The strength of this book (henceforth LPLCJ) is that it is filled with information about an important but little-understood aspect of Japanese culture: Japan's stance toward its own language. It takes as its point of departure “the study of language planning as a branch of the sociology of language” (p. 10). For reasons that I will outline below, I find this particular approach unsatisfying, but the book's strengths far outweigh its weaknesses, and I will outline the former here before offering my own opinion on how this topic should be approached.