This year, I’ve have the wonderful opportunity to be an invited speaker at a number of conferences and events. While it would have been great to have done a few in person, the side benefit of online delivery is that we were able to record all of these discussions of my research and areas of expertise for public access. I have publicized most of these videos on Twitter already, and they’ve all been available on my Free Resources page for a while. But I thought it would be good to put all of them together here for easy access, and so I could give a few notes on what they are all about!
1. Introducing and Understanding Non-Standard Script Use in Contemporary Japan
This isn’t the first presentation I gave this year, but I’m going to start this overview with it as it is the presentation I designed the most directly for general audiences. As a researcher, the majority of my career so far has focused on nonstandard use of script in Japanese. That is, things like writing loan words in hiragana or kanji (e.g., コーヒー as 珈琲 or こうひい), or using katakana for grammatical particles.
In this presentation, I focus on a broad overview of the reasons why these kinds of variation (as in the image above) occur. The presentation came about due to in invite from Monash University’s Japanese Language Education Centre and the Japan Foundation Sydney. Due to COVID, their yearly National Symposium on Japanese Language Education (NSJLE) was put on hold, so my speech was part of a series of talks designed to “fill the gap” until a time when the symposium could run again, with each designed to cover a topic that the average Japanese teacher might be interested in but not aware of. And certainly, script variation is something that hits this bill! At the bare minimum, it is something that anyone who has been to Japan (or read a manga or other “casual” text) has seen, but most textbooks don’t touch on at all! The popular textbook Genki for instance, only notes that scripts have “normal” uses or are “mostly” used for things. What is “abnormal” or happens in “not mostly” cases is left up to your imagination.
In this talk, I therefore tried to shed light on these “edge” cases, and explain what might cause someone to write a word like フランス as ふらんす, 私 as ワタシ, or any other form of “nonstandard” script use. To sum everything up, there are five main reasons I cover here:
- Variation can’t be stopped, and is just going to happen to some extent
- Script variation helps with legibility, issues of space, drawing attention to words, and other practical concerns
- Japanese people view the scripts in different ways (e.g., hiragana is cute, kanji is old, katakana is futuristic) and can use unconventional representations to draw upon these images
- Forms of marked script use, just like certain words, accents, or pronouns, are linked to social actors in Japan, and can evoke and/or show alignment with them
- Script play is a form of language play, and language play is fun!
While some of these reasons (especially 3 & 4) can get a little complex, I did my best here to keep things as broad and simple as possible. So ideally this speech is completely accessible to someone who is familiar with Japanese but might not know about (or care about!) sociolinguistic theories and all that stuff that I love. The only limitation is that it does come with an expectation you are familiar with the basics of written Japanese.
2. The Sociolinguistics of Japanese Script
This second presentation is actually the first one I gave this year. I was really excited for this one, as I was invited by Dr. Mayuko Inagawa. I first met Dr. Inagawa when I was still doing my master’s, as she used to teach at Monash University. So it was a really great chance to reconnect a bit as part of her awesome work with Cardiff University and their Japanese Language Seminar Series. The entire series was great, so be sure to check out the rest of the lectures too.
The speech I gave for this lecture is much more socio-linguistics focused than the first one, but is still aimed at a general audience familiar with Japanese. The audience were not linguists, but just Japanese students interested in language, so don’t stress if you aren’t a linguist! I start the presentation by going through the basic theoretical concepts necessary to follow along.
Basically, to contrast this speech with the first one, I go into much higher detail here about the fourth major reason for variation in Japanese. The data I cover in this presentation includes findings from a few articles I’ve written and some chapters of my recent book, as well as a few things I’ve stumbled across since then. The final goal of the whole presentation is to explain what it means for script variation to be a “socially meaningful” in written Japanese, and why something that doesn’t exist in speech has been able to transform into a place where social meaning is made.
3. Ojisan Gokko Shiyo!: Contesting Graphic Ideologies in Online Japanese Language Play
In September, I was invited to give a lecture and host a masterclass on sociolinguistics as part of Monash University’s Linguistics & Applied Linguistics Lecture Series. Unlike the prior two presentations, this one was aimed at an audience with a linguistic background. So in contrast to the other two presentations, in this one I had to prepare something that assumed a bit more linguistic knowledge and interest on the part of the audience, and spend time introducing Japanese writing instead.
