The Adoption of Punctuation in Japanese Script

Abstract

Exposure to Western writings in the nineteenth century had a beneficial effect on the spatial organization of Japanese texts, which had hitherto been either sketchily punctuated or not punctuated at all. The use of such devices as word spacing, paragraphing, commas, and full stops was advocated first in essays by scholars of the West and applied in a few school textbooks in the early Meiji period (1868-1912). The real impetus for the adoption of European-style punctuation, however, came from the novelists who produced the various schools or modern fiction which began to appear from the mid-1880s. They experimented with the whole spectrum of European devices in conjunction with a new colloquial style, though not all proved appropriate to Japanese. Through their efforts the practice of punctuating texts became well established and later spread outside the realm of fiction to other areas of written Japanese.