Just a quick update: the free level 2 textbook I created has been updated for 2024. This includes a number of adjustments to highlighting and phrasing, a few typo/error fixes, and, most importantly, the answer key to the workbook is now part of the main document. You can download the textbook here or via the Free Resources page.
Introduces plain form and ~て form, guides you through their basic uses
This is probably the last major update of the Level 2 textbook. I hope to have the Level 3+ textbook ready to go by end of July, at least as a first draft.
If you enjoy my writing, considering subscribing to get articles sent directly to your email! We also appreciate contributions via Ko-Fi to help keep this website ad-free.
Just a quick update: I have a new publication out in Japan Forum… and it’s open access, so you can read it even if you don’t have a university/library account! This was a really fun collaborative project with the amazing Dr. Alexandra Hambleton and Dr. Mie Hiramoto, both excellent scholars who I’ve been citing and influenced by for some time. This project came out of informal chats as fans of the show Aggressive Retsuko, wherein I mentioned that I was starting a research project looking at the language use throughout. Alex and Mie noted that my conclusions were similar to things they had thought about when watching the show, but referencing different critical literature in their own areas of expertise. As a result, we decided to sit down and create a combined project which analyzed Aggressive Retsuko from distinct perspectives, all contributing to better understand what it means to be both “Sanrio” and “transgressive”.
Where’s the lie?
My primary contributions here were as the overall project lead, which was super easy to do given how excellent my co-authors were, and the sociolinguistics section. The data collection was no joke… I had to write down every single line of dialogue the main character of the show said. But it allowed for some really clear analysis, so it was worth it. The review process also took a bit – one of the common problems with trying to get cross-disciplinary work out – but the paper came out stronger for it. And unlike most of my peer-reviewed work, we got it published Open Access thanks to my university, so if you’re curious you can read it here:
I hope you have as much fun reading this as we had writing it! I’m honestly not sure if I’ll have more research outputs come OUT this year, but there’s a whole bunch slated for early 2025, with late 2024 being a dream scenario. I know this blog is mostly about more casual stuff, but I’m glad that for once I can announce some academic stuff that is actually available for people to read even without having to be an academic! And that’s it for this blog post! See you in the next one!
If you enjoy my writing, considering subscribing to get articles sent directly to your email! We also appreciate contributions via Ko-Fi to help keep this website ad-free.
Just a quick update to note that I have a new peer-reviewed article out! “Kvetching Abovt Kvlt” is my first ever paper that has nothing to do with Japanese at all. It was a lot of fun to branch outside of my normal research area for this, and do some sociolinguistic work on English-language subcultural practices. You can read the article in the newest issues of Metal Music Studies!
In all its abstract glory
I don’t plan on doing any non-Japanese stuff like this in the near future, but who knows? For this one, since I’ve been working on Japanese metal language practices, I wanted to try to expand what I’ve been doing to communicate with the metal studies field that influenced my Japanese work so much. It was therefore really great to get a good reception, as I really wanted to do something that showed a developed understanding of their field.
Hopefully I’ll have at least 2 other publications out this year, if not more. I know most people subscribe to this blog for slang and trivia stuff, but if you’re also a follower of my quote-unquote “real” research, I hope you enjoy this piece! See you all in a bit for the March slang review.
If you enjoy my writing, considering subscribing to get articles sent directly to your email! We also appreciate contributions via Ko-Fi to help keep this website ad-free.
Just a quick update: the free introductory textbook I created has been updated for 2024. This includes a number of adjustments to highlighting and phrasing, a few typo/error fixes, and, most importantly, the answer key to the workbook is now part of the main document. You can download the textbook here or via the Free Resources page.
Starts from 0, moves into basic grammar and conversation!
This is probably the last major update of the Level 1 textbook, and a similar update to the Level 2 textbook will happen next semester. By then, I also hope to have the Level 3+ textbook ready to go, at least as a first draft.
If you enjoy my writing, considering subscribing to get articles sent directly to your email! We also appreciate contributions via Ko-Fi to help keep this website ad-free.
In 2021, I wrote my first ever end-of-year post to take stock of what I’ve done, and prepare myself (and the kind few people who are interested in my research) for what’s next. I found that creating this kind of reflection was quite useful, so I kept it up in 2022. And now, of course, I am doing the same here now in 2023. In looking back, I think some of my earlier posts lacked a bit of structure, so here’s an attempt at something more straightforward. Here’s what I’ve been doing in 2023 as broken up across three sections: formal research, more casual activities like this blog, and projects I hope will see the light of day in 2024.
