Japanization

After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan began to follow the way of the western imperialism and expansionism. in 1879, Japan officially annexed the Ryūkyū Kingdom, which was a tributary kingdom of both the Qing Dynasty and the Empire of Japan.

Though the Ryukyuan languages belong to the Japonic language family, the Japanese language is not intelligible to the monolingual speakers of the Ryukyuan languages. The Japanese government began to promote the language "standardization" program and took the Ryukyuan languages as dialects. In schools, "standard" Japanese was promoted, and there were portraits of the Japanese Emperor and Empress were introduced. Many high-ranking Japanese military officers went to inspect Okinawan schools to ensure that the Japanization was functioning well in the education system. This measure did not meet the expected success at the beginning, partly because many local children's share of their heavy family labor impedes their presence in schools, and partly because people of the old Okinawan leading class received a more Chinese-styled education and were not interested in learning "standard" Japanese. As measures of assimilation, the Japanese government also discouraged some local customs.[2]

At the beginning, these assimilation measures met stronger reluctance of local people. However, after China was defeated in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, people lost their confidence in China, and the reluctance against the Japanization, though it did not disappear, became weaker. Men and women began to adopt more Japanese-styled names.[2]

Taiwan was ceded to the Empire of Japan in 1895 as a result of the First Sino-Japanese War. At the beginning, Taiwan was governed rather like a colony. In 1936, following the arrival of the 17th governor-general, Seizō Kobayashi, there was a change in the Japanese governance in Taiwan.

Kobayashi was the first non-civilian governor-general since 1919. He proposed three principles of the new governance: the Kōminka movement (皇民化運動), industrialization, and making Taiwan as a base for the southward expansion.[3]

"Kōminka" literally means "to make people become subjects of the emperor". The program itself had three components. First, the "national language movement" (國語運動, kokugo undō) promoted the Japanese language by teaching Japanese instead of Taiwanese Hokkien in the schools and by banning the use of Taiwanese Hokkien in the press. Second, the "name changing program" (改姓名, kaiseimei) replaced Taiwanese's Chinese names with Japanese names. Finally, the "volunteers' system" (志願兵制度, shiganhei seidō) drafted Taiwanese subjects into the Imperial Japanese Army and encouraged them to die in service of the emperor.[4]

Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo 1940.1.1

In Korea during the Second World War the use of written Korean in education and publication was banned by the Empire of Japan, but this did not cause a significant change in the use of the Korean language, which remained widely used throughout the colonisation.