldn't quite call either "all but exterminated".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Amer...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Am...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Canada#/media/Fil...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States...
« there are some 6 million Indigenous people » — Now where have I seen that figure before? ^^ ChatGPT tells me there are even 9.7 million people in the USA who identify as "American Indian or Alaska Native" (2020 census). I was wrongly exaggerating in claiming they had been "all but exterminated".
Instead, they were removed from the territories that underwent English colonization (in which they had not yet been confined to reservations, but gradually driven from their ancestral lands "by treaty") to what was to become Oklahoma (part of the 1803 Napoleon purchase) by the aptly named 1830 "Indian Removal Act", which is why today OK has the highest absolute number of Indians (730k), followed by Arizona, New Mexico and California (annexed from or "ceded" by Mexico, formerly Nueva España).
So, I exaggerated. They were not exterminated, but they were uprooted or eradicated from the lands of their forefathers under English colonization.
Yup, this is unfortunately the case. Colonization definitely made things vastly worse than they were before, but the modern world has become so connected that it's challenging for small languages to survive: young people want to read books, watch TV, and get an education, but it's hard to support all that in a language with only 50k speakers. Bilingualism helps a lot here, but if people can only use their languages to speak to their families, then they're less likely to teach it to their children.
For some further background, I took a class in a local indigenous language last year, so I know a tiny bit of one indigenous language [0], but that language has less than 10k speakers in total. Everyone is putting in a lot of work to preserve it, and it's universally taught in all the schools on the reservation, but unfortunately that's not even enough people to sustain a local newspaper. And to make matters worse, there are two other completely distinct indigenous languages spoken in the same city, so the indigenous people can only use English to speak to each other if they're from different tribes.
> I was wrongly exaggerating in claiming they had been "all but exterminated".
To be fair, there are cases like the Beothuk [1], but that's a rarity.
Actually, before I had looked up the numbers, I had assumed that the populations were far larger than they actually are. It looks like that the US only has twice as many Indigenous people as Canada, yet 10× the overall population. I live in Canada, so I had assumed that the proportions were similar, so you're not the only one here who was surprised by the actual numbers :)
> Instead, they were removed from the territories that underwent English colonization […] but they were uprooted or eradicated from the lands of their forefathers under English colonization.
Ah, I wasn't aware of that. Canada has plenty of its own atrocities, but we've thankfully never done anything like that.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoney_language
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beothuk#Extinction
Moldova switched for a similar reason as Moldovans speak Romanian, and they did so to align themselves with Romania.
That is a total of five countries.
The actual history is rather more nuanced, as after the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks – intent, at least in principle, upon eradicating Great-Russian chauvinism and weakening the Russian cultural dominance – introduced the policy of «korenizatsiia», or «nativisation».
The new policy encouraged non-Russian populations to cultivate distinct national identities, use their own languages in administration and education and, where indigenous languages had previously lacked established writing systems, develop scripts and literary standards of their own:
«Politically and culturally, the nativization policy aimed to eliminate Russian domination and culture in Soviet republics where ethnic Russians did not constitute a majority. This policy was implemented even in areas with large Russian-speaking populations; for instance, all children in Ukraine were taught in the Ukrainian language in school. The policies of korenizatsiia facilitated the Communist Party's establishment of the local languages in government and education, in publishing, in culture, and in public life. In that manner, the cadre of the local Communist Party were promoted to every level of government, and ethnic Russians working in said governments were required to learn the local language and culture of the given Soviet republic»[0].
For that reason, nearly all new writing scripts developed between 1920's and mid-1930's were Latin based.
Joseph Stalin, a Georgian himself, ended and reversed the policy in the mid-1930's and instructed the Latin-based scripts to be replaced with the Cyrillic-based ones.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia
How the British invented Communism (and blamed it on the Jews) • Richard Poe @ RTF (Matthew Ehret) • 2h01 • https://youtu.be/Cxen-IzX-Gw
At least, that's the reason why I prefer still having kanji around.
So at a minimum, dropping kanji would mean the language needed to develop a system for where spaces go (which is less trivial than it sounds IMO). But also it would need to abandon a lot of homophones or find some way to disambiguate them. It could happen I guess, but I'm not sure how it could happen gradually.
It's a bit easier for Korean as it has far more available syllables (so fewer homonyms), but you could easily imagine these languages making different tradeoffs and ending up in different places.
What did happen was that we lost obscure words that could only be understood by looking at Chinese characters (because they're used so rarely, or because they sound the same as another more common word) - you could still use them if you wanted to, but unless you also write them in Hanja, it would be confusing, and if you mix gratuitous Hanja into your writing just because you like those words, most young readers will find it pretentious, and I fear, mostly unreadable.
