The Meiji period brought with it a massive upheaval of the written language. The Meiji government decreed Tokyo-Japanese to be the standard, the writing system was reconsidered, and the vocabulary exploded with new concepts. However, there was one important movement that brought the written language into the modern day: genbun itchi.
What is Genbun Itchi?
The Genbun Itchi movement arose in order to bring literacy to everyone. Click To TweetGenbun itchi (言文一致) is a movement that refers to the concept of the unification of the written and spoken language. As previously mentioned, the writing and spoken forms of the language had been diverging for centuries. As the malleable spoken form evolved, the rigid written form did not. By Meiji, they had differed to the point where special training was required to be able to write. The Genbun Itchi movement arose in order to bring literacy to everyone.
These two forms are differentiated in Japanese by the following two terms: bungobun (文語文) refers to this classical writing style (the mixed kanji and kana writing style, NOT kanbun or washiki-kanbun), and kōgobun (口語文) refers to spoken Japanese.
A Short History of Written Japanese
If we look back to when the spoken and written forms were the closest together, we have to go all the way back to the hiragana-written texts of the Heian period. The hiragana-writing of these nobles was in an oral style and eschewed some of the stuffier forms found in the written style.
However, as we enter the Kamakura period, a gulf starts to develop. Or, rather, as the spoken language evolved, the conservative written language almost completely stayed the same. After all, a language can be more easily preserved if it is written down. Not only this, the fact that writing was an activity restricted to mainly the elite class could have prevented any major changes.
By the Edo period, this difference was keenly felt. Those who wrote works in the kokkeibon and sharebon genres, which were targeted at the masses, wrote the vernacular ad verbatim. However, the low-brow nature of these works meant that they were very much an exception. The majority of written works were in bungobun. Kanbun was still used, but it had very much been replaced by the mixed kana and kanji written style in most cases.
At any rate, there were a number of differences between the written and oral forms aside from just grammatical issues.
