Volume 2023, Issue 284 - Special Issue: Ideologies of contact and space in Japan; Issue Editor: Ayumi Miyazaki

Scholars of language and culture have effectively used the language ideology concept to critique the referentialist assumption in the post-Enlightenment conceptualization of language and society. Continuing with this critical project, this article attempts a further reorientation of our analytic metalanguage to explore the ideology of the phatic, the way in which salient emphasis is placed on problems regarding communicative channels of contact. The article identifies this ideology in the increasingly visible role played by phatic labor and its concrete manifestations in scenes of service and affective labor in contemporary Japan. Two separate instances are analyzed to reveal their common engagement with channels of contact as a metapragmatic concern. First, I analyze one Japanese restaurant chain’s attempt to design and control the material zone of contact in dining experience, as indicative of the larger tendency in the contemporary economy to standardize consumer desire at the level of the phatic. Second, I look to the culture of celebrity, especially popular idols, and examine the institutionalization of fan-idol contact that has become a hegemonic marketing strategy. These cases witness rituals of public encounter that either work to hybridize human speech acts with nonhuman speech-actants inhabiting the material environment of contact, or to regulate forms of interaction deemed detrimental to the channel of affect through monitoring, interruption, and other forms of phatic policing. I use this analysis to draw attention to the necessity of taking the phatic function seriously in the scholarly exploration of language ideology. While scholars in various fields have frequently spoken of the centrality of communicative labor in postindustrial societies, the analytic focus on ideologization of the phatic offers a more precise theoretical and empirical framework for examining how communication is fetishized as the central site of political and economic intervention.

During/after disasters, language communication (or the lack thereof) can be a matter of life or death, particularly for “Indigenous/Tribal, Minority and Minoritized languages and peoples” (ITMs). Disaster and language studies have identified language barriers as critical because some ITMs do not understand basic risk communication, evacuation warnings, and recovery information. There are three major approaches to lowering these barriers in disaster contexts: (1) disseminating warnings and critical information in multilingual formats; (2) using bi/multilingual translators/interpreters and automated translator; and (3) using simplified language(s). However, this top–down approach is insufficient because ITMs need more than just selective information to cope with adversities. The basic communication rights to know, “talk about it,” and express one’s feelings after a traumatic event should not be a taken-for-granted privilege for speakers of the majority languages. The root causes of disaster linguicism, which focuses on the unique social vulnerabilities confronted by ITMs, have not been properly addressed. Drawing from our qualitative research, this article explores the role of Japanese language ideology in relation to the experiences of ITMs in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.

Nanchatte is a Japanese gag expression, whose literal English translation could be “I have just completed the saying of something like what I have just said.” Its meaning partially overlaps with English expressions such as “Just kidding,” or “I am just saying.” Its felicitous execution is often intended to “crack up” listeners, to take the edge off an impression of formality, arrogance, aggression, austerity, or bluntness, to break the ice, mitigate face-threat or potential embarrassment, keep meaning ambiguous, or other similar performative effects. Positioned right after the completion of the preceding utterance, nanchatte performs a self-quoting speech act, in which it reflexively and retroactively turns one’s own utterance as reporting speech into reported speech. Ex post facto reframes the utterance from a narrating event to a narrated event, which then turns the speaker from the subject of the utterance to the object in the real-time temporal process of the utterance, splitting and doubling the subject “I” and the world it inhabits between the actuality and the virtuality. By doing so, nanchatte structurally produces the space of non-position-taking. As frivolous as it might be, nanchatte ’s structural condition warrants a serious semiotic analysis. Drawing on Husserl’s concepts of neutrality modification and ego-splitting, this essay will discuss how and what kind of political subjectivity could be produced in the quoted space afforded by nanchatte. I proposes the concept of virtualization as a performative effect of nanchatte . As I will detail below, nanchatte as a self-quoting operation – that is, “I” quotes what “I” have just said – unsettles other familiar binaries in the illimitable movement of the virtual and the actual, and this paper considers its broader political implications.

