ABSTRACT
The years following the Manchuria Incident were a period of increasing tension in Japan as the power and influence of the military grew, culminating in the invasion of China in 1937 and the war in Asia and the Pacific which followed the attack on the United States in 1941. As the shadow of impending war grew ever closer, extreme right-wing ultranationalism of the kind described in Chapter Two came to dominate the political and intellectual climate, with disastrous results for the language reform movement and its attempts to democratise script by making it easier for the ordinary Japanese. From 1931 to 1945, the principal features of the language planning scene were the virulent suppression of attempts by the National Language Council at script reform at home and the devising of policies to guide the dissemination of Japanese as the common language of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere abroad.
