Japanese Narratives Research Articles

Narrative identity in context: How adults in Japan, Denmark, Israel, and the United States narrate difficult life events.

Integrating the selective reconstruction of the past with an imagined future, narrative identity is a person's internalized and evolving story of the self, functioning to provide life with some degree of meaning and purpose (McAdams & McLean, 2013). While narrative identity has been found to be associated with a range of psychological and social phenomena (e.g., Adler et al., 2015; McAdams & Guo, 2015), cross-national variation in narrative identity has been only minimally examined. For the purposes of the current inquiry, 438 adults from the United States (N = 102), Japan (N = 122), Israel (N = 103), and Denmark (N = 111) wrote narratives on adversity (low point and life challenge) and completed self-report measures on psychological well-being. Part 1 examined the narrative topics discussed, the frequency of narrative indices (redemption, contamination, agency, communion, meaning-making), and their relationship to well-being across the four countries, finding the most cultural difference in levels of redemption and meaning-making and the kinds of events narrated. Part 2 involved a qualitative, thematic analysis of the Japanese, Danish, and Israeli narratives to derive a set of narrative indices characterizing each country. Several emerged in the Japanese narratives (acceptance, attribution of blame, unresolved), the Danish narratives (balanced affect, communal growth, normality), and Israeli narratives (collective responsibility). Taken together, our findings regarding narratives of adversity support the idea that narrative identity cannot be fully captured without an understanding of culture but needs to instead be studied in tandem with the cultural context in which stories reside. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Visits to the Palace of the Sea God in Ancient and Medieval Japan

Visits to the palace of the sea god are a recurring theme in premodern Japanese narratives, and comparing these stories across time periods reveals shifting perceptions of the supernatural world. The earliest sources for narratives of travel to the palace of the sea god in Japan date from the eighth century, most notably in the stories of Luck of the Mountain and Urashima Tarō. In these stories, the descriptions of the sea god’s palace, the relationship of the sea god to the natural world, and even the location of the palace were tied to eighth-century understandings of kingship, weather, and geography. Later adaptations of these stories incorporate features of Buddhist geography, Chinese architecture, Buddhist narrative motifs, and even an alternative vision of supernatural time. These alterations occurred because the eighth-century narratives required adaptation to fit a new political, social, and religious reality. This comparison demonstrates that our vision of the supernatural world is inextricably tied to our understanding of the natural. When our fundamental grasp of the nature of reality changes, our imagination of the supernatural transforms in turn.

Constructing a Sacred Site Overseas: The Japanese Reinvention of the Rujing Stūpa in Hangzhou

A sacred site that draws pilgrims from distant regions is a distinctive resource for studying religion. Research into a site’s relevance to pilgrims and how it came to be founded contributes to a better understanding of religious activity. To address these issues, a thorough historical analysis of a sacred site’s records is essential. Such an analysis endeavors to distinguish the historical facts of a sacred site from its narratives and further discusses the significance of each. With such intent, this study focuses on the Rujing Stupa, a sacred site of significant importance to transnational pilgrimages that has yet to receive sufficient scholarly attention. The stupa, which is located at the Jingci Monastery in Hangzhou, China, is believed to hold the relics of Tiantong Rujing 天童如浄 (1163–1228), a Song Dynasty monk. Although the modern stele inscription at this location indicates that the stupa was founded in the 13th century, shortly after the monk’s death, this paper examines the historical reinventions within the inscription and traces the influence of Japanese narratives on such a reinvention. This study demonstrates that the Rujing Stupa was established by, and for, the Japanese Sōtō Buddhists. The Chinese monk’s connection to the Sōtō pilgrims lies in Rujing’s role as the master who instructed Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253), the founder of the Sōtō tradition, making his stupa a sacred site for the Sōtō community. Concerns of commemoration and reifying doctrinal authenticity motivated two generations of Japanese pilgrims to construct the Rujing stupa in the late 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. On the other hand, Rujing’s significance and the presence of the Sōtō tradition were scarcely acknowledged in China until the early modern period. Only in the late 20th century did Chinese Buddhists begin to appreciate this stupa. Examining the site’s historical reinventions and identifying the factors that shape its narrative, this case study offers insights into the investigation of sacred sites and suggests a concern for narrative in the examination of a site’s history and significance.

