Status Updates From Japanese Language, Gender, ...

Well, at least this next essay doesn't quote Foucault or Marx and it is written in an understandable way in the introduction.

"In short, the majority of women experienced 'women's language' not so much as its producer but as its (gendered) consumer. They 'heard' modern women 'speaking' in the novels and the magazines."

This might actually be true. Or at least true in the idea that fictional women in Japanese literature speak in a more gendered way than actual women...that I think could be argued with data.

"The rise of women's language is thus inescapably connected with the development of consumer culture."

As if Japanese women of the past weren't involved in purchasing? Or does she mean the purchasing of written material?

Granted I haven't even read a paragraph of this book in a couple of months, but the conclusion of a paper is not the place to slip in an explanation that hasn't been discussed before. Where was the photograph and colonial education mentioned as a contributing factor to the way that women in the Meiji period spoke?

How did I ever read this stuff and find it convincing?

That paragraph is entirely circular. According to it, the development of the modern concept of language (whatever that means) was both its own cause and its own effect.

Not only that, but it was influenced by things as disparate as colonial education and the photograph. Indeed that they were directly responsible for its rise...just one question. How?

"Precisely the same new 'modern' conception of language that enabled and was enabled by the development of rational bureaucracy, the universal education system, nationalism, the military, the print media, colonial education, science and technology, and mimetic apparatuses such as stenography, the photograph, and the phonograph made possible the emergence of women's language, the sign of Japanese culture and tradition

...could conclude that the author caused specific sentence final particles to come into use for a specific subgroup of people.

But...there are other characters in Naruto, lots of them, and what do they do? Talk like normal Japanese people. If we look at the language produced by all the characters and not just Naruto, we would see that on average the characters mirror actual people's speech, not the other way around

Furthermore, there are plenty of instances in modern Japanese literature where an author manipulates language in order to give a subset of characters a specific linguistic 'tic' that sets them apart from other characters. A great one is Naruto with his 'dattebayo'. It sets him apart from other characters and is a particle that no one used in real life before the author created it, if we only look at Naruto, we...

Even as she is pointing out that we don't actually know if women actually spoke like this at that period, and even if they did we couldn't know if women spoke like this and then the novels were written, or if the novels were written and then woman spoke like this, or if they had any relationship at all. It's purely conjecture.

I know I've said this before, but I can't believe I found these authors convincing in grad school. I accepted what she said: that the female dialect of Japanese was created, not that it arose naturally, but that it was created by novelists in the Meiji era.

Her proof? Meiji novels.

Wow, that's a major inflation of the data on the prior page: "It is noteworthy, first of all, that the gender-neutral final particles in Ukiyoburo have become gendered into either female exclusive or male-exclusive in Sanshiro." (100 years later)

No.
First: there were male and female exclusive particles in ukiyoburo
2nd: there were 14 neutral. Of those 14, 6 become gendered. That's not 50%. Hardly conclusive.

I can't make too hard of a judgment, because I've never read anything written during the Meiji era in Japanese, I doubt I could, but this certainly isn't true of modern literature. So at what point did the status switch?

This actually disagrees with other works in this volume that talk about how honorific endings are required in writing..so..? Is this just historical? She certainly doesn't frame it as such.

"Polite and honorific verb-ending forms, which formally indexed context-bound relationships between the author and the reader and between the author and the characters, eventually lost their status in the serious literary style."

Again. Examples? That would be nice.

I can't believe I found this article convincing in grad school.

first of all she said that by the 1910s plain verb endings such as -da had won out as the established literary style.

Maybe it had in the 1910s, but it certainly isn't now. And where is the evidence that this is true? She doesn't give a single example. No excerpts. No surveys. Just her feelings.

I just read the world's most rambling paragraph and am sitting back in astonishment at how my younger self found post structuralism to be convincing.

Just because you redefine commonly understood words to mean something completely different doesn't rescue you from inherently circular arguments.

This particular author seems to think that governments and institutions are a) a lot more competent and efficient than they actually are and that b) they use those powers to effect structured social change...

I think she overestimates them.

"Women's language is also a national issue, a reflexive parameter of civil order and of social change. Nationwide opinion polls are regularly conducted on whether "women's language: is becoming corrupted and how much so; national sentiments over its perceived disappearance are thereby crystallized and circulated in the form of numbers and statistics."

Oh. I should clarify, this book is also beautifully cited, I'm just reading it as research rather than as non fiction, so it wasn't in my mental category of 'nonfiction.'

Anyway.

"Japanese women's language is a socially powerful truth. I mean by this not that the phrase refers to the empirical speech patterns of women. Rather...it is a critical cultural category and an unavoidable part of practical social knowledge

"One cannot characterize women's speech as more polite than men's in the abstract simply because the former is presumed to contain more honorifics than the latter."

Interestingly enough she says nonreciprocal use of honorifics from lower to higher is disappearing in Japan, rather people are reciprocating to decrease the hierarchical difference.

....I think she doesn't read manga, because WOW, it's still there.

"Politeness should be viewed as involving moral judgements rather than as an objective system of rules, strategies, or principles that is assumed to govern speakers' behavior. It is thus important to examine why and how such judgements are made."

"These how-to books thus promote the notion that women's attractiveness depends on their appearance (beauty), which is in part determined by their good upbringing and education, including the knowledge of honorifics."

This is probably true, one of my samples of manga is a Pretty Cure spinoff where all of these silver spoon young ladies are in a boarding school and their language is INCREDIBLY formal and stilted.

"There are also numerous books, magazine articles, and other materials on how to use honorifics 'correctly', which suggests that knowledge of honorifics is not evenly distributed in the society and that many native speakers aspire to acquire it, because they consider it linguistic capital for improving their social status."