This study examines how the Japanese writer Furui Yoshikichi engages with Western mystical experiences, particularly through his reading of Martin Buber’s <i>Ecstatic Confessions</i> and his broader engagement with Meister Eckhart and medieval German mysticism. Furui’s literary inquiry revolves around the inherent tension between the ineffability of mystical experiences and their articulation through language. He critically engages with the paradox of verbalization, recognizing that while mystical experiences transcend linguistic and temporal boundaries, they nevertheless achieve resonance through written and spoken expressions. His reflections converge with Buddhist notions of Sūnyatā, underscoring intersections between Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. Drawing upon his background as a translator of German literature, Furui mediates mystical experiences within a comparative framework, navigating cultural and linguistic boundaries. His approach elucidates the concept of the multiplicity of qualities in mystical experiences, demonstrating particularity and universality simultaneously. By analyzing Furui’s interpretation of mystical texts, this study contributes to broader discussions on the limitations of language in conveying transcendence and the role of literary imagination in rendering the ineffable.
Prosody not only signals the speaker’s cognitive states but can also imitate various concepts. However, previous studies on the latter, the iconic function of prosody, have mostly analyzed novel words and nonlinguistic vocalizations. To fill this gap in the literature, the current study has examined the iconic potential of the prosodic features of existing Japanese imitative words known as ideophones. In Experiment 1, female Japanese speakers pronounced 20 sentences containing ideophones in infant-directed speech. They used a higher f0 to express faster and more pleasant movements. Similar iconic associations were observed in Experiment 2, in which Japanese speakers chose the best-matching pitch–intensity–duration combination for each of the ideophones. In Experiment 3, Japanese speakers chose the best-matching voice quality – creaky voice, falsetto, harsh voice or whisper – for the ideophones. Falsetto was preferred for a light object’s fast motion, harsh voice for violent motion and whisper for quiet motion. Based on these results, we entertain the possibility that the iconic prosody of ideophones provides a missing link in the evolutionary theory of language that began with iconic vocalizations. Ideophones with varying degrees of iconic prosody can be considered to be located between nonlinguistic vocalizations and arbitrary words in this evolutionary path.
Retno Dewi Ambarastuti, Laily Amalia Savitri, Amalia Chotimah
et al.
This literary research uses a short story entitle Kamisama by Kawakami Hiroshi. Kamisama tells the Watashi’s short journey with Kuma on a spring day. Kuma is a bear who recently moves in a lives next door to Watashi’s apato room. Despite being a bear, Kuma can speak human language and behave like humans. Kamisama not only tells the condition of the natural environment, but also contains a picture of the life of Japanese people related to Japanese culture, in the form of daily habits, view of life, and Japanese people’s thoughts about nature and environment. The research conveys how the natural and cultural views of Japanese society in the Kamisama short story. This study uses qualitative descriptive methods, ecocriticism in Japanese literature and culture. The results this study shows the literary ecocriticism aspect in the interaction between characters in the environment. Ecosystem of the natural environment are not used by humans, but their existence is also respected.
