[KS] RE: Mori's cockamie ideas

[Jim Hoare]

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Dear List

Before we go too far down the "wasn't Mori silly" road, remember that the
idea that the Japanese should give up their incomprehensible language (to
Europeans anyway), was floating about in the late nineteenth century. F V
Dickins, British lawyer in Yokohama in the 1870s (involved with the "Maria
Luz" case) and editor of the Japan Mail for a time, wrote that Japan could
not expect the revision of the unequal treaties until it had abandoned its
written language in favour of a romanised one. Mori, both in his enquiry to
Spencer and his approach about language was merely reflecting some of the
strands of thought about at the time. 
And were such ideas any stranger than the idea that to become civilised, one
had to become a Christian, or build railways?

Jim Hoare