AHC: Japan Adopts the Latin Alphabet (Romaji)

During the Meiji period, Wikipedia says there were advocates of ending the traditional system and switching to a Romaji. The idea never caught on.... but is there a way it could have? The challenge: Anytime after Commodore Perry shows up (1854), is there any non-ASB way the Japanese would use some sort of Latin alphabet?

I am thinking something similar to how the Turks or Vietnam switched to Latin based letters. In fact, the entry on the Vietnamese alphabet lists this:
Because the period of education necessary to gain initial literacy is considerably less for the largely phonetic Latin-based script compared to the several years necessary to master the full range of Chinese characters, the adoption of the Vietnamese alphabet also facilitated widespread literacy among Vietnamese speakers—whereas a majority of Vietnamese in Vietnam could not read or write prior to the 20th century, the population is now almost universally literate.
From what I understand, Japan was a highly literate country even prior to the Meiji period, but I might be wrong.
 
If it's pre-Tokugawa, any Romaji orthography developed would be a very weird combination of Dutch and Portuguese orthography, looking similar to Vietnamese and dissimilar to it at the same time.
 
During the Meiji period, Wikipedia says there were advocates of ending the traditional system and switching to a Romaji. The idea never caught on.... but is there a way it could have? The challenge: Anytime after Commodore Perry shows up (1854), is there any non-ASB way the Japanese would use some sort of Latin alphabet?

I am thinking something similar to how the Turks or Vietnam switched to Latin based letters. In fact, the entry on the Vietnamese alphabet lists this:From what I understand, Japan was a highly literate country even prior to the Meiji period, but I might be wrong.

Do a search for threads about the Japanese language. This has been covered many times before. I only say this with charity. There are a number of AH.com participants who know quite a bit about Japanese. The threads are quite interesting and informative.

In the main, Japanese needs both kana and kanji because of the very large number of homonyms in the language. The kanji provide fine distinctions between homonyms. Kanji also help to avoid ambiguity.

I could see an earlier reduction of the number of Kanji in common print publications. This reform did not appear until the American occupation.
 
Do a search for threads about the Japanese language. This has been covered many times before.

In short, Japanese needs both kana and kanji simply because of the very large number of homonyms in the language. The kanji provide fine differentation of homonyms and avoid ambiguity.
This was one of those times the search function crapped out on me, so all it returned was a blank page.

As to your response, according to a quick search there are about 8,000 homophones in the English language. Certainly a lot of languages depend on context and you could simply alter the spelling or add diacritics in some way to create homophones, which may or may not be spelled the same to reflect appropriate inflection. I am not sure how many homophones or homonyms the Japanese language has, but a quick search indicates that there might be roughly equal numbers of words in each language depending on how you look at the issue.

So it doesn't seem necessarily impossible.
 
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