Gender, Language, and Modernity: Toward an Effective History of Japanese Women's Language

Gender, language and ideology: A genealogy of Japanese women's language Momoko Nakamura (2014) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp. xv + 253. ISBN 978-90-272-0649-7 (hbk)Women's language is a highly salient category in Japan, which most large Japanese language dictionaries define as the style of speech spoken by women since ancient times. For a long time, it has been assumed that this 'speech peculiar to women' is naturally derived from nyooboo kotoba (court-women's speech), the speech created by women in the imperial palace since the fourteenth century, and also from yuujogo (play-women's speech), the speech used by women in the licensed quarters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Japanese society, there is a widespread notion that women have always spoken differently from men, and that these differences are the result of their feminine nature.In this book, Momoko Nakamura emphasizes the heterogeneity of women's linguistic practices in Japan and defends the notion of women's language as an ideological construction, closely linked to historical, political and economic processes. In opposition to the common assumption of women's language as women's actual speech and as a reflection of 'innate femininity', she provides a historical-discourse analysis of written documents, such as conduct books, school textbooks, dictionaries, grammar books and commentaries by intellectuals, in which women's language is prescribed, marginalized and conceptualized in different ways, depending on the historic and political context. This genealogy of women's language in Japan is of great interest for both researchers on Japanese language and language and gender, as it illuminates the importance of history, discourse and ideology in order to deconstruct and denaturalize the relationships between gender and any language. To this end, the author discusses the implications of the analysis in each chapter from this general perspective. The book comprises ten chapters that are organized into four parts, chronologically ordered, from the premodern period of the thirteenth century to the immediate post-WWII (1945-1952).Part 1 addresses how norms of feminine speech are constructed in the discourses of conduct books (etiquette manuals) from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Strongly influenced by the androcentric view of Confucianism dominant in this age, these conduct books establish appropriate ways of speaking for women, thus treating women's speech as an object of regulation, control and normalization. Chapter 1 shows that these normative discourses include not displaying intelligence and not using Chinese words, but are specially focused on limiting women's right to speak, regarding their talk as a dangerous act that can bring trouble to families. It is worth mentioning that these historical discourses on silence or 'not speaking too much' as an ideal for women, and on women's talk as malicious gossip, have also been documented by studies with reference to Spanish (Lozano Domingo, 1995; Acuna Ferreira, 2015) and to many other languages (Spender, 1980; Romaine, 1999).Chapter 2 focuses on the establishment of court-women's speech as another norm of feminine speech in a large number of conduct books which appeared from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Court-women's speech was created by women serving in the imperial palace since the fourteenth century and it consisted of creative word formation to refer to domestic items such as food, kitchen utensils and clothes. Nakamura analyses funny stories and dramatic comic novels in which court-women's speech is represented as a symbol of being upper-class, a way of speaking that servant women refused but probably needed to attain employment at samurai mansions, and even as a style of speech that was also used by men, though this was later prohibited. Conduct books in this period, however, redefined court-women's speech as a norm of feminine speech, as a list of words that all women should use. …

Speech without a speaking body: “Japanese women's language” in translation

Miyako Inoue, Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, April, 2006, 340 pp. More than a mere debunking of cultural assumptions about Japan, gender, and modernity, Vicarious Language is a scrupulous study of how these assumptions penetrate contemporary social life in Japan and beyond as a productive site of subject formation. Inoue's historical-cumethnographic investigation searches for semiotic foundation of of Japanese women's language, a socially powerful truth (1). Why does this appear transparent to social actors who invest it with cultural values? Her aim is to render this transparency visible. Or rather audible. Inoue starts her discussion by arguing that the modern Japanese woman came into being as a culturally meaningful category in and through her imputed presence (39). This is an intriguing move. While existing on modern sociocultural forms tend to privilege visuality-gaze, spectacle, history, etc., lnoue here opens up a critical perspective for study of modern that gives silence, loquacity, overhearing, echoing, and other semiotic qualities of acoustic presence due analytic attention (41). Reverberating in and out of this book, then, are overtones, to use one of Bakhtin's metaphors for language in society, that constitute this language. It is clear that this book avoids simply repeating a modern liberatory desire of revealing hidden histories of underrepresented. The overtones are all too present rather than hidden, working their way into habitus of a listener, even when she doesn't hear them. Inoue's task is thus to ethnographically locate women's language with respect to historical sedimentation of these overtones immersed in cultural consciousness and to undo discourse of women's language to articulate moments of its failure. Two vectors of demonstration may be identified here: how women's language as a new register, a new norm of language-in-society and a new way of regimenting social life, can be generated at various historical conjunctures in Japan's and capitalist modernity; and how such a semiotic creature comes to mobilize sign users toward varying interests in its subsequent sociopolitical life. Inoue's retelling (and undoing) of this story of enregisterment introduces a complexity that has been taken for granted in previous research, a complexity that it has been necessary for any research to leave unexamined in order to maintain its episteme. She discovers that story hardly represents a coherent project, that it is filled with unintended consequences and misrecognized objects. We learn that it was urban male intellectuals in Meiji era whose serendipitous act of overhearing created category of schoolgirl sampled (so to speak) from soundscape of Meiji city (Ch. 1). But no Meiji writer was fully aware that schoolgirls' vulgar speech, associated with this new type of social beings at that particular historical moment, would transform into quintessential Japanese female voice transcending all historical moments. Neither was there any one type of agency or institution that anticipated that women's this imperfect echoing of a modern, national language (Ch. 2), would survive into late twentieth century as an object of very public discussion in context of Equal Employment Opportunity legislature. And linguists, pollsters, and journalists today are not necessarily, or not always, aware of historical condition of fetishization of gender and speech, even while they help reproduce this condition each and every time they try to discern formal and functional features of women's language (Ch. 4). If, however, state, market, or elite could never primarily but only vicariously be liable for maturing of women's language into ethos of modern Japanese femaleness, then what allowed for such misrecognition that is nevertheless effective in keeping discourse of women's language intact? …

