Actually, he's right. The distinction you bring up here, effected 75 years ago, has been settled. Modern Japanese comes in one form. While I can't deny there are various dialects and topolects of Japanese, there is but one standard of official Japanese. That's not the case with Chinese.

An interesting parallel of sorts does exist, though. Political rulers in both countries used a linguistic construct, or an imposed prescriptive standard both to forge a shared identity and to facilitate communication between and over the their subjects. In Japan it's a fait accompli, and one that stayed within the country. For China and the Chinese diaspora, Zhongnanhai is still waging its battle.

View original postYes China went even further in its simplified Hanzi(Han characters, Japan calls their Kanji) but that is not neither here nor there for being rude correcting somebody and say do not speak of something you do not know, and then making a similar error is kind of hubristic.