Women's Language in Japanese: Forms, Ideology, and Change

How did the norm of 'women's language' in Japanese develop into it's current form, and how does this norm contribute to the subordination of women while sustaining itself?
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Discourse on Language and Gender

In looking for places where gender is constructed, language has been a highly salient location. Language can be used both consciously and unconsciously in a variety of different ways to construct gender, and have gender be constructed for you - whether you want it or not. However, much of this work has been 'archeological' in nature - uncovering hidden sites where gender is forced upon us, or where people are excluded through language use. This kind of work includes the fight for more gender-inclusive language, especially in pronominal reference and grammatical gender, for languages which have it. Additionally, work such as that by Lakoff (1973), in how womenfn:{The use of terms such as 'woman' and 'man' is clearly problematic. If we take the many arguments made by Feminists and especially Queerfeminists seriously - and we should -, then there is no entity stably being referred to by 'woman' and 'man'. On the other hand, 'woman' and 'man' are highly socially salient concepts, with non-negligible actual consequences if you are seen as one or the other. Since this paper is concerned less with how women actually speak (a property that refers to some actual concept of woman), but more with how women are presumed or supposed to speak, the 'woman' I am referring to is primarily a construct of the society they live in, 'woman' as understood by the group of Japanese-speakers and scholars. Secondarily, insofar as we will discuss how 'woman actually speak', it is with the premise that these speakers see themselves as women at least insofar that they would ordinarily be the targets of the language norms referring to women, without any other metaphysical baggage attached. That is, these people would not deny that these norms do or would apply to them, because they would answer the question "Are you a woman?" with yes, whether or not they 'actually are', or whether or not the question if they 'actually are women' is even a question that makes sense} are forced into subordinate social roles by their speech, especially in the area of pragmatics, and in their discursive roles, has unearthed hidden loci of domination and subordination. In sum, this is the work of 'making the invisible visible'. Conversely, the popular discourses on how 'woman' and 'men' speak differently, at least in my mother tongues German and English, are limited to 'well, women talk a lot about unimportant things'.fn:{In personal conversation, this was the only salient stereotype which emerged} This is different in Japanese: Here, a well-defined discourse exists that ascribes specific vocabulary items and grammatical forms to either 'woman' or 'men' and disallows or sanctions the use of these forms by anyone but the intended social group.fn:{Nakamura (2014), p. 1f} And indeed, in language learning textbooks and dictionaries as well, specific forms are labeled 'women's language'.fn:{Jisho.org} This paper will aim to trace the outlines of a 'women's language' that is so naturalized as to be taught to language learners as objective fact.fn:{Kim (2017)} To do this, I will first give a short overview of the linguistic structures of Japanese that are used in 'women's language'. I will then aim to describe the norms governing 'women's language', and how these norms interact with the more specific forms to leave women in a position with less social power. I will then sketch how these norms came to be and are active today and discuss current developments.

Relevant Features of Japanese

Sentence-Final Particles

Sentence-final particles are pervasive in Japanese. They typically occur after verbal and post-verbal morphology, that is, after the verb including its conjugations.fn:{Smith (2003), p. 210} Since Japanese is verb-final, this places them at the end of the sentence.fn:{Ibid. p. 201} Mainly, these indicate the speaker’s attitude towards the sentence uttered.fn:{Smith (2003), p. 210} To illustrate, the particle ne, placed at the end of a question, indicates a desire for agreement, glossing as "right?" or "isn't that so?".fn:{Martin (1975), p. 916f} Of these, there are many, many variants differentiated both by the supposed gender of their users as well as formality and other factors.

Honorific and Politeness Forms

Japanese politeness comes in different forms. Verbs come in plain and polite forms and can be conjugated to a sonkeigo form, honoring the subject of the sentence, and a kenjoogo form, which humbles the speaker. The gendered claim here is that Japanese women use more sonkeigo and kenjoogo forms as well as that they differ in the use of request forms and imperatives,fn:{Smith (2003), p. 214f} and are therefore more polite.fn:{Ibid., p. 214, Ide (2003) p. 227. For an incredibly detailed discussion of honorifics and politeness in this context, see Ide (1982)}

Exclamations

Japanese exclamations are said to be relatively highly gendered. In general, vocabulary items said to be male have more exclamatory strength, such as oi 'hey' or kuso 'shit', which compare with ara 'goodness gracious' and maa 'dear me' in 'women's language'. fn:{Smith (2003), p. 208}

