An Introduction to The National Language Research Institute:
A Sketch of its Achievements
Third Edition(1988)/
HTML Version(1997)
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II.2.10 The Writing Life of the Japanese People After the War
(Report 29, 1966. 226 pages)
The aims of this survey were to ascertain how the general
public, men and women of various ages, occupations, and
levels of education, live the life of the written language, the
life of reading and writing, every day, and to determine what
problems they have and what consciousness they have of the written
language. The central concern was to find how those who
had got an education in writing before the war were influenced
by the linguistic policy after the war. (A list of Chinese
characters for daily use and the rules of present-day kana use
were established by the government in 1946.)
For that purpose we made surveys at Nagaoka City, 270
kilometers north of Tokyo, in Ni~gata Prefecture, in
1962: 1. individual interviews of 310 general citizens; 2.
test and questionnaires to 243 mothers of P. T. A. 's of
primary and junior high school; 3. questionnaire to company
employees and workers. In 1963 in Tokyo, we gave a test
identical with that of the second survey to 118 mothers,
and a test identical with that of the third survey to 130
persons. Besides, we examined the real characteristics of
Chinese character usage through materials written for
the informants' own pleasure, e.g., 240 contributions to papers,
350 fragments of letters, diaries, drafts of speeches, etc.
A committee planned and worked on the project in 1962;
NAGANO Masaru, TAKAHASI Taro~ and WATANABE Tomosuke were
mainly in charge throughout the survey.
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