From approximately 1887 through World War 1, a surge of commentaries were written and circulated in the Japanese print media about the strange and unpleasant (mimizawarina) sounds issuing from the mouths of schoolgirls. Male intellectuals of various affiliations located the source of their dismay in verbending forms such as texo, noxo, dawa that occurred at the end of utterances. They called such forms schoolgirl speech (jogakuseikotoba). It was jarring to their ears; it sounded vulgar and low class; its prosodic features were described as fast, contracting, and bouncing with a rising intonation: and it was condemned as sugary and shallow. Using the newly available modern textual space of reported speech (Voloshinov 1973), male intellectuals cited what they scornfully referred to as teyo-dawa speech (texoduwii kotoba) in an effort to convince parents and educators to discourage it as a corrupt form of speaking. The irony here is that main of the forms then identified as are today associated with s language, or the feminine style, indexing the figure of the generic urban middle-class woman. The contemporary discourse of Japanese women's language erases this historical emergence from social memory to construct women's language as an essential and timeless part of culture and tradition. Public opinion, responding to a perceived social change toward gender equit recurrently deplores what once again is described as linguistic corruption and the cultural loss of an authentic women's language. As a demographic category. the term referred to girls and young women of the elite classes who attended the women's secondary schools that had been instituted as part of the early Meiji modernization project inspired by Western liberal Enlightenment thought. By the late 19th century, women's secondary education had been incorporated into the state s mandatory education system, and schoolgirls became the immediate and direct target of the state s constitution of the (gendered) national subject b> educating them

List of Illustrations and Tables Acknowledgments Note on Names and the Romanization of Introduction: Women's and Capitalist Modernity in Japan part one: language, gender, and national modernity: the genealogy of japanese women's language, 1880s--1930s 1. An Echo of National Modernity: Overhearing 2. Linguistic Modernity and the Emergence of Women's 3. From Schoolgirl Speech to Women's Language: Consuming Indexicality in Women's Magazines, 1890--1930 part two: the nation's temporality and the death of women's language 4. Capitalist Modernity, the Responsibilized Speaking Body, and the Public Mourning of the Death of Women's part three: re-citing women's language in late modern japan Introduction 5. Just Stay in the Middle: The Story of a Woman Manager 6. Defamiliarizing Women's Language: Strategies and Tactics of Female Office Workers Afterword: This Vicarious Japanese Women's Language Bibliography Index

Abstract. This study aims to investigate and define Japanese women's language politeness in communication interviews. This study is descriptive, using a content analysis approach. This study collected Japanese women's words, phrases, and clauses from YouTube videos and used free-conversation listening and note-taking techniques to acquire data. The results showed three main types of Japanese woman’s polite language in communication interviews: teineigo, kenjougo, and sonkeigo. Sonkeigo is used when the speaker wishes to show respect for the other person and the person being discussed. In contrast, the phrase kenjyogo puts the speaker on a lesser level with the recipient. Teineigo is best described as a form of polite or formal speech. It is found that keigo is a method of Japanese women to express their politeness, etiquette and also emotional in the same time This finding also contributes to a greater understanding of social position and social status in Japanese society, as well as how Japanese women communicate to maintain their image in the eyes of others Keywords: Japanese Woman, Politeness Language, Communication Interview, Sociolinguistic