Pronouns

Japanese pronouns are a contentious subject, as they function quite differently from pronouns in Indo-European languages (such as English or German): The third-person pronouns are rarely used, as they mean 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend' as much as 'he' or 'she',fn:{Ibid., p. 209} avoiding the classical problem of gendered pronominal reference so common in Indo-European languages. Even in second-person reference, names are generally preferred to pronouns.fn:{Takahara (1992), p. 127} First- and second-person (when they are used) pronouns are however said to be gendered not in terms of the recipient, but in terms of the user. In this way, pronouns jibun, washi, boku, and orefn:{amongst others} are said to be male-exclusive, while atashi and atai are said to be female exclusive, and watashi and watakushi (both readings of the same character, 私) are considered mostly gender-neutral.fn:{Smith (2003), p. 209f}

Importantly, even this rough sketch of which features are considered to be part of 'women's language' is not universal even in the mainstream narrative, and it may depend on the source which pronouns and which sentence-final particles are considered part of 'women's language'.fn:{Nakamura (2014), p. 4}

Ideals and Effects of Japanese Women's Language

While specific linguistic realizations thought to be 'women's language' have changed completely, one thing Japanese authors writing on 'women's language' have consistently emphasized are the norms underlying such speech, which remain remarkably consistent: From the 13th centuryfn:{Nakamura (2014), p. 41} up to the post-war period,fn:{Ibid., p. 216} female speech was said to be characterized by four elements: (1) use of polite speech, (2) use of elegant speech, (3) an indirect way of speaking, and (4) avoidance of Chinese words. fn:{Ibid} Depending on the period, 'an indirect way of speaking' might have been supplemented by rules to speak as little as possible.fn:{Ibid., p. 46} In the following section, I will aim to lay out how the element considered to be part of 'women's language' interact with these prescriptions, so that using or being assumed to use 'feminine' forms, 'women' construct themselves or are constructed along these lines, and that this (assumed) construction then strengthens the association between these forms and the aforementioned prescriptions, constituting a self-reinforcing paradigm. This is not to say that the use of these forms is as pervasive as the ideology claims, or indeed at all common, merely that the assumption that 'women' use these forms is enough to reinforce the paradigm.

Women's Language as a Normative Standard

Firstly, it is important to note that while variants of different words and grammatical forms exist which are considered masculine, these do not constitute a norm, that is, they are not seen as something valuable, to be taught and desired - they 'just are'. Meanwhile 'women's language', as we shall further see in the following chapter, is a topic of national discussion, and a normative standard: Women are expected to speak 'women's language.'fn:{Ibid., p. 6f}

Discursive Implication of Norms of Women's Language

Let us now turn and examine the possible effects of some of the more specific language norms: The avoidance of kango (Chinese loanwords), mentioned above, seems to not be mentioned as much in modern discourse about 'women's language', but seems to have been seen as a norm as late as the 1950s. fn:{Ibid., p. 202} Since most scientific and technical terminology was and is Chinese-derived, this norm directly contravened any kind of female education.fn:{Ibid., p. 17} A norm with more currency is the norm for the use of different sentence-final particles. The general kanaa, used at the end of a sentence, is frequently glossed as 'I wonder'. The version prescribed according to women's language, kashira,fn:{In this and other cases, Ide transcribes かしら as kasira instead of kashira. While there are some arguments for transcribing し as si, it is in fact pronounced shi, and that is the more common transcription, which I will follow} is said to be more uncertain-sounding than kanaa.fn:{Ide (1982), p.381f. She gives etymological reasons, which seem relatively unconvincing} In the classification by Okamoto (1995), many forms classified as feminine are tag questions,fn:{According to Lakoff (1973), a tag question is a declarative statement without the assumption that the statement is to be believed by the addressee: one has an out, as with a question.} while male forms seem to include many that imply strong assertion or declaration.fn:{Okamoto (1995), p. 301f} In the countless letters to the editor and newspaper editorials complaining about the deterioration of women's language, the use of strong expressions such as urusee 'shut up' and fuzakenjanee yo 'cut the crap' is classified as unacceptable for women.fn:{Ibid., p. 297ff} It seems, then, that the forms associated with 'women's language' are, as a whole, less assertive than the gender-neutral or male-connotated variants. Thus, the language women are supposed to speak, as we shall later see, to maintain the beauty and nobility of Japan, is one that forces them into a position of subordination. As Furuya Tsunatake, a post-war critic, states: the past 'soft women's language' is the language [...] of women who, their power deprived by men, had to live assiduously studying the pleasures of men and [try] painfully to show coquetry and flirtation [...]. It is the language of slaves.fn:{Tsunatake (1953), as cited in Nakamura (2014), p. 200}

