Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso ... practicing ....

The prime minister of Japan, Taro Aso, has been coming under fire recently for his seeming inability to, well, read. He’s made so many mistakes reading speeches in his public appearances that columnists have started calling him “Manga Brain,” and at “a school in Aso’s hometown, Fukuoka, children who make reading mistakes are called ‘little Taros.'”

But the gaffes have had a surprising result: It seems, for one thing, Japanese isn’t so easy to read, consiisting of a “notoriously tricky mishmash of Chinese characters and its two sets of indigenous syllabaries” amounting to over 2,000 characters. What’s more, “Most characters have several different pronunciations depending on the context.”

And so, according to an AP wire story by Mari Yamaguchi, Aso’s blunders have inspired others to try and clean up their act: “Literacy-boosting books are selling briskly. One titled, Chinese Characters that Look Readable but are Easily Misread, released a year ago, has sold more than 800,000 copies — most of them since Aso’s mistakes first got national attention in November.

“We owe a lot to Prime Minister Aso,” says Yukiko Sakita, of Futami Shobo Publishing Co.. “Many people don’t want to make mistakes like his.”