Nuevas narrativas niponas y desarticulación de la hegemonía masculina

El manga se ha establecido como una de las industrias editoriales más rentables del mundo, convirtiéndose en un importante movimiento artístico del siglo XXI cuya influencia ha impregnado a otros medios como el cine, la música, los videojuegos y la moda. Este artículo trata de identificar la existencia de una semántica general en la narrativa del manga, así como su influencia industrial. Lo que nos lleva a vaticinar la desaparición de sus géneros comerciales debido a un proceso de hibridación que está ocurriendo en las producciones contemporáneas, implicando el desmantelamiento de la hegemonía masculina enraizada en él desde hace décadas.

From Acting Out Stories to Telling Stories: Elicitation of Oral Narrative Productions in the Japanese Language Classroom

Given the complexity and difficulty of discourse-level grammar acquisition, narrative construction can be a challenging task for many language learners as well as for language teachers to provide guidance in classroom. This paper provides a structure for narrative production practices that are based on assigned dialogues in classroom setting by following the Japanese narrative structure of kishōtenketsu 起承転結 (introduction, development, twist, and conclusion), and William Labov’s (1972) six components of a natural narrative model—Abstract Orientation, Complicating Action, Resolution, Evaluation, and Coda. Sample narrations in Japanese are provided to discuss a selected set of discourse-level features commonly used in each phase of narrative production. As pedagogical implications, this paper provides a step-by-step instruction on how to conduct narrative rehearsals in classroom by using a dialogue from the NihonGO NOW! series (Noda, et al. 2020). It also discusses ways to provide support and opportunities for language learners’ narrative skill development.

On The Idealized Image and Japanese Moral Narratives: A Case Study of an Artist of the Floating World

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro is set at the end of World War II. It reveals the psychological trauma caused by the war, the self-help method adopted by the characters to heal themselves, concerning “idealized images” and Japanese moral narratives, which are consistent with the narrative ways adopted by the contemporary Japanese government to deal with the negative effects of war. The novel creates a “positive image” by means of morality and memory interweaving, half true and half false, avoiding the serious and taking the light to demonstrate the “mainstream memory” which is more acceptable to himself and the public. In dealing with the moral conflicts of war trauma, the protagonist of An Artist of the Floating World creates idealized image through using Japanese moral narratives to shape and strengthen it.When his moral conflict, his idealized image, and his real self can not be reconciled, the house and pub provide him a stage to escape from reality, to hypnotize himself through his own achievement, to ignore his own impact on the war, to reshape his heroic image with Japanese heroic narrative. For the reader, through the repetition and emphasis of the prosperous and the modified description of the house and Kawakami’s Pub, Ono’s career and contribution are also enhanced, his own achievements are exaggerated, and militarism behaviors are blurred so as to make the effect of diverting the reader’s attention from Ono’s sins that urge war outbreak, add fuel to the destruction caused by the war which is highly s similar to the application of the Yasukuni Shrine in current Japanese political strategy. On the basis of examining the contents mentioned above, which reflect the nation’s way of coping with the war trauma from the perspective of individuals, this study attempts to help people better understand the continuity and complexity of the negative effects of war. Meanwhile, it hopes that the Japanese government can transmit the negative information of war more objectively so as to have a clearer and more reasonable identity.

Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest by Kyokutei Bakin

Reviewed by: Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest by Kyokutei Bakin William C. Hedberg Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest. By Kyokutei Bakin. Translated by Glynne Walley. Cornell University Press, 2021. 348 pages. ISBN: 9781501755170 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). Pity the scholar of early modern Japanese narrative with proselytizing ambitions. While our colleagues researching Renaissance England or Golden Age Spain can be reasonably confident that a mixed audience at a Modern Language Association convention is at least passingly familiar with the historical context and plotline of, say, Macbeth or Don Quixote, those in our field are afforded no such luxury. When presenting our research to nonspecialists at conferences, we reluctantly become participants in Monty Python's All-England Summarize Proust Competition, racing our way through tedious but necessary summary in the hope of securing a few short minutes for explication and analysis before we end. Even among peers, the twists and turns, concealed identities, and multigenerational vendettas central to genres such as yomihon, jōruri, and kabuki defy easy summary and require valuable space in our conference talks and publications to adequately contextualize. Confronted with the relentless avalanche of names, titles, battles, and historical allusions found in a baggy monster like Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden, one is initially [End Page 344] tempted to sympathize with the novelist Martin Amis, who in describing Quixote wrote, "The question 'What happens next?' has no meaning, because there is no next … there is only more."1 Or is there? Among scholars of Edo-period literature, one of the most welcome critical interventions of the past thirty years has been the insistent and long-overdue argument that the texts we study are undergirded by a rigorous system of narrative logic that is readily discernible to any reader willing to pay attention to the author's (often heavy-handed) hints about how to read the work. Seminal scholarship by, most recently, Peter Kornicki, Jonathan Zwicker, Satoko Shimazaki, Patrick Caddeau, and Rebekah Clements has directed our attention away from the narrative proper and toward the prefaces, interlineal commentary, illustrations, maps, charts, lists of characters, commemorative poems, postfaces, and advertisements that explained how texts like Hakkenden were meant to be interpreted and that were, for early modern readers, inseparable from the narrative itself. Most of these paratextual features were excised in modern typeset editions of the works, and despite our frequent reliance upon these modern editions, it is a useful exercise to think of them as butterfly specimens that have been pithed and mounted in a display case: readily visible and easily legible, but wholly shorn of the life, movement, and context that gave them meaning as social beings. It is to Glynne Walley's immense credit that he brings the materiality of early modern Japanese fiction to the forefront of his translation of Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi of Southern Fusa; 1814–1842) and, in so doing, gives us a keen sense of the paratextual density and cosmopolitan dimensions of this text. Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest contains the inaugural volume (shū) of Hakkenden and four chapters of the second volume, sensibly concluding at a natural break in the narrative with the canine Yatsufusa's immaculate impregnation of Satomi Yoshizane's daughter, Fusehime; the release of the embryonic spirits of the eponymous dog-knights; and the beginning of the warrior-monk Chudai's quest to locate and gather the warriors. As Bakin himself reminds the reader in a postface to the final chapter included in the translation, "everything from the 1st Book of the Inaugural Volume through to the end of the present Book constitutes but the opening stage of the whole" (p. 292), and as Walley notes in the translator's introduction, An Ill-Considered Jest comprises less than one-tenth of the complete Hakkenden. Before discussing the translation itself, I must give due praise to its translator for his Yoshizane-esque ambitions in embarking on such a venture, and to Cornell University Press for supporting an epic project and ensuring that the job is done well. An Ill-Considered...

Tense Alternation in Japanese Literature: Translating Free Indirect Discourse and Focalization in Kashimada Maki’s Meido meguri

This paper examines the phenomenon of tense alternation in Japanese literary narrative, making specific reference to Kashimada Maki’s (鹿島田 真希) novella Meido meguri (冥途めぐり Touring the Land of the Dead, 2012) as a case study. It argues that tense alternation in sentence‑final predicative verbs should be regarded a stylistic technique that serves as an indicator of free indirect discourse and of focalization through a central character, and that it moreover establishes an opposition between external narration and internal focalization. It then illustrates how this dynamic is employed in Meido Meguri to create a contrast between a mode suggesting narrative distance and another suggesting mental interiority. This paper thus highlights a significant linguistic difference in the construction of free indirect discourse in Japanese and English narratives.

Teaching how to love your country in schools?: a study of Japanese youth narratives on patriotic education

ABSTRACT In 2018, the Japanese government introduced a controversial education policy, which made moral education (dōtoku) a formal (as opposed to supplementary) subject in elementary schools, and the new scheme intends to teach, foster, and grade patriotic feelings among school children. By referring to semi-autobiographical narratives of 80 Japanese college students, this exploratory study delves into the question of how the Japanese college youth perceive the efficacy of patriotic education. Do we need to teach school children how to love Japan? If so, how? If not, why? This study suggests that the youth narratives do not necessarily align with this shift.

Japan’s narrative on human security: international norms, diplomatic identity and recognition

Human security is presented in the United Nations Development Programme’s 1994 Human Development Report as a new security concept, different from more conventional ones focusing on the security of the state, and instead focusing on the security of the individual, of humans. At the turn of the century and for about a decade, academic literature has regularly described Japan as promoting human security in different ways. However, little has been published on this during the last decade. The aim of this article is two-fold. First, it takes a long-term perspective to trace the evolution of this concept in Japanese diplomacy over the last three decades, in order to assess its significance over time and as of today. Second, it takes a close look at the actual Japanese narrative in order to understand how this concept can be beneficial for Japan’s diplomacy. This article argues that, first, human security has been and still is a central concept in Japan’s diplomatic discourse and, second, Japan’s promotion of human security leads to a positive Japanese diplomatic identity and an increased self-confidence, which Japan wants because of its desire of recognition. This claim is demonstrated by a quantitative and qualitative analysis of central texts of Japanese diplomacy, narrating human security, over the last three decades. For Japan, emphasizing its own efforts and complying with the international norm of human security has a positive effect on its international identity and recognition.

Disaster Narratives by Design: Is Japan Different?

Disaster movies remain a relatively under-studied “genre” of narrative, particularly in relation to which conventions are used within such narratives. One of the key works is by Yacowar (2012) and not only categorized disaster narratives into eight types, but also highlighted 16 conventions that exist in these movies. However, that study was done in 1976. Furthermore, Yacowar's study was primarily on English-language narratives. Just as Mileti (1999) has suggested that disasters are “designed” by a range of cultural and social influences, are disaster narratives similarly constructed through inherent cultural and social influences? This article not only looks at the conventions in 38 disaster narratives covering the 40-year period from 1978 to 2018, but it also analyzes 22 Japanese-language narratives in order to assess the degree to which conventions may be universal. Japanese disaster narratives were chosen due to Japan being linguistically and culturally different from the countries where English-language narratives were made, and that Japan has a developed film industry and one that has produced many disaster movies over the years. The article finds that many of the conventions suggested by Yacowar no longer apply, but that there are 17 conventions that can be placed into one of three groups; those found in English and Japanese narratives, those found only in the former and those found in the latter. That there are three separate groups reveals that there are clear differences between what constitutes a disaster narrative in different areas. These differences, ultimately, are likely to not only influence the degree to which a narrative will be successful in its own country, but also the degree to which it could be exported to other countries.

Ambivalent encounters: colonial memory in the literature of two Japanese returnees from Korea

Hikiagesha, or returnees from Japanese overseas colonial territories, occupy an ambivalent position within Japanese narratives on imperialism. Deprived of their perceived home in the colonies, they became a domestic Other situated in the margins of history as post-war Japanese society distanced itself from its past adventures in Empire-building. Some hikiagesha, however, became cultural producers and openly challenged post-war amnesic forgetting of the workings of Japanese imperialism. This article analyses two pieces of short fiction written in the 1950s and 1960s by returnees who were born in Korea during the colonial period (1910–1945) – Kajiyama Toshiyuki’s The Remembered Shadow of the Yi-Dynasty (Richō zan’ei, 1963) and Kobayashi Masaru’s Ford 1927 (Fōdo senkyūhyakunijūnana-nen, 1956). I discuss how the texts negotiate the memory of Japanese colonialism in Korea and argue that the hikiagesha share a deep-seated ambivalence towards both Japan’s role as an imperial power and Korea as the place of their childhood. While generally critical of Japanese imperialism, their narratives are caught between conflicting post-war discourses concerning the memory of the colonial period.

To Link or Not to Link: Clause Chaining in Japanese Narratives.

Japanese is a clause chaining language, in which a sentence is formed by linking two or more clauses in a series (chain), using different forms of the verb in “non-final” clauses within the chain from the “final” clauses that end the chain. Since the verb comes at the end of a clause in Japanese, speakers must decide by the time they reach the verb at end of one clause whether or not to connect it to the following clause. This study analyzes the narratives of Japanese children and adults with the dual goal of discovering why narrators decide either to link the clause they are producing to the following clause or not to link, i.e., to end the clause chain. Stories were elicited from 60 3- to 7-year-old children and 10 adults, who performed two tasks: (1) telling the story depicted in a hand-drawn cartoon, and (2) viewing a 7-min video and then recounting the plot from memory. The data were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The qualitative analysis examines story length and prompting, length of clause chains, variety of linking connectives, semantic relations—such as simultaneity, temporal sequence, and causality—between clauses in chains, shifts of subject from one story character to another (switch-reference), and contexts in stories where narrators end clause chains. For the quantitative analysis, a multifactorial, mixed-effects model was fit to determine which of several potential predictors have a significant effect on the probability that narrators will link clauses. The model is significant, though weak in discriminatory power. Among the significant effects, simultaneous relations between events increase the probability that narrators will link clauses, while changing the subject referent and reaching the end of a narrative unit, e.g., an episode, increase the probability that narrators will end their clause chain. There are no significant age effects: the children respond in the same way to the predictors as the adults. The qualitative and quantitative results of the study are interpreted with respect to the close relation between grammar (clause chains) and discourse (narrative structure) as well as the cognitive process of producing clause chains during narration.

Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras by Nobuko Toyosawa

Reviewed by: Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras by Nobuko Toyosawa Rex J. Rowley Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras. Nobuko Toyosawa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. Pp. xiii+305, illustrations, color maps, notes, index. $60.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-674-24112-1. In recent decades historical and historical geography scholarship about Japan has oft en focused on Japanese identity and Japanese essence. Of particular interest to geographers are those studies that ask, What is Japan? How have actual and perceived borders evolved over time? How have various internal perceptions in the context of shift ing national power structures affected Japanese identity? And how have international geopolitical relationships further altered an understanding of Japaneseness? Nobuko Toyosawa addresses such questions in her book Imaginative Mapping: Landscape and Japanese Identity in the Tokugawa and Meiji Eras. Toyosawa analyzes the influential works of several early-modern and modern Japanese scholar-writers that exemplify how the natural landscape has long been a source of power and as a defining core of Japanese identity. Whereas Toyosawa's approach is that of a historian, her multidisciplinary study on landscape's influence dips its toes variously in history, philosophy, religious studies, and geography. Toyosawa makes two critical contributions in Imaginative Mapping. First, she expressly points to the power that landscape has in creating a national narrative. Toyosawa analyzes changes in that narrative over time as seen through a series of local mapping projects, regional topographic surveys, and travel guidebooks conducted by various Japanese scholars across a swath of Japanese history stretching from the 1600s to the earlier days of Japanese imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time of their publication, she argues, these works—each with legacy ties to similar topographic surveys (called fudoki) done centuries earlier—provided an important and familiar touch point connecting the Japanese people to the landscape, which their writers used to promote ideals that influenced the construction of Japanese identity. Toyosawa shows how local topographies of the 1600s and travel guidebooks widely published in the early 1700s were leveraged by Tokugawa scholars, who invoked and altered neo-Confucianist ideas from China, to promote Japan as shinkoku, a "land [that] had inscriptions of various divine traces" (63). Then she argues how the idea of shinkoku shift ed with the adoption of Western philosophies and [End Page 186] physical geography scientific approaches in the 1800s. Shunning longstanding Chinese influence, late Tokugawa and early Meiji scholars shift ed inward, but they invoked Western ideas such as natural selection as they resurrected origin stories of the Japanese nation (including a strong connection between Heaven and Earth with Japan at its center) to strengthen Japanese identity and promote feelings of nativism. This, of course, paralleled Japan's rising political influence and dominance within the Asian sphere leading, eventually, to the events of World War II. In short, Toyosawa describes how shift ing senses of space, place, and landscape are perceived and then mobilized to create a narrative that has yielded a sense of national community and, eventually, nationalistic power amid changing geopolitics (what Toyosawa calls the "spatializing" of Japan relative to its neighbors). Toyosawa's second key contribution to historical scholarship is in identifying how an ostensibly unique Japanese narrative is dependent on that country's relationship to external geopolitics and philosophies. Toyosawa draws a strong thought line from the spiritual leanings of earlier narratives of Japanese nature as the home of divinities as influenced by Chinese philosophy, to Japanese physical geographies of the Meiji era wherein rational scientific perspectives imported from the West drove descriptions of the expanding Japanese homeland as special, beautiful, and sublime. In doing so Toyosawa argues that Japanese identity, while centered in the space of the Japanese homeland, exists in the context of the ever-present Other. In her words, "the spatialization of Japan was promoted and mediated by the Other, even though the representations of Japan imply its exclusively Japanese space" (7). Imaginative Mapping readers will also gain other important insights into Japanese identity. Readers will recognize the historical roots of sociocultural phenomena still at work today within Japanese society, including...

