The manuscript “Tales of the Northern Barbarians” (“Hokuidan,” 北夷談) by Matsuda Denjūrō 松田伝十郎 (1769–1843) is a valuable source on the history of Russian-Japanese relations, the development of the northern territories inhabited by the Ainu conducted by the Japanese, relations between the Ainu and the Japanese, their barter trade. The written source consists of seven notebooks. The manuscript was created in the first years of the Bunsei era (文政, 1818–1831). It describes the events from 1799 to 1822 in chronological order, i.e., events that occurred during the 24 years of Matsuda's service in the lands of the Ainu. The manuscript is written in cursive (Japanese: "grass writing," sōsho 草書). The second half of the first book examines the bear festival and the inau, cult objects of the Ainu, which were described in detail by the author in [Klimov 2024].
This article is the continuation of the description of the events of the first notebook, in which Matsuda describes: wintering in Akkeshi, the life and clothing of the Ainu, the peculiarities of hunting sea lions, the attitude towards the moon fish, wintering in Aputa, the fight against the smallpox epidemic that arose, and his return to Edo. The text is accompanied by numerous sketches. The illustrations in the manuscript are of great value, providing additional information that is missing from the text itself. Matsuda’s descriptions refer to November 1799 – January 1801. The Hokuidan manuscript has not yet been translated into any of the European languages other than Russian. The author of this article provided translations of fragments of the written source in the chapters of published collective monographs. The translation was carried out from the published text of the Japanese manuscript in the ten-volume series of written monuments entitled “Collection of Historical Materials About the Life of Common People of Japan” (Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryō shūsei 日 本庶民生活史料集成). We also used the original manuscript that is kept in the National Archives of Japan.
This research examines the failure of Japanese whale diplomacy following the International Whaling Commission’s (IWC) moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986, with a focus on Japan’s attempts to change the conservationist view of whales to the one focused on consumption of whale meat. This article explains how Japanese whale diplomacy attempts to convince the international public that whaling is part of cultural preservation. The method used is a qualitative approach with analysis of official government documents and research related to Japanese diplomacy and whaling. The constructivism approach was used to analyze how international identities, norms, and discourses shape Japan’s diplomatic policies.The findings show that, despite Japan’s efforts to prove that whaling is safe and sustainable, it has failed to change international norms on whale conservation. The dominant international discourse continues to regard whaling as unethical and environmentally damaging. Significant resistance from other countries that support conservation was a major obstacle.This research reveals that the failure of Japanese diplomacy was not only due to international resistance, but also Japan’s inability to align their scientific and cultural arguments with a global narrative that prioritizes environmental ethics. The contribution of this research lies in understanding the dynamics of norms and identities in international relations and the importance of ethical narratives in environmental diplomacy.
This study clarifies the meaning of direct evidential markers in Korean and examines their semantic characteristics using a multi-store memory model. Korean direct evidential markers are categorized into those indicating either “present perception-based knowledge” or “past acquisition-based knowledge.” The former are subdivided into “unaccepted present perception-based knowledge” (-네 -ney) and “accepted present perception-based knowledge” (-군 -kwun), and the latter into “knowledge derived from past perception” (-더라 -tela) and “knowledge integrated into personal or general understanding” (-지 -ci). Within the multi-store memory model, -네 -ney aligns with the indicator of the maintenance rehearsal process, while -군 -kwun serves as an indicator of elaborative rehearsal, and -더라 -tela and -지 -ci correspond to retrieval indicators from long-term memory.
The article offers a critical review of the Russian edition of the comic novel Footing it Along the Tōkaidō by an outstanding writer of the Tokugawa era (1603–1868) Jippenshya Ikku. Recently published by Saint Petersburg’s Hyperion, the novel was masterfully translated from Japanese by Anastassya Y. Borkina who thoroughly studied this complex observational comedy of manners or humerous book (kokkeibon) and provided the necessary analytical apparatus, including commentaries and a preface. The narrative develops around the adventures of two characters, Yajirobei and Kitahachi, who embark on a journey along the so-called Tōkaidō road, the most important of the routes of Japan, connecting Edo and Kyoto. They meet various personages from a variety of cities and regions as well as from different strata of society, getting themselves into farcical situations and every time finding their way out of comic conundrums. The road itself works as a central axis of the story, propelling the characters forward and offering diverse settings for their escapades. The novel with illustrations by the writer was especially popular in nineteenth century Japan, yet the adventures of Yajirobei and Kitahachi remain well-known up until today, providing inspiration for a trove of literary parodies, manga novels, anime books, and video games.
