The Crazy Effort to Remove Foreign Words From Japanese

During WW2 English was considered enemy language. The saxophone was renamed “bent metal sound machine” and beer became “barley alcohol”

Is this a saxophone or a “bent metal sound producing machine”? Photo by EAVONE Jazzman on Unsplash

Modern Japanese can seem at times like a collection of English words written in katakana connected with a particle or two and a desu or suru placed at the end of the sentence.

Especially in sports, music, technology, and fashion, almost all the vocabulary has been adopted wholesale from English.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise when you watch a bēsubōru gēmu in Japan and you hear the unpaia yell, “Sutoraiku surī! Auto!”

Still, at times you wonder why Japan doesn’t come up with more traditional Japanese words, especially for everyday items. Why is my iPhone a sumaho (smart phone) instead of perhaps…kentai 賢帯?

If you’ve ever thought it strange that English vocabulary has invaded Japanese so thoroughly, so did the Japanese public in the 1940’s as the country was embarking on a war with most of the English-speaking world.

At a time when the ultra-naturalist Japan was determined to dominate Asia, how could Japanese claim their blood was purer than everyone else if their language was a mutt — a combination of old…