Ide (1982) asserts that women using weaker forms are merely and directly caused by women's subordinate status, as low-power groups generally are forced to, and not the cause of subordination.fn:{Ide (1982), p. 382} For us, since we don't want to make claims about what 'women are actually' doing, this would mean the norms - not the use itself - are caused by women's subordinate status.fn:{'Women's subordinate status' again runs into metaphysical problems. (What do we mean by 'woman'?) Without committing myself to a theory of gender, let us follow our intuition, which is that there is something like 'women's subordinate status', at least in the most general sense} While this is certainly true to an extent, it is false to conclude from this that women's subordinate status is not reinforced by the application of these norms. To see this, we now turn to the example of a (fictional) female transgressor of these norms.

Consequences of Transgression of Language Norms

As we have seen above and will see again later, complaints against worsening women's speech are legion. More substantially, Smith (2003) provides an example of a female protagonist of a business novel, who repeatedly uses forms and words outside of the permitted range of 'women's language', and repeatedly faces criticism by other interlocutors, or even by the narrator. Her speech is called rough whenever she uses 'male forms', and whenever she 'mixes men's and women's language', the narrator criticizes her for doing so.fn:{Smith (2003), p. 216f} In so doing, even supposed rebellion against the language norms is used to harden the norms of what is considered part of male and female language. Does this mean resistance is futile? We shall return to this.

Constructing the Modern Idea of Japanese Women's Language

If the effect of the ideology of women's language is to keep women in a subordinate place, then we would be tempted to say that this ideology is simple self-serving justification of a social position and power. But that leaves much unexplained: Patriarchy exists in other places of the world, so how did Japan develop its specific flavor of linguistic oppression? The easy answer would be, perhaps, to say that Japanese culture is simply more hierarchical, more obedient. But that would be falling into the same fallacy of essentialism that Japanese linguists display when they claim that 'women's language' comes from women's essential femininity.fn:{Nakamura (2014), p. 206} In attempting to resolve the question, Inoue (2002) has argued that 'women's language' emerged in the late Meiji period from the speech of very few schoolgirls, that was used as the basis of women's speech by famous novelists, and was disseminated through that medium as well as magazines.fn:{Inoue (2002), p. 396ff} That is almost certainly where the features of 'women's language' developed. It was, however, early on not an object of prescription, but an undesirable element of Japanese, considered a variant at best.fn:{Nakamura (2014), p. 120ff} I will argue that only during the war effort of World War II, 'women's language' received its positive connotation, and through postwar reinterpretation, it was able to survive the liberalization of the American military occupation. Today, this norm has become 'natural fact' through its inclusion in generations of textbooks, and through the received speech of entertainment media.

Language and Empire

Three currents came together to create the ideology of women's language as something beautiful during the second World War. Japanese society before and during the war was patriarchal in the most literal sense, with the father being the head of the household, with absolute power over it, and these households, not citizens, being the minimum units of the state.fn:{Ibid., p. 173} This family system was seen as essential to the strength of the nation and the soldiers will to fight,fn:{Ibid., p. 173f} but despite deep unwillingness in the Japanese government, women eventually had to be recruited to work in factories, especially as the war situation worsened.fn:{Ibid., p. 174} Additionally, since the beginning of the colonization of East Asian countries and regions such as Manchuria, Taiwan, and Korea, 'women's language' had been seen as integral to justify colonialism there.fn:{Ibid., p. 160ff} To this aim, then, 'women's language' was claimed - falselyfn:{Nakamura (2014) devotes whole chapters to court-women's speech and the discontinuities with current 'women's language'. For further refutation, see also Inoue (2002)} - to reflect a beautiful imperial past of the speech of refined court women which had been graced by contact with the emperor.fn:{Ibid., p. 163f} 'Women's language' was furthermore seen as a strong expression of the Japanese tendency towards politeness, which itself, it was sometimes argued, originated in the respect of the gracious imperial family.fn:{Ibid., p. 164f} Helpfully, more clearly circumscribing 'women's language' helped also might have helped 'keep them in their place', even as they were working in the factories.

