Khari’s Reviews > Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People > Status Update

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.