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方言札, and the century of telling children to stop
Lesson 55 said that 共通語 was assembled and pushed. This is what the pushing looked like. From the late nineteenth century a child who spoke dialect at school in Okinawa, Tohoku or Kyushu could be made to wear a 方言札 — a wooden placard on a string — until they caught another child doing the same and could pass it on. The practice was deliberate language policy, it worked, and it lasted in places into the 1960s, which means people who wore one are alive. The reversal has been equally deliberate: dialects are now taught in schools as heritage, 博多弁 sells merchandise, and prefectures run campaigns to record the speech of their oldest residents. What cannot be reversed is that the generation who were punished for it often did not pass it on.