This was an exciting presentation for me, as it was the first public presentation of some really interesting data I spent most of 2019 collecting and coding. The formal, official publication version of this topic will come out in Japanese Studies in early 2022. But I have written up a short overview of the topic for my blog. Basically, in this talk I look at a rather strange and hilarious phenomenon where young Japanese women text each other as though they were old, lecherous men (who they call ojisan). My talk covers why the young women are doing this, the various steps required to “become” an ojisan, and why the parody identity involves so many distinct applications of script, kaomoji, and emoji.
Unfortunately, the live recording of this presentation didn’t get fully recorded. I was able to re-record it though, and I’m hosting it on my (otherwise currently unused) YouTube channel! It was a lot of fun preparing and giving this talk, so I hope that comes through even in a speech that isn’t “live” in the traditional sense.
4. Language & Identity in Japanese Extreme Metal
My fourth presentation this year featured some of the most recent data I’ve been gathering, as it draws from a recent publication of mine and a paper that I have under review. Over the last few years, I’ve been investigating why Japanese extreme metal artists choose to use (or avoid) certain language forms in their lyrics. This is part of a larger study I’m doing with Dr. Jess Birnie-Smith, where we examine issues of language, identity, and “scale” in extreme metal lyrics in Australia, Japan, Indonesia, and Taiwan. We hope to start writing a book on this topic next year, and if all goes well it should see print in 2023.
Anyway, I was invited to give this speech by Dr. Hannah Dahlberg-Dodd, who has done some really great recent work applying theories and ideas from Japanese sociolinguistics to contemporary media. She organized a whole group of great presentations for the series, including Dr. Nakamura Momoko’s talk on Gendered First Person Pronouns and Dr. Claire Maree’s lecture on Language Labor and queerqueen (always lowercase!) Talk, and Dr. Sven Osterkamp’s dive into Script and Identity in Edo Japan. I’ve been in touch with these researchers for a while, and been drawing on their work for even longer, so it was an absolute honor and delight to be featured with all of them here!
My talk looks specifically at how and why (i.e., by which language forms and for what motives) three Japanese extreme metal bands revisit Japan’s history and myths through their lyrics. The data comes from interviews with the lyricists of Gotsu Totsu Kotsu, Allegiance Reign, and Rakshasa, which is combined with deep-dive analysis of their lyrics. In going through these various data sources, I show how although the bands borrow some trends from one another and also “translate” practices in the English language metal scene, they are not simply copying the behavior of other bands (in Japan or abroad). Rather, each artist uses distinct forms for distinct purposes, or at times even does what looks to be “the same thing” as the others but for completely different reasons, with their choices drawing on complex influences, pressures, and understandings of what it means to be “metal” (and if it matters whether you are “metal”!). These understandings themselves are then also in flux, and under the sway of influences created abroad, in Japan, and in even smaller local scenes.
Also, for the first time ever I had an entire speech dubbed in Japanese as part of this project! Kind of a surreal experience to be honest, but I have to give extreme props to the poor dubber who did a great job converting my super fast English into understandable Japanese. Really impressed by her work here. I hope she gets some kind of raise!
And then after the seminar series was all done, a bunch of us sat down to chat about language and language research in contemporary Japanese! I never feel super comfortable talking “off the cuff” like this, but I had a great time discussing topics with all these other researchers.
5. Book Stuff
Finally, I also had the opportunity to give a few talks about my recent book Scripting Japan. The first was part of my university’s New Books Seminar Series, where I sat down with my long time friend and colleague Dr. Thomas Baudinette to discuss the background of my book and the work that went into bringing it from an idea into a reality.
I then was also honored to be featured in an interview for the New Books Network series on Japanese. I had a great time sitting down with Jingyi Li to discuss script and language in Japanese in a more casual setting than I usually do, and, of course, ramble about some of my favorite topics!
And that’s it for my lectures in 2021 (or at least, I assume, there’s a whole month left!). I hope that these videos are of use and interest to students of Japanese, linguistic, and, well, whoever! I certainly hope to have even more open lectures over the upcoming years as well, especially as I move into new topics and data. Thanks for your time in giving my talks a listen!
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Scripting Japan 
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