I can't say we lost much by losing these words. Rather, I think it actually forced writers to select less ambiguous words, which is usually a good thing.
When you're reading, you're trying to identify a substring and map it back to the unit of meaning, which is effectively the kanji. That works seamlessly with Hangul, because it mostly blocks the same way as kanji, and, as you mentioned, the extra vowels and silent consonants provide more disambiguation. With kana, the length you have to scan to read, and then guess at (using only context to disambiguate), a root word, is a lot more arbitrary.
Mechanically kana is just less compressed, less aligned, and makes it harder to visually identify/scan for units of meaning. Obviously Korean shows that you can make different tradeoffs, but for Japanese losing the kanji would probably necessitate reworking Kana as well.
This is a not a new method of writing, but this is how writing was done in the past, for many millennia.
The oldest writing systems, like the cuneiform and the Egyptian, also used, besides signs that indicated the pronunciation of a word, determinative signs, which indicated the semantic domain of the word, e.g. it is a name of a human profession, it is a name of an animal, it is a name of a tool made of metal, it is a geographic name, and so on.
The determinative signs could be Chinese radicals to continue the tradition, or they could be a special set of emojis.
Sort of. The adoption of a Latin script would risk severing cultural continuity – a likely deal breaker in a society such as Japan, where history, tradition, and inherited form are not decorative artefacts but active components of cultural identity.
Consider the following two Japanese surnames that – today – are spelled as Kanō and Gotō (I happen to have a close Japanese friend with this surname).
They can be rendered as:
Leaving the historical pronunciation aside, the issue that we have here is that each Kanji rendition represents a distinct lineage (or a medieval family/clan).The medieval 狩野氏[0] of Izu was an established warrior lineage. Its members occur in the Azuma Kagami, and the family was active by 1180. It belonged to a Fujiwara-derived lineage.
加納[1] is explicitly recorded with historical kana カナフ. A separate 加納氏 belonged to the Miura–Sawara grouping that divided control of Aizu after Yoritomo's Ōshū campaign. The official history of Kitakata lists 加納氏 separately amongst these medieval families.
後藤[2] The 後藤 lineage is attested in the twelfth century. 後藤基清, born in 1155, was the adopted son of 後藤実基 and served as a Kamakura-period warrior.
五島[3] This is the most interesting example as 五島 came from the unrelated medieval 宇久氏. The 宇久 had already been established by the Kamakura period and later controlled the Gotō islands. After Ukuji was promoted to Bunroku's service, he changed his surname from Uku to Gotō, and developed into the Gotō clan, a daimyo of the early-modern times.
None of that historical lineage can be faithfully preserved through the use of a Latin script. The characters themselves carry continuity – visual (radicals), literary and civilisational – that transliteration can approximate only by discarding precisely what made the tradition contiguous in the first place and compressing them into a neutered phonetic contraption.
Then there is the separate issue that Chinese characters, their readings and the vocabulary associated with them entered Japanese through several successive waves of cultural import, with one particularly important layer having been introduced during the Tang dynasty, when Japan extensively adopted Chinese literary, administrative and cultural models. Different readings, compounds and usages consequently preserve historical or cultural nuances associated with particular periods of Japanese contact with China.
[0] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%8B%A9%E9%87%8E%E6%B0%8F-1155209
[1] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%8A%A0%E7%B4%8D-45984
[2] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%BE%8C%E8%97%A4%E5%9F%BA%E6%B8%8...
[3] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%AE%87%E4%B9%85%E6%B0%8F-1148019
I never get this line of reasoning - so are people listening to spoken japanese just in a perpetual state of confusion because they can't see the associated intended Kanji?
Also this coming from a person on a platform who's primary language is commonly pronounced with the last syllable/letter of each word used to start the next one.
The engli shlanguage ha sit sown nonsense.
Also the homophones thing is probably lesser of the things I mentioned. A typical sentence might only have 1 or 2 overloaded words, but it will have lots of substrings that can be parsed multiple ways.
I think at some early point most Japanese learners (that don't already know a Chinese language) think kanji should be dropped. And at a later point I think most would change their mind as the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Native speakers get confused in conversations and have to refer to kanji regarding which word they mean. Except they don't write down the kanji; they think of a very common word which has that kanji and say things like, "the shō syllable in my word is the same (kanji) as in shōrai".
The vast majority of the Japanese vocabulary consists of word roots made from the combination of two kanji. The language-making itself is not separable from kanji.
Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first.
I seriously doubt that. Literacy levels rose in Japan during the Meiji era and that produced pressure towards simplification of the writing system. Sure, Japan didn't go all the way to a pure kana system or to a latin-derived script, but the reasons are political and cultural (and there is nothing wrong with that) rather than linguistic.
In any cases, you didn't disprove my point, which is that the need for kanji is self-fulfilling. It feels necessary, precisely because its usage prevents the evolution of the phonetic kana system into something useful.
So, it is absolutely baked in and kanji first. without kanji the following tongue twister is indecipherable.
Niwaniwaniwatori ga, uraniwanimoniwaniwatoriga iru.
庭には二羽鶏が、裏庭にも二羽鶏がいる。
You keep missing the point, so I'll try one last time. Look at a picture of the Rosetta stone. I can read Greek but I find the Greek part hard to read. It's written entirely in capital letters with no spacing and no punctuation. (Maybe there were people like you at the time claiming that hieroglyphs were easier to read than Greek.) Modern Greek still uses the Greek alphabet but it has evolved into something much more readable. The same thing happened to latin.
I claim that the Japanese kana system is stuck in its own figurative Rosetta era. There are no reasons why it could not evolve into something readable and not purely phonetic. With all due respect, I don't consider seriously your argument that Japanese is an exceptional language uniquely based on combination of foreign characters that can only be considered a spoken language by children and idiots. There are arguments for kanji that I find convincing, yours has to be the worst.
As for homophones, why would that be a problem? They are not unique to Japanese! For instance, in French, the only reason why 'a' and 'à' are spelt differently is to make it easier to tell them apart in writing. They are pronounced exactly the same. French has a lot more examples like that, and actually, using wrong spellings for words notoriously makes French much harder to read, even if the spelling is phonetically correct. French writing is not purely phonetic, it's only one way: if you know how to write a word, you usually know how to pronounce it but the converse is not true. Yet, it is still a much simpler system than the Japanese one. Children can fully read at age 6, although writing with few spelling mistakes take more time.
Even though hiragana can be traced back to the 5th century, the educated and elites continued to use kanji exclusively until the 20th century, whereas hiragana was relegated to unofficial writing and it first became popular amongst women, hence gaining the condescending status of «female writing». Drawing parallels with hangul (as some have noticed) is not entirely correct as hangul entered the official use in the 15th century and has been in the extensive use for writing since then, even though the use of hanja has ceased only relatively recently. Hiragana entered the stage approximately four centuries later.
Katakana, on the other hand, was developed by Buddhist monks in the 9th century to translate texts from India and later to represent borrowed words. The Empire of Japan used kanji and katakana in official documents.
Then there is a distinction between the syllabary and vocabulary.
Chinese vocabulary and pronunciation has entered Japanese in three distinct waves: go-on, kan-on and tō-on. The Tang dynasty kan-on wave was particularly and enormously important as it has supplied Japanese with a major new pronunciation system, vocabulary, administrative culture and literary.
The earlier go-on wave is associated with Buddhist terminology that prefers the go-on readings, and the tō-on wave readings occur particularly in vocabulary brought through medieval and early-modern contact with China.
Therefore, the same character can therefore contain several historical layers, for example: 明 has go-on myō, kan-on mei and tō-on min as in:
Even the pronunciation alone partly tells the reader which historical layer is being invoked.明朝 is even more interesting as the reading of /myōchō/, being an older myō reading, indicates «tomorrow morning» whereas the /minchō/ reading, being a tō-on, indicates «the Ming dynasty» or related to the Ming dynasty.
Neither hiragana nor katakana can preserve such details, and, depending on whom one asks, it may or may not acceptable to a Japanese national. Perhaps the younger generation cares less but it is not all that clear cut.
> Three Japanese words, three Hepburn transcriptions. The letters you already know, telling you what they sound like.
I mean come on.
That's why Nihon-shiki is and will likely always remain the best system for serious students of Japanese - if you even need it at all. But then again, if you're just starting out, the best place to start is usually to immediately start learning kana.
"…久保 becomes "Kubo" without the long vowel marked at all…" -- there is no long vowel! Just plain Kubo is correct.
"Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki optimize for a systematic, one-to-one mapping between kana and romanization. One kana, one romanization, always, with no exceptions." (Kunrei-shiki: exceptions! 猫は庭へ魚を運ぶ Neko wa niwa e sakana o hakobu)
Also: "Romanization is a scaffold, not a destination." ? I TOO AM A HUMAN WRITER WHO WRITES WITH MY OWN FINGERS.