The article describes two theater performances: the first took place in the Chinese Theater of Tsarskoye Selo in the summer of 1803, and the second one (or, rather a series of guest performances) – a hundred years later, in 1902, in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The first performance was shown for Emperor Alexander I and his guests including the Japanese sailors who were leaving for their motherland with Ivan F. Kruzenshtern’s global circumnavigation. The description of the performance the Japanese sailors left became part of the manuscript Kankai Ibun (“Surprising Information about the Seas Surrounding [Earth]”) written in 1807. The performances of 1902 were presented by the Kabuki guest company headed by Otojirō Kawakami with actress Sada Yacco, the star of the company, attracting most attention. The performances shown in Russia aroused a mixed reaction among spectators and art critics, which is proven by periodical editions of those days. The article analyzes specific perception of foreign-language theater culture reflected in the spectators’ descriptions and concludes that, regardless of the reaction to strange and unusual things, the acquaintance with other culture dramatically broadens the spectator’s horizons and allows discerning something new in one’s national culture.
The Adaptive Control hypothesis and relevant empirical evidence in bilingualism literature have revealed the adaptive nature of bilingual language control in skilled languages, while the language control processes at the very initial stage of new language learning have not been examined. The present study investigated how the individual differences in inhibition ability and language switching experience influence the controlling process of newly learned languages, using event related potentials (ERPs) technology. We first assessed the language switching frequency and inhibition ability of Chinese-English bilinguals on Day 1. Then, all bilinguals learned words from new languages (namely German and Japanese words) during the next six days and completed a comprehension-based language switching task between the newly learned languages on Day 8. Results of mixed-effects models on the behavioral data showed that there were no switching costs (i.e., derived by contrasting switch trials with repeat trials) and no predictive effect of individual difference on the language switching between newly learned languages. However, the ERPs results revealed switching costs and individual difference effects in N2 and LPC. The language switching frequency significantly predicted the variability of the N2 and LPC, and the inhibition ability modulated the switch effect in Japanese as showed in the LPC. These findings suggest that individual differences predict comprehension-based language control be-tween the newly learned languages, providing new evidence for the adaptability of language control from a language comprehension perspective.
In the mid-1940s, Taiwan underwent a change of ruling power from colonial Japan to the Kuomintang Party from China. Both governments implemented monolingualization on the Taiwanese population. In this article, we examine the situation translingual position in a historical aspect, dwelling in detail on the work of the outstanding Taiwanese poet Chen Qianwu. We come to several conclusions that may be useful to researchers in the field of translingual literature. 1. Taiwans translingual poets, born in the 1920s, found themselves in a situation of permanent code switching: using the local dialects of Hokkien and Hakka in everyday practice, they were trained in Japanese and used Japanese in a wider society. 2. Although the switch between one monolingual paradigm and another violated the creative result of translational authors, this did not exclude the experience of multilingual realities and interlingual influences that they experienced from the fragmentation of local identities, especially during the development and formation of Taiwanese linguistic consciousness. 3. The literary intermediaries between the paradigms were: the classical Chinese writing, brought with the first immigrants from China; vernacular Chinese writing, influenced by the New Literary Movement in the 1920s; Taiwanese writing based on the most common dialects, Hokkien and Hakka (the idea of speaking and writing in unison); Japanese writing, which was originally studied in school along with Chinese, but supplanted it. The switch from Japanese, the colonial official language, to Mandarin Chinese, the postcolonial official language, led to a so-called translingual generation of literary writers. While the switch from one monolingual paradigm to another disrupted the creative output of the translingual generation, it did not prevent these writers from developing a Taiwanese consciousness. As illustrated by the poet Chen Qianwu, language crossing experiences strengthened the translingual generations assertion of their local identities.