MINIKOMI 88 - Special Issue - Heisei 平成
Herausgeber der Schwerpunkt-Nummer: Adam Greguš
Cover & ToC
4 Adam GREGUŠ
Schwerpunkt Heisei (1989 - 2019)
5 Judith BRANDNER im Gespräch mit Adam GREGUŠ
Inselreich in Bewegung: Journalistische Annäherung an Japan
14 Michiko MAE
Neue Tendenzen und Entwicklungen in der japanischen Gegenwartsliteratur: Versuch einer Heisei-Literaturgeschichte
32 Marc YAMADA
Locating Heisei in Japanese Film: The Historical Imagination of the Lost Decades
42 Joachim ALT
Schlüssel- und Wendejahr 1993: Anime zu Japans Weltkrieg um und ab Heisei
58 Florian PURKARTHOFER
Heisei City: Ein Blick auf 30 Jahre urbaner Veränderungen
68 Sebastian POLAK-ROTTMANN
In Heisei angekommen: eine Rezension zu Local political participation in Japan: A case study of Oita'
74 HASEBE Hiroshi
International Exchange in Heisei-era theatre: Spotlight on Ninagawa Yukio and Noda Hideki
81 Christina GMEINBAUER, Ina HEIN und Tamara KAMERER
6. Forum für literaturwissenschaftliche Japanforschung: 8.–9. Juni 2018 Universität Wien
86 [ Autor*innen | Contributors | 著者紹介 ]
The Kenmu Regime is the military and aristocratic Japanese government in 1333–1336, headed by the supporters of sovereign Go-Daigo (後醍醐天皇, 1288–1339). The reign of Go-Daigo, full of contradictions, had a great impact on premodern Japanese culture and Japanese historical memory, and became one of the main narratives of medieval Japanese history. Academic discussions on the historical role of the Kenmu Regime began in the Edo period (1603–1868) and continue to this day. However, there are no specific Russian-language studies entirely devoted to the events of the 14th century and the Kenmu Regime in particular. In Russia, the works by European and American authors are usually used to describe this period. At the same time, many aspects of the discussion remain neglected. For example, Russian scholars have essentially ignored the last stages of the study of Go-Daigo’s reign. The purpose of this paper is to determine what we know and what we do not know about the Kenmu Regime, how we know it, and what we can do to deepen our knowledge. The author of the current article used as sources various academic and near-academic texts (notes, monographs, collective monographs and manuals, reviews and responses to reviews, background materials) in Portuguese, English, French, German, and Russian. The texts are considered in chronological order, i.e., each section reflects a certain stage in the study of the rule of GoDaigo. This work also examines the methodological and other influence of Japanese historians on nonJapanese scholars who study the Kenmu Regime and analyzes the prospects for further study of Go-Daigo’s reign from the point of view of different scholarly approaches and academic traditions.
Während ich diese Zeilen verfasse, wütet sowohl in Österreich als auch in Japan noch immer die Omikron-Welle. Die Pandemie hat in den vergangenen zwei Jahren auch das Vereinsleben des AAJ und die Redaktionsarbeit für die vorliegende MINIKOMI-Ausgabe geprägt. ...
This article presents a critical examination of “transborder” literary approaches that seek to renegotiate the position of Japanese fiction within the world. The concept of transborder fiction has emerged in recent decades as a means of breaking down the boundaries of Japanese literature that assume agreement between the nationality of a writer and the language of her text. However, as it takes its cues from David Damrosch’s influential study of 2003, What is World Literature?, which suggests that literature gains in value in translation, transborder literature betrays its desires to promote Japan’s national literature in a globalising literary context. This more critical view reveals that despite their calls for greater literary diversity, transborder approaches exhibit problematic tendencies that threaten to erase the multiple flows of language and intertextuality already extant within modern Japanese fiction and turn its eye away from history. This critique is focalised through the writing of Tawada Yōko, whose prolific output of literary works and essays in Japanese and German appear to epitomise the image of transborder writing, and yet which frequently challenge these assumptions. Both the book-length essay Exophony (2003) and the Japanese novel Tabi o suru hadaka no me (2004) offer prescient critiques rooted in history that expose moments of rupture, asymmetry and untranslatability, which an emphasis on border crossings threatens to overlook. However, by choosing to peer through those gaps, guided by the latter’s Vietnamese narrator, these texts also incite hitherto unseen connections between Tawada’s Japanese fiction and the world.
The article is devoted to the problems of the formation and development of military Japanese studies in the early 20th century. Its relevance is related to the fact that current problems of the Russian-Japanese relations are rooted in the political confrontation and numerous wars and armed conflicts between the two countries which erupted in the first half of the 20th century. The military have joined Japanese studies since its establishment in Russian higher education. Officers of the units of the Russian army stationed in the Far East studied Japanese and Japan together with university students - in the early 20th century the ratio of military and non-military students was almost 50:50. The first military specialists in Japanese studies either gave priority to research and education over military service, or successfully combined both. Joint training of officers and university students had a great impact on all aspects of life and work of the Oriental Institute, while causing criticism from both senior faculty managers and the high-ranked Russian military. Despite great success in the officers’ training at the Oriental Institute, the initial system of Japanese studies training was reformed, though its principles and traditions were preserved until the 1917 revolution. The article was written on the basis of archival and published documents of the Oriental Institute, with the use of academic works of the first Russian officers specializing in Japanese studies. The historical experience of the Japanese studies education and research is interesting and relevant for today’s Russian-Japanese relations.
