If Japanese sociolinguistics can be likened in range and complexity to a forest, this book by the sociolinguist and Japan specialist Nanette Gottlieb would best be described as a Kyoto rock garden. It is cool and calm. It lies within a circumscribed landscape and gives pause for thought.

Language and society in Japan makes an important contribution to the study of the sociology of language in Japan, focusing on key sociopolitical issues affecting language use there in recent years. The connecting theme of the book is the relation between language and identity from the Meiji Period (beginning in 1868) to the present. Gottlieb introduces this theme by saying, “Language has played an important role in Japan's cultural and foreign policies, and language issues have been and continue to be intimately connected both with globalizing technological advances and with internal minority group experiences” (p. vii). With this in mind, Gottlieb examines the role of the institutions of media and schools in spreading the standard form of Japanese, and the role of the media in language engineering.

In chap. 1, the author introduces the social context of the Japanese language and its varieties. She proceeds down a well-trodden path, looking at the body of ethnocentrist literature known as Nihonjinron, a collection of cultural myths and folk beliefs in which Japan and the Japanese are characterized as uniquely different, existentially static, and racially and linguistically homogeneous. A useful addition to the excellent discussion on language varieties and Japanese in the world would have been some discussion of “new dialects” (different from standard Japanese, more frequent among younger speakers, and common in daily conversation), an important area of research (Inoue 1993). The author touches upon and might have elaborated further the issue of dialect attitudes. Dialect security/insecurity is a metaphor for the powerful center/periphery dichotomy of modern Japan. It is a canonical theme in sociolinguistics and is linked to what is known as hoogen kompurekkusu ‘dialect complex’. Certainly, the theme winds through the author's discussion as in her mention of the imposition of dialect placards as punishment for the use of Okinawan.

Chap. 2 deals with the opposite of Nihonjinron: language heterogeneity, specifically languages such as Ainu, Korean, Okinawan, and Chinese, as well as the internationalization and foreign language learning. In chaps. 3 and 4, Gottlieb looks at the broad themes inherent in the ideology of language and identity. The author is right to include in the discussion of language planning not only Japanese as a national language alone but also policy relating to other languages in Japan (Ainu and English) and the teaching of Japanese as a foreign language, both inside and outside Japan.

Chap. 5 deals with the Japanese writing system – “maligned and praised by Japanese and non-Japanese alike” (78). The issue of literacy is of particular relevance to modern Japanese society. Particularly pleasing but hardly surprising is how Gottlieb goes to work on this topic. Diglossia prevailed in the prewar period, when college-bound secondary school pupils and college students were trained in kanji and kango to be part of the social elite. This set them apart from the masses with only primary school diplomas. In contrast, statistically, Japan is now considered to have perfect literacy (“almost 100%”; Adachi, quoted in Gottlieb, 91) from the point of view of literacy skills (decoding, comprehension, writing). This is based on the argument that furigana can be added to any kanji to provide its correct reading. However, as Gottlieb points out, “books and newspapers are never just written in hiragana, nor do they usually place furigana glosses beside the kanji” (91). From the point of view of functional literacy – literacy domains such as labels for objects, signs, official forms, instruction and explanations on medicine bottles, advertisements and receipts – there is increasing concern (confirmed in numerous surveys by the government's Agency for Cultural Affairs) that citizens are decreasingly confident about their literacy skills. This section brings to mind the influential film Gakko (1993 “A class to remember”) by writer/director Yoji Yamada, which features a yakangakko ‘part-time night school’ for people who had slipped through the literacy net. The film traces a junior-high night-school teacher's thoughts on the eve of graduation as he recalls the delinquent adolescents, aging laborers, learning-disabled and non-Japanese students who filled his evening class, trying to learn how to read. Yakan gakko still function as educational institutions for people in diverse social situations, such as retraining for Chinese-speaking recently repatriated orphans left behind in China and older Korean-speaking residents of Japan. Novels and the popular media have well and truly punctured Japan's postwar boast of “perfect literacy.”

The push for language change and the “re-engineering” of discriminatory language in Japan was no less strong than in other countries, and the international movements for human rights, particularly in the United Nations, enhanced this debate. Chap. 5 deals with issues of discriminatory language in an interesting way, first discussing a social outcast group, the Burakumin, and proceeding to people with disabilities, women, and the Ainu. “Shifting electronic identities” (chap. 7) deals with the use of Japanese in word processing technology, in particular the Japanese language presence on the Internet: It is the third most common language of the Internet after English and Chinese. The implications for language policy – not easily recognizable by the nonspecialist – are teased out by Gottlieb (132): “People began to think differently about how they used kanji once this technology became available and its possibilities became clear … to consider a revised approach to script policy and character education might be appropriate, given that current script policy is premised on the fact that characters are hand-written … Characters can be easily called up on word processor without imposing a memory burden on their user. More characters than formerly are being used in word-processed documents. Would it not make sense, therefore, to change the policy so that a greater number are taught for recognition only and a reduced number for reproduction, rather than placing equal emphasis on both skills?”

The author is not afraid to grasp various species of nettle. On the (mostly Western) advocacy of the romanization of Japanese, she comments, “What would be lost by switching to the alphabet, however, is probably much greater than what would be gained … the implications for education and the publishing industries in particular are such that I do not think this will happen, especially when combined with the likely affective or emotional resistance to such a change” (144). This position is guaranteed to steam up the screens of every advocate of romanization from Tokyo to Glasgow.

Surveys of the Japanese language are regularly hauled on stage by government agencies. In a 2005 survey by the government's Cultural Affairs Agency (Asahi Shinbun, 13 July 2005) of 3,000 adult (16–50 year old) citizens' view of the Japanese language, an increasing number of people said they thought learning kanji was important, indicating a national consensus that handwriting is still important in this age of personal computers. Those who said people should study kanji despite the prevalence of word processors and PCs totaled 56.6%, up 18.7 percentage points from the previous survey in fiscal 2002, but those who said they were not confident in using kanji correctly, at 41.3%, increased from the last time by 19.2 percentage points. Gottlieb has wisely avoided areas of heavy sociolinguistic traffic like keigo ‘polite speech’, which she contextualizes in gendered speech and subcultural variations. There are innumerable studies of keigo, from undergraduate theses to full-length books; to try to summarize it is to take a walk on the wild side. A result from the abovementioned survey is, however, utterly charming: 81% of respondents said that keigo is misused more widely than in the past.

Well referenced and indexed, this volume is recommended to students and scholars alike. Nanette Gottlieb is well known for her works on the sociolinguistics of written Japanese, in particular the reform of written Japanese, the politics of kanji, and the role of kanji in the age of word processing technology. This recent book is both a summation of her thoughts on written Japanese and on developing multiculturalism and technology and a lucid introduction to many other aspects of the sociology of the language in Japan.