But the history of the Romaji movement is indeed interesting - there were influential people who were quite serious about moving entirely to romaji at one point! It would have changed everything.
This is a silly argument because anyone learning Japanese is going to need to learn how to pronounce it anyway. Also "serious Japanese learners" would likely be using kana.
Remembering both Hiragana and Katakana took me no more than a day each. Although I have to admit that I already tried learning them around 5 years ago and gave up back then out of lack of motivation.
Sure, maybe don’t force people to learn kana first. But Hepburn is kind of the worst of all worlds, it is just a waste of time to learn Hepburn.
I’m not trying to say you should avoid kana, just that there is some amount of intuition you can develop with romaji that does not work in kana.
- “Need to” is a very different criterion from “is useful”, and “visually split” is, well, kind of unexpected to me!
- The comparison to native Japanese speakers seems especially irrelevant here,
- You’re not using your native orthography here, you’re using romaji, I don’t think it’s anyone’s native orthography.
- You probably want to use the Romaji heavily anyway, because that’s how most people will use computers.
When you’re learning a language you naturally multiple approaches to understanding a single topic. You’ll see a word written, you’ll hear it. You’ll hear a sentence and then someone will give you an explanation of the grammar, and you’ll compare that with your notes. It’s multimodal and all of these different modes are useful.
Like how romaji is useful for understanding conjugations. Obviously not necessary, just useful.
As for why it's interesting and useful theoretically - well, Japanese is of course older than the kana chart, and if you're doing diachronic linguistics I think taking mat- to be the stem is probably a useful frame to think about the origins of the modern conjugation paradigm.
It is equally unnatural to form kana in your head when thinking about how to say something! Or, it’s unnatural to think about whether a verb is godan or ichidan when speaking, it’s unnatural to think about what particles are, etc.
You get an explanation for a concept and you internalize it. The explanation is a framework for you to internalize the concept, and once the concept is internalized, you no longer need it. The explanations are still useful, like romaji is still useful. None of the explanations are necessary, some are useful.
> which in this example is not actually even the same consonant
By that standard, the “t” in “butter” is not the same consonant as the “t” in “tap” (try it!)
People are really good at understanding and learning phonology and can really internalize it and understand it on an intuitive level, even if they can’t explain the rules for it. If you’re a native English speaker, you accept that there’s a “t” in “butter” and a “t” in “tap” even though they are not the same sounds (phones). That’s because they are the same phonemes.
Romaji is an effective way of writing down Japanese phonemes.
I think the exception is people using the JSL textbooks :) there is a reasonable defense to using JSL. But you’re right. I think it’s indefensible to teach Hepburn to people interested in learning Japanese.
Learning the katakana pronunciation of English learn words can be fun. There was a popular TV commercial jingle for “McDonald’s” that only works in Japanese because “makudonarudo” has more syllables.
Besides this historical motivation, there exists no technical argument in favor of any of them.
I do not agree at all that Nihon-shiki can sabotage the ability of Japanese people to learn and pronounce English.
Except for the native English speakers, all the other people of the World who are familiar with other languages besides their own are also familiar with the fact that every language has its own system of writing and pronunciation, whose rules you must learn.
Making the rules for writing your own language more complex for your own country and for most other countries of the World, just to make them simpler for the citizens of a certain privileged country, is not a behavior that I can approve, because I find it too subservient.
Rather, he (rightfully) criticized the generally negative effect caused by the deployment of anglocentric teaching methods (exclusively for the convenience of the Anglo world).
In addition, he observed a negative feedback of such strategems on the Anglo world itself, in as much as it forms an "impediment by convenience" for them to learn about other cultures (and thus rise a bit on the scale of human development).
So in a way what he said is the opposite of what you claim he did. Might that have been what triggered your inadequate reaction?
As for "arrogance", you stated that Kunrei/Nihon have been "sabotaging Japanese people's ability to learn and pronounce English correctly", as if there was any value in that for a civilization that culturally stands much higher than, say, the USA.
And as for "racism", it is well known that was an important factor on the "no prisoners" approach the US took against Japan, and also in terroristically and sadistically napalming one city after another (then repeated in Korea and Vietnam).
Hepburn is an inappropriate method of writing Japanese, which nonetheless has become the dominant way of writing Japanese, just because it caters to the inability of most Americans to learn how other languages than English are written and pronounced.
Add to that, that this is content marketing, and the whole thing really collapses. I'll consume interesting content marketing, I may even consume interesting slop, but I can't consume slop content marketing.