are grounds for serious doubt of this assertion,[1] and, in any case, the argument is quite beside the point. For each student of the Japanese language there are hundreds or thousands who read and write about Japan, and it is the latter, rather than the former, who need a system of Romanization. The argument that, no matter what the Romanization, the foreigner will not pronounce Japanese with absolute correctness, and therefore the foreigner’s viewpoint need not be considered, has been brought forward, but it is mere sophistry. The fact remains that an intelligent but uninformed foreigner confronted with the Old Romanization has a much greater chance of arriving at a comprehensible approximation of the Japanese pronunciation than when confronted with Nipponsiki or Kokutei, which for him will always be full of startling and confusing discrepancies between the spelling and the correct pronunciation. The vast majority of interested foreigners, whether they be merely members of the newspaper reading public or serious students of the Far East, desire and need a broad phonetic transcription which can be used with fair accuracy by anyone, and not a phonetic orthography, which is satisfactory only for those who know the language.[2]
- ↑ To the student of the language the fact that Kokutei preserves the stem of the verb matsu (matu) in all forms unquestionably is gratifying, but that is of little significance, for it is generally accepted that students of the language should use kana and Chinese ideographs rather than Rōmaji in language study.
- ↑ No person with whom I have spoken about the subject in the United States has been in favor of the adoption of Kokutei, and the only argument put forward in support of it is that, if the Japanese all use it, we may be forced to do so also for the sake of uniformity. The instructors of Japanese in eastern universities and others closely concerned with the problem of Japanese Romanization, who are listed below, all recently signed their names to a simple statement that they were in opposition to the adoption of Kokutei.
William R. B. Acker Freer Gallery of Art Hugh Borton Columbia University Knight Biggerstaff Cornell University Serge Elisséeff Harvard University John K. Fairbank Harvard University A. W. Hummel Library of Congress Shio Sakanishi Library of Congress Osamu Shimizu Columbia University A. C. Soper Princeton University
