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- The so or the koto? - Part names from a Chinese dragon |
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The so or the koto? |
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I'd like to introduce
you to a plucked string instrument called the so. The
so is a
member of the cithara family, and originated in China in the 4th century
BC. It was introduced to Japan in the 7th century during the Nara period.
Although many Japanese people call this instrument the koto and
write it in Chinese characters as in figure-1, the word "koto" is just a
generic name for a group of stringed instruments. It usually refers to a
bridge-less instrument those of the harp family. Thus, some Japanese people in
the traditional music world have been trying to write it as shown in
figure-2, reading it as "koto" to avoid incorrect usage. They want people
to know its correct name because they really love the so, and they
are passionate about it. But, when
one looks at this situation in a different way, it gives rise to a new
confusion.
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figure-1
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figure-2
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People learning Japanese in school after 1946 under GHQ’s occupation policy would not have to learn the complex Chinese characters. So, many Chinese characters such as "so" disappeared from school textbooks and official documents, by statute, based on the Toyo Kanji list of 1,850 standard-use characters. And, the character in figure-1 became the replacement for "so". The master plan for education reform in Japan after the war was based on the mission report written by the delegates sent from GHQ. It included the total abolition of Chinese characters, hiragana, and |
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katakana, and insisted on the introduction of roman scripts to be used as the native script in the future. The Cabinet at the time implemented a restriction of Chinese characters and simplified a large amount of complex characters. For instance, the character for the so was simplified as shown in figure-3.
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figure-3 |
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The notion of the doing away with Chinese characters had already been raised in the 19th century during the Edo period. A few intellectuals insisted on using only hiragana or roman scripts as the native script, and believed that the abolition of Chinese characters could save students and teachers a ton of time in school. Actually, it might have helped reduce the impediment that kanji caused in typography. There were extreme examples after the end of the war, like the one advocating the introduction of the French language as the national language. I guess not many Japanese people thought that all the Toyo Kanji and more characters would become digitized and convertible through the software applications on personal computers within a half century. Maybe I should add that recent hiragana-kanji conversion software displays the character shown in igure-2, when you enter "koto".
In the end, we Japanese circumvented the total abolition of Chinese characters. However the drastic restriction of Chinese characters in daily use has left us confused over 60 years later. In 1981, the Ministry of Education revised the Toyo Kanji list and proclaimed the Joyo Kanji list instead. There are 1,945 characters on the new list. Today children are supposed to learn 1,006 characters in elementary school and learn the remaining 939 characters in junior high school. They learn the character for koto in junior high school. However, the chances of learning the character for so in school or home are slim, since their parents or grandparents probably don't know the character. You still see incorrect usages even in a lot of koto school ads but don't pay it much attention. In a sense, any of these 3 characters are absolutely right to the people who learned one of these as a right character in their school days.
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