unintentionally. Because communication is essential, the use of language becomes the main thing for social life. In line with this, the use of language in each nation also has its characteristics. One is in Japan, which has a unique way of communicating, Aizuchi. Aizuchi is a form of response so that the speaker feels heard and understood by the listener. In this era of globalization, when technology is increasingly sophisticated, it is also easier for humans to communicate through podcast media as one of the audiovisual media that can be listened to anywhere and anytime because the platform for listening or watching it is straightforward to access. This study's data source was taken from the Yuyu no Sekai Podcast in the episode "[Gesuto: Chō-san] Vol. 01 - Myanmā tte don'na kuni?". This study aims to find out the differences in the use of aizuchi in Japanese and Myanmar people fluent in Japanese in the episode "[Gesuto: Chō-san] Vol. 01 - Myanmā tte don'na kuni?". The theory used in this researchis the theory of Mayumi Kutoba. This research method uses a descriptive qualitative type, with the collection method being the listening and Simak Bebas Libat Cakap listening techniques. The data contained in this study amounted to 51 data divided into 10 Kiiteiru to iu shingou functions, 14 Rikaishiteiru to iu shingou functions, 10 Doui no shingou functions, 9 Kanjyou noshingou functions, 6 Ma wo motaseru shingou functions, 1 Hitei no shingou function and 1 Jyouhou wo tsuika, teisei, youkyuu no shingou function.
Abstract While the ‘global countryside’ advocates networked and differentiated rural realities, the platform of discussing and disseminating those is usually, and sometimes inevitably, monolingual. The language of academic research creates its own politics, exclusions and inequalities: ubiquitous and universal uses of the term ‘rural’, particularly in non-Anglophone contexts (through translation for example), mask a series of nuanced, but critical understandings which reduce the quality of debate in rural studies. Drawing on the literature around language politics, we explore interpretations of rurality in Greek and Japanese linguistic contexts and we contrast those with English. We call for more critical approaches on how rural scholars use, and translate, notions of ‘the rural’. In certain contexts, this might mean avoiding the term ‘rural’ altogether and using original and informal terms in the languages of actual fieldwork. We thus support terms that communities use to describe their own spatial identities. Such actions undermine the hegemony of Anglophone ‘rural’ research and introduce nuances that are needed in international debates – despite the challenge of explaining those in a single (in fact, any) language.
Abstract Animacy, commonly defined as the distinction between living and non-living entities, is a useful notion in cognitive science and linguistics employed to describe and predict variation in psychological and linguistic behaviour. In the (psycho)linguistics literature we find linguistic animacy dichotomies which are (implicitly) assumed to correspond to biological dichotomies. We argue this is problematic, as it leaves us without a cognitively grounded, universal description for non-prototypical cases. We show that ‘animacy’ in language can be better understood as universally emerging from a gradual, cognitive property by collecting animacy ratings for a great range of nouns from Japanese and Persian. We used these cognitive ratings in turn to predict linguistic variation in these languages traditionally explained through dichotomous distinctions. We show that whilst (speakers of) languages may subtly differ in their conceptualisation of animacy, universality may be found in the process of mapping conceptual animacy to linguistic variation.
Although Japanese language is one of the most quoted examples in speech acts and politeness research, current publications focus on distinct areas of criticism speech acts and politeness. Very few of them enquire into the varied aspects of politeness strategy in criticism speech acts. Furthermore, politeness strategies of Japanese criticism speech acts via movie media are minimally explored. This study aims to show how the Japanese criticism strategies are represented in the media. Using a qualitative approach involving note-taking methods, the study analyzed dialogues containing criticism in Boruto: Naruto Next Generation by Noriyuki Abe. The data were then recorded and analyzed using criticism of speech acts and politeness theory by Brown and Levinson (1987). The findings revealed that direct and indirect criticism speech acts were the most commonly used strategies in the movie. Several politeness strategies displayed in the movie also included bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off record politeness strategies.
Japanese are known to have a very unique work culture. One of the characteristics of Japanese work culture is detail oriented, paying attention even to small things and details. This study aims to clarify how the practice of Mekubari (Watchfulness) and Kikubari (Attentiveness) between superiors to subordinates in the communication frame in Japanese companies in Indonesia. The methods in this study are case study, literature studies, focus group discussion, and interview of 25 workers of Japanese Company in Indonesia, with various position from staff to manager. The results show that the practice of Mekubari (Watchfulness) and Kikubari (Attentiveness) implemented between superiors to subordinates communication can affect to work performance. The results also show the benefits and obstacles while the respondents implemented Mekubari (Watchfulness) and Kikubari (Attentiveness) at work. The findings of the study have some pedagogical implications, as an effort to improve communication skill from graduates of Japanese language education study programs in society, especially into Japanese companies or institutions that use Japanese language as a
This research discusses expressions of apology in Japanese by Javanese and Sundanese speakers at Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta. The apology differs between Japanese and Indonesian. Apologizing to the Japanese uses many reasons, the Japanese may distrust the speech partner and cause misunderstanding. In learning Japanese, Javanese-speaking learners are different from Sundanese-speaking learners because their culture also influences them. This research aims to determine the strategy of apology expression by Japanese language learners who speak Javanese and Sundanese as seen from the semantic formula and the differences between the two. This research used a descriptive method with a qualitative approach to describe the strategy of apologizing in Japanese by Javanese and Sundanese mother tongue learners using semantic formulas. Respondents were UMY students from level 2 and level 3 PBJ Study Program with 15 Javanese speaking students and 15 Sundanese speaking students. This research showed that most Japanese learners who speak Javanese and Sundanese tended to use the Speech Act Indication Expression (apology and appreciation) when expressing Japanese apologies. They used polite language ultimately when apologizing to lecturers.