Microteaching is one of the subject matters to prepare student teachers. Many publications confirm the function and importance of microteaching in improving the student teachers’ teaching skills. However, publication on the perception of Japanese Language Education students about microteaching is still limited, despite its importance in guiding the students for better improvement. This study aimed at analyzing the students’ perception on the implementation of microteaching at the Japanese Language Education in a university in Bali on 2018. This study used qualitative research, and the data collected by questionnaire and interview. The results of the analysis showed that holistically, the students have postive perception and microteaching is perceived as very useful to improve the student teachers’ teaching skills. The instrumens used are not only relevant to assess the progress and the achievement of the student teachers but also can function as guideline for students on what to do in improving the teaching skills.
The purpose of this article is to share approaches to raise undergraduate student awareness and understanding of Japanese foreign language (JFL) teaching careers, which might increase the number and diversity of our students who become teachers. These strategies, presented with examples from the Japanese program at <Institution Name>, are presented in order of ease of implementation, including 1) advisement to provide a space to consider JFL teaching as a possible career and to share share accurate information about JFL teaching opportunities and qualifications 2) guest lectures by local JFL teachers, 3) instructional units related to Japanese teaching and learning, 4) a new Japanese teaching-related internship program where students can get experience helping in a JFL classroom, and 5) courses on Japanese applied linguistics, including a newly-developed course on foreign language teaching methods featuring JFL in North American and EFL in Japan.
Language and Literature, Japanese language and literature
The 1990s ushered in the active critique of disciplines in the humanities including history, anthropology and literature. At the same time the discourse of the Fall occurring in various genres was presented by scholars such as Francis Fukuyama and Karatani Kojin. These two phenomena have been deeply and curiously connected in complementarity in the last decade based on globalization and the discourse of the Dead in a post-Fukushima world.
In the translation of cultural words, Domestication and Foreignization strategy is a kind of translation strategy that is widely applied by translators. The tendency to use one of these strategies in a translation work can be identified through the analysis of translation techniques. This article discusses the translation strategy of cultural words in Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk which had translated into Japanese, Parukku Mura no Odoriko. Through the identification and analysis of translation techniques, it is known that the cultural words in Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk is translated into Japanese using several techniques: (1) borrowing, (2) paraphrase, (3) using cultural words which equivalence in target language, (4) using generic words, (5) using neutral words . From the results of calculating the amount of usage of each technique, it is known that the borrowing and paraphrase is the most widely used techniques, so it can be concluded that in this translation used the strategy of foreignization. Foreignization is the strategy that focuses on the source text, as an interpreter attempt to maintain the concept of culture As well as the socio-cultural values of Javanese society as in the original novel. The fact raises the assumption that Parukku Mura no Odoriko lacks the tastes of readers in Japan because of the many foreign cultural concepts in the novel thus making the distance between the reader and the translation product itself.
Utterance in the literature usually contained metaphor. Metaphor in the novel is an expression of the author in creating a sense of imagination through the medium of language. This paper aims to determine the creation of the metaphor physical description of the heroine in the novel Noruwei No Mori created by Haruki Murakami. The research method used in this study is a qualitative method that used the theory of conceptual metaphor found by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Based on data analysis, there are any interaction or Japanese society with nature so that metaphors can be found in the novel Noruwei No Mori showed a constantly interaction between the Japanese people with their both environment physical and cultural.
Keyword: conceptual metaphor, heroin, novel, Norwei no Mori
ABSTRAK
Dalam karya sastra, lazim ditemukan ungkapan yang mengadung metafora. Metafora dalam novel merupakan ekspresi perasaan pengarang dalam mewujudkan imajinasinya melalui media bahasa. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui pembentukan metafora deskripsi fisik tokoh wanita pada novel Noruwei No Mori karya Haruki Murakami. Metode penelitian yang dipakai dalam penelitian adalah metode kualitatif dengan teori yang digunakan adalah teori metafora konseptual yang dikemukan Lakoff dan Johnson (1980). Berdasarkan analisis data, diketahui adanya interaksi atau kedekatan masyarakat Jepang dengan alam sehingga metafora yang muncul dalam novel Noruwei No Mori memperlihatkan interaksi terus-menerus antara masyarakat Jepang dengan lingkungannya, baik fisik maupun kultural.
Kata kunci : metafora konseptual, fisik, tokoh wanita, novel, Noruwei No Mori