LANGUAGES OF JAPAN

That’s right - languages, plural. 

Historical territory of the Ainu people (map from Wikipedia / kwamikagami

When I arrived in Japan in the early 1990s I was amazed how little the citizens of that nation knew about the native language varieties of their country. Decades of propaganda had led to the universal belief that ‘we are Japanese, and speak the Japanese language’ - a monolithic testimony to nationalism in the era before widespread DNA testing put paid to the notion that the Japanese were a unique race who somehow emerged from the soil of their land independently.

Being obsessed with minority languages, I was amazed that almost nobody knew who the Ainu were and that they had a different language, or that the people in the Okinawan islands to the south had their own linguistic varieties too. 

These days awareness of this linguistic diversity is much more widespread, although, as usual, Japan has lagged behind other developed nations in recognising and protecting its linguistic minorities. 

Ainu people, 1904 (Jessie Tarbox Beals - Missouri History Museum)

The problem is that nationalistic right-wing politicians (like those who have governed Japan for decades) dislike linguistic diversity as much as they dislike sexual diversity. It’s an affront to their core ideology. Thus, one cannot help but be cynical about Japan’s belated fairly recent half-arsed recognition of the Ainu as an indigenous people of Japan when virtually no speakers of the language remain and centuries of forced assimilation has led to a blurring of the ethnic lines. 

The Ainu, for those who don’t know, traditionally lived in the north of Japan’s main island of Honshu, the northern island of Hokkaido, and on into Sakhalin island and other Russian territories. Their language is an isolate, completely unrelated to Japanese. The Ainu are also distinct physically.

Japan’s other linguistic minorities lie in the Ryukyuan Islands, of which the largest is Okinawa, to the south of Japan, stretching in an arc all the way to Taiwan. This was an independent kingdom before it was annexed by Japan in 1879. Once again, forced assimilation has been the policy with regards to the ethnically and linguistically different inhabitants. Young people don’t speak the various languages anymore, and Japan does not recognise them, dismissing them as mere dialects. 

Ryukyuan languages (from Wikipedia)

This is a standard tactic of lawmakers, designed to give the impression that a given language variety is some bastardised offshoot of the national language, leading to its slow disappearance, as young people don’t want to speak something regarded as parochial and unhip. 

The same policy was implemented by Mussolini in Italy and can also be seen in the French constitution which states in article 2 that ‘the language of the Republic is French,’ thereby immediately dismissing and depriving support to the multitude of varieties spoken in that nation.

Back to Okinawa - the Ryukyuan languages (about ten in number, spread across the various islands) are all Japonic, and thus in the same language family as Japanese: however, not only are they are all mutually unintelligible with Japanese, they are also mutually unintelligible with each other. 

With no recognition and therefore no government support, it is estimated that these languages will be dead by 2050 - the entire history and culture largely gone with them.

The need to have one standard language in a nation-state is understandable when thinking about a unified education system and so forth, but it doesn’t need to exclude the rights of those who speak other varieties. Local bilingualism need not be threatening to the nation, as has clearly been demonstrated in many other countries. 

Sadly, it is too late in the case of Japan - the nationalists have had their victory - according to the UNESCO Atlas of World Languages, Ainu is critically endangered with just 5 speakers, while the Ryukyuan languages are either critically or definitely endangered, with numbers of speakers of the different languages ranging from 400 to nearly 100,000, mostly the elderly.