I share Philip J. Cunningham's concern in his July 2 article, "Goodbye Iwojima, Hello Iwoto," that stirrings of language police are a harbinger of oppressive nationalism. But there is more behind the move to call Hollywood's "Iwo Jima" Japan's "Iwoto" than meets the eye or ear.

The first edition of Kojien (1955, 1967 printing), Japan's premier desktop dictionary, lists "Iougashima" (sulfur island) in Kagoshima Prefecture. It then lists "Iou rettou" (sulfur archipelago) as part of Tokyo but gives no pronunciations for the individual islands. The second and third editions have the same entries. The entry for the Kagoshima island in the fourth edition (1991, 1997 printing) notes that it is also called "Ioushima."

Not until its 1999 edition (first printing) does Kojien show three entries to clarify pronunciations: "Ioushima" (in Kagoshima, also called "Iougashima"); "Ioutou" (principal island of Iou rettou in Tokyo, also called "Ioujima"), and "Iou rettou" (archipelago in Tokyo).

Other publications over the decades show even more confusion. Some call both islands "Ioujima" and some people have differentiated the Kagoshima island as "Satsuma Ioujima." Japan Post's Web site assigns Kagoshima's "Ioujima" a unique postal code. It does not even list Tokyo's island.

Japan is a country with thousands of place names. Bureaucratic interest in their standardization began long before film director Clint Eastwood was old enough to wear rawhide chaps or see John Wayne hit the sands of Iwo To, where all those letters were written.

In 1938, worried about "fascism" in Japan, John Gunther wrote in "Inside Asia" that "-san" is an honorific in Japanese, meaning something between "honorable" and "mister"; it is added to both names and things. Japanese usually call their sacred mountain Fuji-san, not Fujiyama." What would he have said about "Iwoto" versus "Iwojima"?

william wetherall