This study aims to analyze the effectiveness of STEAM project-based learning in enhancing students’ Japanese speaking skills in online classrooms. This study used true experimental research with pre-test and post-test control group design involving 42 vocational high school student participants majoring in hotel and accommodation. They were divided into two classes, namely the control class, and the experiment class. Data were gathered through pre-and post-interviews and questionnaires for both control and experiment classes and treatment to control class. The result shows STEAM project-based learning is effective in enhancing the students’ Japanese speaking skills in online classrooms. The students’ speaking skill improvement supports the positive result of STEAM project-based learning effectiveness. The participants were more eager to speak in Japanese after a few treatments compare to the control class. It also shows how the STEAM project-based learning treatments affect the students’ motivation in speaking Japanese. The questionnaire results supported the data; the students from the experiment class agreed that STEAM project-based learning could motivate them to speak Japanese in the online classroom. Accordingly, STEAM project-based learning could be used for enhancing Japanese speaking skills in the online classroom.
This study explores the views of Indonesian workers on the communication aspect in Japanese workplace. In particular, this study aims to interpret the employees’ communication patterns in the company which involve procedures like greeting, receiving instructions, making appointments, using polite languages, giving signals, etc. It also examines the differences and similarities between Japanese and Indonesian communication patterns in the workplace. Research participants in this study were thirteen Indonesian workers which data collected through interviews. The results showed that most of the informants perceived the Japanese work culture as a reflection of disciplined behaviour, detail orientation, collective values, loyalty, and politeness. The aspects of Japanese work patterns that are common to Indonesian culture are politeness, collective values, and loyalty. On the other hand, there are quite large differences between the work patterns of Japan and Indonesia, namely discipline and detail orientation. The quite striking result of this study is that almost all participants stated that in all aspects of communication patterns and work rules in Indonesia is much looser than Japanese. As a follow-up to this research, it is necessary to examine and explore how the strategies of Indonesian workers adjust to the Japanese communication culture.
This research aims to investigate the pragmatic transfer of Japanese language learners' request expressions and its comparison with expressions conveyed by Japanese native speakers. In this study, a qualitative descriptive method was used with the DCT instrument to collect data on the expression of requests for students and native speakers. The respondents were 33 university students of Japanese learners in Bandung and 10 native speakers. Interviews were also conducted on 5 Japanese learners and 3 native speakers. The comparison between the expressions of the learners and native speakers is seen based on the use of words or phrases that make the learners' expressions can be categorized as pragmatic transfers. Pragmatic transfer in the learner's expression is analyzed by using the pragmatic transfers’ theory adopted from Hitomi's (2017) research. The results demonstrate that pragma-linguistics is seen in the learner's error in using the combination of kureru/morau with Japanese sentence patterns, The errors were due to the differences between the giver and recipient of the request in Indonesian and Japanese. Meanwhile, socio-pragmatics can be seen in the similarities between Japanese and Indonesian cultures by using the word sorry in their expressions of request.
Youth language is a language gap between the elders and the youths. The purpose of this research is to describe youth language or slang, which in Japanese is called wakamono kotoba. The data was collected from YouTube content because YouTube has a large number of viewers. Both Japanese and Indonesian contents included 48 youth slang. The technique of comparing each category and characteristic of Japanese and Indonesian youth slang was used as an analysis. The explanation of the forms of how youth language is formed will be put in the categories based on the youth language formations theory by Tanaka (1996). The result revealed that Indonesian youth slang formation was dominated by abbreviation formations. While in Japanese, it is dominated by the formation of flattening the accent and characterization. Moreover, Japanese youth languages have the addition of nouns and auxiliary verbs because the Japanese language has Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana letters.