Essential Femininity

As we know, the war did not last forever. After Japan's unconditional surrender, the US occupational authorities implemented a number of changes intended to democratize the nation. The new Constitution of Japan included provisions on gender equality,fn:{Ibid., p. 195} and because mentioning the emperor as the source of beauty of 'women's language' had become unacceptable, the discourse about women's speech stopped mentioning the emperor.fn:{Nakamura (2014), p. 215} But, despite some early criticism, women's language as a norm did not disappear. Why?

We can assume that patriarchal norms and attitudes did not disappear just because the new Constitution of Japan outlawed them. So instead, 'women's language' was essentialized, defined to be something innately feminine, outside of the purview of women's rights.fn:{Ibid., p. 206} Women's small vocabulary was due to their innate, conservative nature, the avoidance of kango was because they do not speak from intelligence or intention, but from emotion and feeling, they used polite prefixes because without them, femininity [...] cannot be expressed.fn:{Ibid., p. 202} At the same time, a mythos was being built around 'women's language' remarkably similar to the mythos during the war years, but now with an emperor-sized hole in the middle. So, therefore, the origin of 'women's language' was again placed in the 14th-century court-woman's language, fn:{Ibid., p. 9f} and problems of deteriorating 'women's language' were always portrayed as recent.fn:{Ibid., p. 18} Even the trope of Japanese women's language as something unique and valuable, whether in academic articlesfn:{Ide (2003), p. 236. While she uses the passive is felt, her conclusion makes clear that she in some sense believes this herself as well} or the ever-reliable letters to the editorfn:{Okamoto (1995), p. 297} persists. Removed from the politics of the emperor, 'women's language' became a beautiful Japanese tradition, something to unproblematically vest pride in.fn:{Nakamura (2014), p. 223} Additionally, since 'women's language' explicitly does not contain dialectal differences, 'women's language' is constructed as exactly one kind of woman's language - helpfully stabilizing the concepts of both woman and nation.fn:{Inoue (2003), p. 324}

The Dissemination: Academia, Textbooks, and the Media

The existence of 'women's language' is implicitly confirmed through many scholarly investigations and opinion polls presupposing the existence of a 'women's language'. Especially the Linguists associated with kokugogaku 'National Language Studies' have participated in the historicizing and naturalizing of 'women's language.' fn:{Inoue (2002), p. 392f., Nakamura (2014), p. 1ff} More than any scholarship, though, two media have formed this idea of the existence of such a thing as 'women's language': the textbook and entertainment media.

Textbooks often directly contrast male and female speakers, and in these parallel scenarios, speakers assumed to be female only ever use female-associated forms (where such exist and are relatively common), and speakers assumed to be male only ever use male or unmarked forms in these situations. So for example, in a reader from 1950, Taroo (a male name) uses the more familiar and assuming -kun and three male-associated forms as well as the unmarked me 'eye' over the course of the text, while Hanako (a female name) uses the more polite -san, three more female-associated forms, and the honorific o-meme for eye.fn:{Nakamura (2014), p. 209f} The picture is similar for first-person pronouns and other features.fn:{Ibid., p. 218ff}

Entertainment media is, at least according to most analyses, equally gendered in its language use. Translations of foreign media, such as interviews and novels, translate almost any female speech to pitch-perfect Japanese ‘women's language.' So Angelina Jolie speaks with female sentence-final particles,fn:{Nakamura (2014), p. 14} so does Scarlett O'Hara in translations of 'Gone with the Wind' fn:{Ibid., more extensively Inoue (2003) 325ff}, and even eleven-year-old Hermione.fn:{Nakamura (2014), p. 14} In romance novels, both foreign and not, women almost always use watashi as a first-person pronoun, and men use boku or ore. Interestingly, even though watashi is considered acceptable for men to use in formal situations, it is not once used by men in the romance novels analyzed in Smith (2004).fn:{Smith (2004), p. 122} In general, the picture that emerges is one of women who speak 'women's language', and men who speak with unmarked variants or male versions. All this would indicate that Japanese speakers should have a clear image of what they consider women's language, and they should claim 'women's language' is 'just the way women speak.' And, as we have hinted at, that is exactly what happens.fn:{Nakamura (2014), p. 1ff} So, we would say, the normative prescriptions have 'successfully' been naturalized. The Cool-Aid has been drunk. Or has it?

