I was amused and pleased by Shinichi Terada's Oct. 2 article, "Kanji, kana trip search engines." I called attention to similar problems in my 1987 book "The Fifth Generation Fallacy" (Oxford University Press) and more recently in "Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning" (University of Hawai'i Press, 2004). A Japanese version of "Fallacy" ("Konpyuta shakai to kanji") was published in 1992.
For a small fraction of the billions of yen the government plans to spend developing mind-reading search-engine software, it could achieve better results simply by encouraging more Web-page creators to use Romanized Japanese, in free combination with traditional script, in online documents.
Since most computer users input Romanized Japanese anyway, inserting keywords, headings, or chunks of text in romaji would be no big deal. Unfortunately, the government currently makes little effort to teach romaji, enforce standards or promote its intelligent use in new media.
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