Beginning this fall, four of the major commercial television networks began broadcasting variety programs aimed at rehabilitating Japanese television viewers' inability to correctly utilize their native language. Why the sudden flood of kokugo (national language) programs?
Some observers trace the decline of the Japanese language to recent government education reforms. In 2002, the Japanese government revamped the school system. Its pet name for the project? "Relaxed education." Ever since, many parents have been shocked to note that their offspring have difficulty in writing kanji at grade level. A number of these same moms and dads, increasingly reliant on Japanese word processing software, admit they are hard-pressed to handwrite the same kanji they expect their children to master.
Cries of alarm are also being raised about the state of the spoken language. Last February, an advisory panel to the Cultural Affairs Agency on kokugo reported that keigo (honorific, self-effacing, and polite language) is being widely misused by the Japanese populace. Sales of kokugo self-help books like Yasuo Kitahara's million-seller "Mondai na Nihongo (Problematic Japanese)" are booming, and it was only a matter of time before the networks jumped on the kokugo rehabilitation bandwagon.