ABSTRACT
Outside the script reform movement, there appeared in newspapers and magazines a spate of essays dealing with the need for stylistic simplification, and many of these referred to the Kana and Romaji Clubs. The Meiji Period controversy over script reform was inevitable in the light of contemporary developments in Japanese society. Watanabe Shujiro, who had studied English and became a renowned historian adopted the device of spacing words in kana prose. The Japanese should adopt European grammar as a model, he asserted with a fine disregard for the difference between grammar and orthography; they should emulate its best features, such as punctuation, paragraphing, parenthesis, dashes, and quotation marks. The use of punctuation in Japanese fiction accelerated from then on in direct proportion to the adoption of the colloquial style by Meiji Period authors.