This article examines the ways in which symbolic English is used in fashion and mass media by indexing ideologies and expectations regarding language ability in Japan. One example of this is the popularity of English language T-shirts in Japan. Using English that is often widely criticized for being awkward or meaningless, these T-shirts are now often mocked in various media sources due to the increased flow of images across traditional nation-state boundaries. By examining the use of these English T-shirts in a Japanese variety show featuring a teen idol known for having English language ability this paper will show how the symbolic value of English T-shirts in Japan can be used to construct a hierarchy based on language ability within Japanese society and how television programs that use such items, take advantage of linguistic inability to increase embarrassment and stake for people heightening linguistic anxiety while at the same time discursively constructing the show and its staff in a positive light. This article examines this phenomenon and the ways in which these fashion items are then appropriated and denaturalized for entertainment both within and outside Japan through forms of mass-media such as television programs, books, and websites.

This paper aims to demonstrate the ideological workings of translation by analyzing the ways Japanese women’s language is employed to translate the speech of women in seven cities worldwide in a Japanese TV documentary series. The analysis finds that the TV production team allocates the features of Japanese women’s language differently to the speech of women according to region, drawing boundaries between women in Europe and the Americas, those in Asia and Africa, and Japanese women. The program’s practices of translation regiment the femininities of women according to region in terms of formality and politeness by actively expanding the indexicality of features of Japanese women’s language away from reticence, politeness, and gentleness, and by restricting the use of these features to co-occurrence with the plain form. The analysis implies that this regimentation of femininities serves to reproduce and reinforce Japanese domestic stereotypes concerning women in distinct regions among Japanese audiences.

Based on a longitudinal ethnography at a Japanese junior high school, this paper explores how ideologies of Japanese women’s language are subverted through girls’ everyday linguistic ideological work of breaking presumed linkages between female gender and language. Girls at Sakura Junior High School employed masculine and non-traditional first-person pronouns and created new sets of indexicalities. The ethnography tracks how the girls did this in three important ways: 1) They used the most masculine pronoun, ore , and attached positive metapragmatic meanings (such as “cool,” “powerful,” “independent,” and “assertive”) to their use of this pronoun. In doing so, they established a powerful ore register and persona for girl users. 2) They also interpreted their use of boku , a plain masculine pronoun, as gender-appropriate for girls, whereas they negatively regarded boy users of boku as weak mama’s boys. 3) They attached strongly negative metapragmatic meanings to feminine pronouns and created an unfavorable feminine register and persona for these pronouns from which they disaligned themselves. The girls’ persistence in aligning masculine and non-traditional registers did not point to any evidence of their desire to take on a male identity, but rather to their creation of positive indexicalities about masculine pronouns and to their engagement in the social capital of maleness that accompanies male speech. Consequently, girls’ ideological work contextually constructed new indexical fields where girls established their own space in which they severed the naturalized relationships between language, identities, and social categories.

Ireland’s 2018 referendum on the Eighth Amendment, in which a majority of the Irish electorate voted to repeal the state’s quasi-total ban on abortion, saw important public discussions regarding Irish national identity in the twenty-first century. From a linguistic perspective, this begs the question of what role language played in the construction of national identity during the referendum campaign. This paper will examine Irish English features in the referendum campaign’s linguistic landscape and the extent to which they were used to index national identity. While there has been a significant amount of research on language ideologies connected to Irish, there has been little attention paid to Irish English and its relationship with national identity in the linguistic landscape literature. Drawing on a dataset of 1680 LL items collected from the 2018 referendum campaign (including campaign posters, placards, banners and stickers), this paper examines signs containing distinctive Irish English features, employing a qualitative, multimodal approach to the indexing of national identity. Specifically, it asks whether and under what conditions it is possible to claim that the use of Irish English features can be taken to index national identity.