This book examines two language issues in Japan today which have arisen from significant developments in the social environment over the last three decades and have pointed to a need for a change in language policy. One is the increase in the number of migrants needing opportunities to learn Japanese as a second language (JSL), the other is the influence of electronic technologies on the way Japanese is written. Immigration-induced demographic changes confront long-cherished notions of national monolingualism, and technological advances in electronic text production have led to textual practices with ramifications for script use and for literacy in general. My central concern is to show whether and how language policy authorities in Japan are moving to accommodate these social and cultural changes. Both the integration of immigrants and new practices affecting literacy are important to the social fabric; it is essential, therefore, that expectations about language in these areas are clear and that policy addresses the realities of the present rather than harking back to an earlier social context.

In one of these two areas, a national policy already exists; in the other, it does not. In one of these areas, the national policy has been revised to acknowledge change; in the other, no national-level policy has yet been developed. In the area of kanji policy, deeply rooted in Japanese language ideology and important to ethnic mainstream Japanese citizens as it is, the widespread uptake of electronic text production has been viewed as necessitating a revision of the List of Characters for General Use, which has just been expanded to acknowledge that larger numbers of kanji are now routinely used than was the case when writing by hand alone. In the second, more contentious area, that of providing JSL instruction for migrants to Japan at a national rather than local level, no policy currently exists, in large part because such a move goes against deep-seated national language ideologies of monoethnicity and monolingualism. It is only very recently that the national government – in contrast to local governments, which have been active in this area for years – has begun to make sporadic provision for language training in certain clearly defined areas relating to employment.