Old Japanese koto covers both word and thing, event, fact, the Manyoshu uses the character for thing sixty-four times where word is meant. The compound kotodama, word plus spirit, appears in Hitomaro's and Okura's poems as a power to invoke: the land of Yamato, where the kotodama brings luck. The belief ran the culture's infrastructure: name taboos, since a name's spirit could be cursed, a woman revealing her name accepted marriage; norito, the Shinto ritual invocations where pronunciation and intonation matter as much as sense; kotoage senu kuni, the country that does not lift up words, praised as blessed.
Motoori Norinaga's eighteenth-century Kojiki project read as scholarship and worked as invocation: because there was no separation between the words and the things they named, reconstructing the ancient language would restore the ancient world, the Age of the Gods reachable through correct philology. Pollack's summary: to utter the word was to give rise to the reality itself. The concept later split into modern mysticism, kototama word-magic movements, and into the ideological mystification of the Japanese language itself.
The claim: kotodama is the purest form of the speech-power thesis because the language encodes it, word equals thing, so the belief is not superstition laid on Japanese but Japanese itself, and every culture that asks whether words create reality is asking whether it speaks a koto-language; the answer is always partly yes, and the partly is where the magic hides. Verdict: the linguistic identity is real, and its modern afterlife, from norito to manifestation videos, shows the thesis needs no quantum packaging to survive. The word and the thing keep finding each other. They were never properly introduced because they were never separate.
If words and things share one soul, is a dictionary a book of the dead or a book of the living?