>>7796>but there is something tragic about how Japanese culture has been majorly cucked by modernity and imperialismI mean they wholesale rejected their culture in a feverish drive to modernize themselves as fast as possible during meiji era.
<Nevertheless, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, governmental policies of modernization and westernization dictated a wholesale rejection of the preceding feudal era. Even the best elements of Edo-period culture were deemed outdated and vulgar and were thought to require prompt and thorough extirpation.<When, for example, a school of fine arts was founded in Tokyo’s Ueno Park during the Meiji period, the Japanese government established a department of Western music but made no provisions for the study of traditional Japanese music. Today hardly anyone would agree with this policy,but it took many years before Japanese traditional music began to be regarded as equal in value to Western music. And it was not until after World War II that Japanese music was made part of the official public school curriculum.
>For the most part the written Korean language currently used doesn't have the requirement to memorize a thousand characters like Chinese and Japanese do.When nips decided to modernize themselves, they faced with the problem of how to standardise and develop their language to better accommodate western concepts and words. They had to create a shitton of words to facilitate translation of western knowledge. But the issue was whether to coin these new words in their native language or Chinese language. Without much debate with the proponents of wago(native vocab), the meiji state basically decided to create new words in kango(chinese words). Their justification was that the native Japanese language is pretty inferior and inefficient to create words. They were also posed with the problem of examining and codifying native word coining procedures, which they didn't wanna bother with. I think this was probably because meiji government was dominated by aristocratic warrior elites from edo who basically had a penchant for Chinese vocab due to their specific kind of education.
In the end, kango wasn't just used to officially coin words, but they replaced a lot of equivalent wago in the process. Obscure kango like "kansha" that not many people used before suddenly became commonly used words thanks to compulsory education. It was basically the era of kangofication of Japanese. Just to be sure, I am not saying kango wasn't used before meiji and I'm not claiming there weren't high class elites or buddhist scholars who were obsessed with kango even before this.
Now the debate surrounding kanji removal is intrinsically tied to how prominent kango vocab is in modern Japanese. Without kanji they can't create new words. Without kanji most of technical vocabulary will become extremely hard to remember even if you exclude commonly used kango.
There were a lot of attempts to create new writing system in Japan but none succeeded(for example,
http://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/942751)
Some group translated a western chemistry textbook in pure hiragana as a way to test the word coining power of wago. The book's called monowari no hashigo(ものわりのはしご). But this was like the only instance from meiji era where someone tried to do something with wago.