The late 1800s and early 1900s were also the peak of constructed-language movements like Esperanto and Volapük, which were riding on the assumption that there w

The late 1800s and early 1900s were also the peak of constructed-language movements like Esperanto and Volapük, which were riding on the assumption that there would be peace in our time if only we would all speak the same language and thereby see eye to eye. Also somewhat related, in the same timeframe, Japan was opening itself up after nearly three centuries of isolation and catching up with technological development. While new loanwords flooded into the language from all kinds of European languages, some scholars argued for replacing the traditional Japanese writing system with the Latin alphabet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#As_a_replacement_for_the_Japanese_writing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#As_a_... The proposal never won any majority support, but the government did end up doing a smaller reform: After WW2, several character forms were simplified and an official list of characters in common use with standardized pronounciations was published by the government as a baseline for the school syllabus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji