>>12833971Japan was debating language reform back when Japanese was even more of an unreadable mess of a language during the Meiji reformation, with literary journals and the legislature taking new inspiration from the intellectualism of the Europeans, with the varying demands of how to fix the language ranging from people advocating for one of only hiragana/katakana, people advocating for
pure romaji, people advocating for just style changes because the language was fucked up, people advocating for limiting the number of kanji, with literary journals popping up writing in the individual style they thought should become the norm for the entire country.
They were unable to form a unified front and stayed multiple separate schools of thought, the only thing agreed was the language needed to be fixed, and the compromise at the beginning of the 20th century was just limit the kanji to a similar number to today and minor reforms to make the language more legible, to after which the remnant hype died. Intellectuals were more bothered with other things during the war period, so after WWII when the topic of language reform came up again, there was no hype to do any major reforms. Essentially the language was further tidied up in 1945 to be way more legible and fix a bunch of minor issues (you will notice when texts were written before there, for examle っ didn't exist and it was just done with つ, this sentence やつとそれは出來上つた would be やっとそれは出来上がった in modern writting), but there was no major reforms, and since all the minor lingering problems were gotten rid of, no-one cares to reform the language nowadays because it's functional enough.
