Japan: Ikeda on the Fall of Japanese

Minae Mizumura ^[1]‘s The Fall of the Japanese Language in the Age of English, which sparked debate recently ^[2] in Japan on the future of the country's national language, is the subject of a blog post ^[3] [ja] by Nobuo Ikeda ^[4]. Ikeda writes that his wife had bought the book and described it as “boring”, and when he later picked it up and had a read himself, he felt the same. “She says that Japanese literature is being threatened so we need to protect it, but her understanding is mistaken,” he writes. “In scholarship and business, at least, Japanese is already nothing more than a regional language.”