Semiotic Study of Japanese Views on Sea in Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea

This paper is a semiotic study of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. The purpose of thi s study is t o reveal the Japanese views on sea in the anime. This anime was selected because it is considered to represents the modern Japanese narrative related to the sea, and regarding that anime as a popular literary work is generally more acceptable at various age levels of audience than classical literary works. The results of semiotic reading on this anime are five Japanese views on sea, which are 1) sea as a source of life; 2) sea as a source of prosperity; 3) sea as a source of strength or energy; 4) sea as a source of beliefs; and 5) sea as a source of beauty.

HYBRIDITY IN POPULAR CULTURE: A TRANSNATIONAL ANALYSIS OF AMERICAN ADAPTATIONS OF JAPANESE MOVIES IN 21st CENTURY

American popular culture has developed from time to time in producing the products. In the progress, the popular product has been modified to satisfy the taste of the consumer and Hollywood is being the one of popular product maker which applied modifications in manufacturing movies; and the result of the development is hybridity seen in Hollywood movies.The journal is written under American Studies discipline, by applying transnational analysis as the basis of the study. Furthermore, the research also used the theory of hybridity in constructing the analysis which concerned about American adaptations of Japanese original movies, namely The Grudge, Hachi: A Dog’s Tale, and Godzilla. The method used in the journal is the qualitative research which comprises the library research by analyzing the three movies as the primary data and the information of the production as the secondary data.There are some conclusions met in the analysis. Being the first one is the three movies definitely adopt American and Japanese narratives and build a new sphere where the two nations living under the same frame. The adoption includes adoption of values, language, and iconic figure in Japan. Then, the second discussion which intended to see the changing of values and taste in Hollywood has resulted some conclusions that the Hollywood has power in shifting the values of the original movies which defined as eastern values to be the ones which related to American values and the three American adaptations in the journal trigger the emergence of American movies with Asian narratives. Keywords: Hybridity, transnational, Hollywood, movies, popular culture, adaptation

Perfumed Sleeves and Tangled Hair: Body, Woman, and Desire in Medieval Japanese Narratives

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‘Folds of the heart’: performing life experience, emotion and empathy in Japanese tango music culture

ABSTRACTIn the Argentine tango music culture of Japan, to have undergone many life experiences is considered critical in order to perform the powerful emotions of tango. Narratives by Japanese tango musicians stress ‘each musician’s feelings’ as crucial in shaping a good tango performance, while empathy is considered important in cultivating such feelings. Based on the author’s field research in Japan and Argentina, and by adding a different nuance to Carolyn Pedwell’s notions of transnational ‘affective relations’, this essay examines how Japanese historical narratives, rooted in aesthetic and moral ethos, fabricate discourses of tango authenticity by Japanese musicians. Taking a closer look at the ways in which Japanese musicians discuss tango’s emotion illuminates how Argentine tango’s aesthetics of emotion are given renewed meanings through the channelling of cultural and historical symbols in Japanese contexts. This article argues that Japanese tango musicians create their discourses surrounding tango authenticity at such transnational instances when aesthetics, affect and morality intersect.

Return to Geopolitics: The Changes in Japanese Strategic Narratives

Return to Geopolitics: The Changes in Japanese Strategic Narratives

Idea density in Japanese for the early detection of dementia based on narrative speech.

BackgroundIdea density (ID), a natural language processing–based index, was developed to aid in the detection of dementia through the analysis of English narratives. However, it has not been applied to non-English languages due to the difficulties in translating grammatical concepts. In this study, we defined rules to count ideas in Japanese narratives based on a previous study and proposed a novel method to estimate ID in Japanese text using machine translation.MaterialsThe study participants comprised 42 Japanese patients with dementia aged 69–98 years (mean: 84.95 years). We collected free narratives from the participants to build a speech corpus. The narratives of the patients were translated into English using three machine translation systems: Google Translate, Bing Translator, and Excite Translator. The ID in the translated text was then calculated using the Dependency-based Propositional ID (DEPID), an English ID scoring tool.ResultsThe maximum correlation coefficient between ID calculated using DEPID-R-ADD (a modified DEPID method to calculate ID after removing vague sentences) and the Mini-Mental State Examination score was 0.473, indicating a moderate correlation.DiscussionThe results demonstrate the feasibility of machine translation-based ID measurement. We believe that the basic concept of this translation approach can be applied to other non-English languages.