English becomes Japan's official language

I've read that during the Meiji Era, there were calls to replace Japanese with English as the official language. In OTL, they never came through, but suppose they had, and so Japan ends up something like Ireland: English as the official language with the old native language relegated to second base.
 
I don't think it's too realistic for 19th-century Japan to successfully replace Japanese with English. The two languages are radically different from each other and aside from some merchants in port cities, few Japanese people had any contact with English speakers.

The plan would probably be dropped quickly and/or scaled back to simply teaching English as a second language.
 
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Maybe after ww2 - a much more severe ww2 where japan is decimated and the americans have a longer lasting, more "intense" occupation?

This is the only real way to get that result. A Meiji-era plan would get revised, after WWII, well...

And by WWII, I mean Operation Downfall being carried out and the Japanese government and their loyalists resisting until the bitter end (whenever that is).
 
This is the only real way to get that result. A Meiji-era plan would get revised, after WWII, well...

And by WWII, I mean Operation Downfall being carried out and the Japanese government and their loyalists resisting until the bitter end (whenever that is).

Hell, the only way to really have it is to have there not only be dozens of nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, but also a form of cultural Genocide and even conventional genocide against the Japanese.
 
Seriously not a joke and not racist- but those who grow up with Japanese as first language cannot distinguish between R and L. That's why Lallapalooza was a "shiboleth" code word on the radio to distinguish "fluent" English-speaking Japanese spies from being on with American radio. It wouldn't be easy for a nation with all of a generation of Japanese speakers to teach their children to speak English (most likely American), because it's not the same situation as Nisei and Sansei in the USA or Canada where they are immersed around native English speakers. Spoken English as the state language in Japan would at best be a pidgin or creole and not any standard British or American. For the sake of easy pronunciation you'd see some words simply not used, or replaced; and loan words from Japanese "Anglo-cized".
 
Hell, the only way to really have it is to have there not only be dozens of nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, but also a form of cultural Genocide and even conventional genocide against the Japanese.

I think being part of a massive warzone with nuclear and chemical weapons, and possibly biological weapons (most certainly nature's own diseases) accompanied by massive famine would do the job without too much conventional genocide.
 
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