Japan’s official nationalism succeeded because a written script unified a linguistically fractured nation
Evidence
In this orderly campaign the men of Meiji were aided by three half-fortuitous factors. First was the relatively high degree of Japanese ethnocultural homogeneity resulting from two and a half centuries of isolation and internal pacification by the Bakufu. While the Japanese spoken in Kysh was largely incomprehensible in Honsh, and even Edo-Tokyo and Kyoto-saka found verbal communication problematic, the half-Sinified ideographic reading-system was long in place throughout the islands, and thus the development of mass literacy through schools and print was easy and uncontroversial. Second, the unique antiquity of the imperial house (Japan is the only country whose monarchy has been monopolized by a single dynasty throughout recorded history), and its emblematic Japanese-ness (contrast Bourbons and Habsburgs), made the exploitation of the Emperor for official-nationalist purposes rather simple. Third, the penetration of the barbarians was abrupt, massive, and menacing enough for most elements of the politically-aware population to rally behind a programme of self-defence conceived in the new national terms. It is worth emphasizing that this possibility had everything to do with the timing of Western penetration, i.e. the 1860s as opposed to the 1760s. For by then, in dominant Europe, the ‘national community’ had been coming into its own for half a century, in both popular and official versions. In effect, self-defence could be fashioned along lines and in accordance with what were coming to be ‘international norms.’ — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 372
Categorization
- XREF: The ideographic script’s role parallels the print-capitalism argument from the book’s early chapters — writing system as proto-print-medium for imagined community.