Miyako Inoue, Vicarious language. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 323. Pb $24.95. Japanese Women's Language (JWL) is not a new topic of research in the social sciences, but Miyako Inoue's Vicarious language is an original contribution to the field. According to Inoue, women's language references linguistic forms distinguishing the speech of women and brings with it certain connotations of “femininity” such as politeness or nonassertiveness. In line with other current research, Inoue asserts that JWL is not part of the linguistic repertoires of many women.

norms of behavior have traditionally been highly gendered. The Japanese has also been characterized as having distinct female and male speech registers or languages, and the gender differences are usually deemed more extensive and more rigid than those in English and other European languages. Descriptions of female and male speech differences are abundant in the literature (e.g., Ide 1979, 1982, 1990; Jugaku 1979; Kindaichi 1957; Mizutani &. Mizutani 1987; Ohara 1992; Reynolds 1985; Shibamoto 1985, 1990; Smith 1992a, b); the most frequently cited differences include women's and men's divergent uses of self-reference and address terminology, sentence-final particles, honorifics, pitch ranges, and intonation.1 Compared to Japanese men's language (otoko-kotoba or dansei-go), Japanese women's language (onna-kotoba or iosei-go) has been described as polite, gentle, soft-spoken, nonassertive, and empathetic (e.g., Ide 1979, 1982, 1990; Jugaku 1979; Mizutani &. Mizutani 1987; Reynolds 1990; Shibamoto 1985; Smith 1992a, b). These characteristics are often interpreted as reflecting women's lower social status or powerlessness (e.g., Ide 1982; Reynolds 1985; Smith 1992a, b).

Japanese sociolinguistics politeness and women's language

This chapter explores the particular politics of gender found in the context of English translations of Japanese literature. It presents an overview of the translation of modern Japanese fiction, focusing specifically on gender. The chapter examines how women's works are translated and positioned, and addresses the related issue of how translation has been involved in the reproduction of representations of Japanese women. It examines the intersections of gender and translation by mainly focusing on onna kotoba, Japanese women's language. Translations of works by Japanese women authors have surely increased in quantity, but one cannot automatically assume that women's voices are better heard and represented than before. The chapter prompts a reassessment of Japanese exceptionalism and the exoticization of the Japanese language. The specific word choices of a translator are indications of how translation calls forth linguistic resources to reinforce or unsettle ideologies embedded in language.

Objective: To characterize the prevalence of vasomotor symptoms affecting menopausal women in Japan, the relationship between vasomotor symptoms and menopause status as defined by menstrual patterns versus self-assigned konenki (climacteric) status, and the salience and specificity of hot flash terminology. Design: Participants were healthy Japanese women, aged 45 to 55 years, living in Kyoto and Fukushima prefectures, divided into menopause groups based on menstrual patterns and self-assigned konenki groups. Women recalled 82 general health symptoms during the previous 2 weeks, and provided detailed descriptions of hot flash symptom terms. Results: Hot flash prevalence ranged from 3.0% (hotto furasshu) to 17.1% (hoteri) depending on the individual term used, and was 22.1% when all hot flash terms were combined. Prevalence of vasomotor symptoms was 25.7%, but peaked at 52.6% among late perimenopausal women. Hot flash prevalence was 13.2% among premenopausal women, but zero among self-assigned pre-konenki women. The three major hot flash terms (kaa, nobose, and hoteri) vary in their physical location, characteristics, and cultural salience. Conclusions: Vasomotor symptom prevalence rates in Japan have increased over the past 20 years but are still lower than in most Western populations, and vary according to hot flash term, and between menopause and self-assigned konenki status. Konenki status appears to be a better predictor of hot flashes than menopause status. Japanese women's language, including self-assessed konenki stage and hot flash terminology, seems to be more fine-grained than Western biomedical terms of menopause status and hot flash, and may offer insight into subtle differences in experiences and underlying physiology of menopause.

Momoko Nakamura, Gender, language and ideology: A genealogy of Japanese women's language. (Discourse approaches to politics, society and culture 58.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014. Pp. 253. Hb. €99.

Negotiation of speech style in Japanese women's language: vantage theory as cognitive sociolinguistics

Aspects of Japanese women's language: Sachiko Ide and Naomi Hanaoka McGloin, eds., Tokyo: Kurosio publishers, 1990

The first description of Japanese women's language in English, utilizing generative-transformational methods to scientifically demonstrate the discriminatory nature of the gender dichotomy of the linguistic resource in Japanese.