カタカナAnalysis!

カタカナはとてもおもしろいですね？！

My first example of Katakana came from watching a music video by Ayumi Hamasaki on YouTube. I realized that the word for "music video" was actually just ミュージックビデオ, rather than coming up with their own word. Then I thought of other technological words that we know which come from English, like テレビ and コンピュータ. However, there are also other technological words which have a Kanji or a Hiragana and thus seem more "native" Japanese. For example, 電話　（でんわ）and 電車　（でんしゃ）both have Kanji/Hiragana names, even though these technologies clearly came from the West. I believe that this discrepancy is due to the history of modern Japan and its relations to the outside world. In the late nineteenth century with the Meiji Restoration and beginnings of industrialization, Japan was ultra-nationalistic and therefore probably "naturalized" these words using concepts related to them. Therefore "electric talk" became the word for telephone, 電話。Trains, telephones, cars, and airplanes, all of which were present in Late Imperial Japan, all have Japanese names. After World War II, I think that the Japanese became more Americanized and more prone to adapt foreign (mostly English) words into their own language. Technologies which came out after WWII and the American occupation all seem to come from English, hence we have ミュージックビデオ、テレビ、とコンピュータ。