Japanese Romanization: they still haven't decided

All Japanese individuals who have attended elementary school since WW II have been taught to read and write romanized Japanese, and romanization is widely used for computer inputting and for other specialized purposes, particularly for those involving foreigners who do not know kana and kanji, but by no means for everyday reading and writing by Japanese citizens.  There are numerous different schemes for the romanization of Japanese, but the three main ones are:  Hepburn, Kunrei-shiki, and Nihon-shiki.  More about each of them below, but first a rough comparison of the two leading systems:

From Momoko Jingu, "Cultural agency now weighing romanization of Japanese words", The Asahi Shimbun (10/1/22).

“Aichi” or “Aiti,” which is the preferred spelling?

That is one of the questions the Council for Cultural Affairs is now considering as it ponders ways to reduce confusion over the use of two different romanization systems for a language deemed to be one of the world’s most difficult to master.

A Cabinet notification issued in 1954 called for using the “kunrei”  [VHM:  "instruction"] style of romanization when writing Japanese words in English. But the notice also allowed for exceptions with the Hepburn romanization style if circumstances made it difficult to change established writing habits.

…

The kunrei style is mainly learned during Japanese language classes in elementary school. But the Hepburn style is more often used in the romanization of Japanese names in passports as well as on road signs.

“People use the kunrei style unconsciously and there are various opinions about which style is better,” said an official with the Cultural Affairs Agency. “We plan to hold discussions about how romanization should be approached after further studies about what works best.”

A few interesting notes about each of the three main systems:

Hepburn romanization [VHM:  devised by a Western missionary in 1867] generally follows English phonology with Romance vowels. It is an intuitive method of showing Anglophones the pronunciation of a word in Japanese. It was standardized in the United States as American National Standard System for the Romanization of Japanese (Modified Hepburn), but that status was abolished on October 6, 1994. Hepburn is the most common romanization system in use today, especially in the English-speaking world.

…

Nihon-shiki romanization [VHM:  devised by a Japanese physicist in 1885] was originally invented as a method for Japanese to write their own language in Latin characters, rather than to transcribe it for Westerners as Hepburn was. It follows the Japanese syllabary very strictly, with no adjustments for changes in pronunciation….  Also known as Nippon-shiki, rendered in the Nihon-shiki style of romanization the name is either Nihon-siki or Nippon-siki.

Kunrei-shiki romanization [VHM:  promulgated in 1937 by the Japanese cabinet, whence it is often referred to as "Cabinet romanization"] is a slightly modified version of Nihon-shiki which eliminates differences between the kana syllabary and modern pronunciation. For example, the characters づ and ず are pronounced identically in modern Japanese, and thus Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn ignore the difference in kana and represent the sound in the same way (zu). Nihon-shiki, on the other hand, will romanize づ as du, but ず as zu. Similarly for the pair じ and ぢ, they are both zi in Kunrei-shiki and ji in Hepburn, but are zi and di respectively in Nihon-shiki….

(source)

It is fascinating to contemplate that the most ardent advocates of the Nihon-shiki romanization have been members of the Oomoto sect:

Oomoto (大本, Ōmoto, Great Source, or Great Origin),^[1] also known as Oomoto-kyo (大本教, Ōmoto-kyō), is a religion founded in 1892 by Deguchi Nao (1836–1918), often categorised as a new Japanese religion originated from Shinto. The spiritual leaders of the movement have always been women within the Deguchi family….

(source)

This fits well with the history of phonetic script of kana as being closely associated with women — onnamoji 女文字 ("women's writing / script") or onnade 女手 ("women's hand") that developed during the medieval perios.  Cf. Chinese nǚshū 女書 ("women's writing / script") in late imperial and early 20th-century southern China.

Most intriguing of all, romanization was seriously considered as a replacement for the Japanese wriring system:

In the Meiji era (1868–1912), some Japanese scholars advocated abolishing the Japanese writing system entirely and using rōmaji instead. The Nihon-shiki romanization was an outgrowth of that movement. Several Japanese texts were published entirely in rōmaji during this period, but it failed to catch on. Later, in the early 20th century, some scholars devised syllabary systems with characters derived from Latin (rather like the Cherokee syllabary) that were even less popular since they were not based on any historical use of the Latin script.

Today, the use of Nihon-shiki for writing Japanese is advocated by the Oomoto sect and some independent organizations. During the Allied occupation of Japan, the government of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) made it official policy to romanize Japanese. However, that policy failed and a more moderate attempt at Japanese script reform followed.

(source)

From my own informal survey of script usage in Japan since the early 70s, the proportion of kana to kanji in general use has definitely increased, while the proportion of romaji to kana has also increased.  It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the coming decades, especially with developments in electronic and digital software and hardware continuing to proliferate in unexpected ways.

Selected readings

• "Rōmaji dialog between 'bread' and 'tea'" (8/9/15)
• "Writing Taiwanese with Romanization" (10/7/20)
• "English as a prestige language in Taiwan" (11/29/20) — proposed as an official language
• Ishikawa Takuboku, Romaji Diary and Sad Toys, translated by Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda. Rutland, Charles E. Tuttle Co. 1985.
• "Women's Romanization for Hong Kong" (8/17/19)
• "'Kong Girl Phonetics'" (9/10/21)
• "Women's writing: dead or alive" (10/2/20) — notes that the Japanese cursive syllabary called hiragana was also known as onnade 女手 ("women's hand / writing").  Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji), one of the great novels of the world, written in the early 11th century by the noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, was written in hiragana.

[h.t. June Teufel Dreyer]