Japanese Sociolinguistics
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 16: 261-278 (Volume publication date October 1987)
J S Shibamoto
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

My dearest lady, my light,

I hope you do not think me mean, wicked and stupid for addressing you with such intimacy.  Generally I’ve found that my non-American friends are less put off by intimacy in letter writing, the same with artists and literature majors of any nationality.  Reading some of your correspondence yesterday, even more so than I had hoped, it was as if I were reading my own heart.  I know that this is plain and common to say, so forgive me, please.  And forgive me again because what follows may read as if it were shot out of a cannon.  Mondays have become a busier day for me and I have yet to adjust my schedule.  I have an opportunity to do community volunteer work on Mondays and I didn’t want to keep putting that off until I had my schedule here adjusted, meaning mainly that I write on Sunday what I want to post on Monday.  For now, it’s still the mad dash.  I hope to integrate more of my thoughts about your work into my thinking on anthropology as I actually read more of your work.  This week I read “Japanese Socioliguistics.”

I haven’t watched much anime recently, but reading “Japanese Sociolinguistics,” I wanted to rewatch some things.  Janet Shibamoto explores some of the findings of various language research projects in Japan and it seemed to me that I recognized some of the patterns discussed from watching the anime in translation — Women use formal language more than men; older people speak differently; women are addressed with more politeness than men of the same status in the workplace.

With one anime series, Ranma 1/2, based on the manga of the same name by Rumiko Takahashi, it seemed that the subtitle company took more pains to translate some of the cultural language through manipulation of English-speaking patterns than did the dubbing company.  For example, it would seem that the upper class characters not only used more formal language, their language was also often more poetic, more reverential.  The subtitles were not only more likely to be in verse, but the language used was more “literary,” for lack of a better word.  If I had watched the series more recently, I might have more plentiful examples.  I used to watch with both subtitles and dubbing to make note of the differences.

The title character Ranma, a teenager, and his father were spending a year in China looking for opportunities to improve their martial arts techniques, when Ranma fell into a magical spring in which a young maiden had drowned.  After having fallen into the spring, Ranma is transformed into a young maiden whenever he is splashed with cold water (a light rain will do it).  He returns to his male body when splashed with hot water.  He and the father return to Japan so that Ranma can meet his arranged bride-to-be, one of the daughters of the father’s former martial arts mate.  The mate’s family is aware of Ranma’s predicament, but all work to hide this from the wider community.

When Ranma is in girl-form, his/her style of speech seems much the same as when in boy-form in that it is less polite than when other females speak.  What I don’t know is whether girl-Ranma uses feminine Japanese language in other ways, which according to Shibamoto includes things such as “special self-reference and address terms, special sentence-ending particles and exclamations, a particular pitch range and set of intonations, frequent use of the honorific style, avoidance of kango (Sino-Japanese lexical items), and avoidance of vulgar language.”  Well, girl-Ranma definitely doesn’t avoid vulgar language.

Shibamoto mentions that there had been only budding interests in biliingualism and minority language in Japanese linguistic studies, but “with the internationalization of Japanese business, increasing numbers of Japanese families are spending some years in foreign countries, and the language problems of the children in these families upon returning to Japan have stimulated some interest…”  This review was published in 1987; Ranma 1/2 was televised from 1989 to 1992.  The characters that had spent significant amounts of time out of the country, Ranma and his father as well as a school teacher who had spent a great deal of time in Hawaii, seemed to have some differences in speech.  I would be curious to know whether their Japanese seemed more “foreign” somehow.  I listened to the show in Japanese (with subtitles) sometimes in order to hear the language, but I don’t have very much Japanese.

Shibamoto cautions on several occasions that although the methods of data analysis used in the Japanese studies were often quite advanced, the data-collection techniques were often questionable.  For example, many early studies relied heavily on self-reported language use from the informants with little or no direct observation of language use.  In some instances, it seems that later studies with better data collection methods confirmed the findings of earlier studies.

I hope to have more French soon.  I enjoyed the cross-cultural aspects of your correspondence with Nelson Algren.  I started reading some of your letters to Sartre as well, hoping to compare the two as far as cultural expression.  What a treat it was to find that you wrote to Nelson in English, and sprinkled with bits of French to encourage him to learn French.  I find it encourages me.

One of your many adorers,
S.