Temptations to Change the Writing System in the Contemporary Iran and Japan

In the years leading to the Constitutional revolution, a number of reformists put forward the idea of changing the Persian script. Strangely, their justifications were very similar to those presented by Japanese intellectuals in the late 19th centurywho argued for abandoning the Chinese script for writing Japanese. The thrust of their argument was that the Arabic script is an obstacle to literacy and the progress of science in Iran. The Constitutional revolution and the role played by the press in enlightening people showed that the problem with literacy lies not in the Arabic script but elsewhere. Likewise, although the idea of changing the Japanese script sounded like the right idea for a time, the scientific and industrial progress of the Japanese leading to a prosperous society with no illiteracy, proved the falsityof the idea. Those who attributed illiteracy and social backwardness to the script, both in Japan and Iran, were obviously wrong. They were not aware of the benefits of the recent scripts and of the losses occurring as a result of the script change.