Counternorms and Other Norms

One indication that the picture is not quite as neat should come from all the complaints we just mentioned. Surely, if 'women's language' was universally and unquestioningly used, we should not expect to see all these complaints?

More substantially, Okamoto (1995) carried out an analysis of the conversations of ten female Japanese-native college students, in which she analyzed recordings of conversations and the use of forms, which she classified as masculine, feminine, or neutral. The vast majority of forms used were neutral, and all but two used more masculine-classified than feminine-classified forms.fn:{Okamoto (1995), p. 303} Further research done by Okamoto suggests this might be a generational change.fn:{Ibid., p. 307}

'Women's language' as Currency and Situational Necessity

Some phenomena suggest that perhaps 'women's language' is shifting from a naturalized phenomenon to a necessary expedient in some circumstances and a currency of attractiveness in others.

According to Nakamura (2014), etiquette manuals have a high currency. These manuals claim to make women happier and wiser, but mainly elegant, charming, and loved.fn:{Nakamura (2014), p. 12} As we had seen, males in romance novels seem to only ever produce 'male' forms.fn:{Smith (2004) p. 122f} To look at this phenomenon further, let us look at the Burikko.

The word burikko comes from a combination of the words buru 'to pretend, act' and ko 'child', equaling something like 'fake child'.fn:{Miller (2004), p. 148} Burikko as a concept gained cultural currency in the 1980s,fn:{Ibid., p. 149} and is associated with behaviors such as a nasalized delivery, use of a baby-talk register, a sprinkling of amusing coinages, and mannerisms such as covering the mouth when smiling or laughing. fn:{Ibid., p. 151} Scholars have emphasized that the burikko is less an identity and more a performance, one does rather than is burikko.fn:{Ibid., p. 150} Interestingly, elements of the burikko register are very similar to the prescriptions of 'women's language', including an avoidance of kango and adding honorific o to produce omeme for me (as seen in the reader above as well).

Why perform burikko? One aspect that is repeatedly mentioned is that burikko is performed otoko no mae 'in front of men.' fn:{Ibid., p. 157} There seem to be three reasons for this: For one to create a (societally required) image of innocence.fn:{Ibid., p. 157f., 160} Secondly, to seem less threatening and to get advantages from male superiors. Interestingly, even when this is recognized as artifice, male listeners will sometimes still consider it ear massage. Even if the performance itself is fake, the willingness to do burikko still marks the performer as willing to perform subservience. fn:{Ibid., p. 158}And finally, performances are a key part of performing attractiveness to men who one is or wants to be romantically involved with.fn:{Ibid., p. 159}

One could say that in analyzing the burikko, one is behind the times. As Miller (2004) remarks, burikko-like performances tend to evoke hostile reactions from younger people, both men and women. Presumably, in the 16 years since that paper has been published, that has only become more true. But, as Inoue (2016) remarks about a different persona, the ojoo-sama, there are striking similarities between that persona and the tsundere. The tsundere is one of many character-archetypes popular in manga and anime, most of which end with -dere, a morpheme which stems from deredere 'fawning'.fn:{Galbraith (2009), p. 355} A deep analysis is outside of the scope of this paper, but a superficial survey reveals that many burikko-like elements as well as hyperfeminine speech are regularly, consistently and unreflectedly reproduced in anime and manga and especially -dere characters. This evidence allows us to argue for a shift from 'women's language' as something expected to 'women's language' as something used to create desirability. It is possible to overstate this, however: Textbooks still teach gender-segregated language as fact beyond criticism, and that is still how most Japanese seem to see it - even if they subvert it or use it.

Conclusion

In this paper, we analyzed the development of the norm of 'women's language', how this norm contributes to the subordination of women, and how this norm sustains itself. To this end, we examined what features are part of 'women's language', how these features interact with norms of how women should speak, and how 'women's language' arose out of the wartime needs of the Japanese empire to become naturalized and stabilized in Japan's post-war era. Finally, we examined new forces that might be influencing the development and continued existence of women's language. This is necessarily only a sketch, and much research remains to be done, especially about the period 1955-1980, and more recent developments, as well as more interdisciplinary work. Further research may also illuminate possible sites of resistance.

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