Formal Research Outputs
This year was a slow one for getting studies actually published. In 2022 I saw a whopping four of my articles come out, plus an introduction to a special issue I organized with Dr. Tamaki Mihic of USyd. In contrast, this year I published one article. Quite the gap! It was a fun one though, which I wrote with my good friend and frequent co-collaborator Dr. Jess Kruk. We were invited to join a special issue of the journal Perfect Beat focusing on extreme music in Aotearoa/New Zealand. As our time was limited when we got the request, we proposed an annotated version of an interview we’d done with Matt Hyde of the sludge metal band Beastwars for our podcast Lingua Brutallica, and to our delight the organizers said “yes”! It was an interesting project; our work involved cleaning up the interview and surrounding it with linguistic commentary/context, which isn’t something we’d done before. But I’m really happy with how it turned out in the end, and it’s always great to publish in a journal that doesn’t focus on your main research area, and engage with research from other fields while doing so…
…but that’s all my publications (aside from a book review) that actually came out! The reason for this low number, I’m happy to say, is not due to laziness on my part. Rather, due to the slow nature of publishing in academia, everything I completed this year is scheduled to see the light of day in 2024. It’s done! You just can’t read it yet unless you hack into my computer or something (please don’t do that just ask I’m happy to send pre-pub PDFs).
The biggest project which will come out in 2024, barring some kind of horrible crisis, is my second book! Currently titled Peripheral Linguistic Brutality: Metal Languaging in the Asia Pacific, this project is the culmination with work I’ve been doing with Jess since 2020. Back when we started working together, our entirely plan was just to interview two extreme metal artists in Asia about their lyric writing processes, trying to see what happened when artists tried to produce “metalness” via a non-English (and non-European!) language. This first step resulted in an article in Language & Communication, a journal we had both tried to publish in before and been rejected from. So by our powers combined! and all that.
When we finished, however, we quickly realized that there was a lot more to say about this topic, so we decided to expand the project. Over the next few years, we conducted dozens of interviews with artists throughout the Asia Pacific to figure out how their creation of “metal language” responded to local metal language practices, international ones, and the “non-metal” language practices which surrounded them. The book has been moved through to formal peer review by our first-choice publisher, so barring an absolutely horrific response we should be able to get it into people’s hands by 2024. We’re really proud of this, and hope you’re just as excited to read it as we are to get it out. Also, it has the best table of contents in history.
See? SEE?
Beyond completing the first draft of the book, I’ve also produced three journal articles and a book chapter. One article is in press, and will be out early 2024. This is also metal-related sociolinguistics, and the first solo paper I’ve ever written which has nothing to do with Japanese. If you aren’t familiar with metal language use, the word “kvlt” (pronounced “cult”) has long been an peculiar linguistic feature of the scene – especially the black metal scene. But while there’s lots of talk about “kvlt” to date, there isn’t much research into how it is actually being used. To fill this gap, I scanned two online forums centering around metal fandom to figure out exactly how this word is being applied and discussed, noting discrepancies between how black-metal focused forums and more general forums use the term, and how individuals apply it to compliment, (self-)critique, and set the boundaries of the scene.
Here’s the abstract
My favorite part of this project was coding all the various uses of “kvlt” in context, dividing them between “positive”, “neutral”, and “negative” uses. A pre-final-edit version of my discussion of this process in the paper can be seen below. The reason I found it enjoyable was because people’s use and discussion of “kvlt” was often quite amusing, with lots of variety among the online discourse. I hope this shows through clearly in the selected quotes. Note that while the quotes below all come from anonymous forums, they have all been altered slightly to further protect poster anonymity. The full article will be out in Metal Music Studies next year, so check it out then to see more!
The red lines obviously won’t be in the final version
The second paper is then an analysis of the gendered transgression found in the TV shorts/Netflix show Aggretsuko. This is a co-authored paper, written with Dr. Mie Hiramoto and Dr. Alexandra Hambleton, two amazing scholars without whom I could have never completed the project. This is another “by our powers combined” project, as we each draw on our own specialties to analyze what it means to be both “trangressive” and “Sanrio”. My part, unsurprisingly, is focused on linguistic analysis, looking at the language features which divide the main character’s “death metal voice” from their “normal” speech, and analyzing if/how this allows for deviation from gendered patterns of language use seen in other anime products. One of the many tables I produced is below:
This is only the first 3/5 seasons, as 4-5 weren’t out when we started
The third and final paper is then part of an upcoming special issue on katakana. The overall project isn’t mine, so I’ll keep details regarding contributors/intended journal light for now, but my contribution is ready to go. In this paper, I’m looking at dialogues about katakana use in contemporary Japan. This examination of script is in part inseparable from dialogues about loan words in Japan, an issue I note extensively in my introduction…
This took a long time to write but it’s something I had to unpack
…but also I analyze discourse around the marked use of katakana for non-loans. A particularly important source of said discourse is discussions of the use of katakana for the names of Japanese individuals. What particularly surprised me is that within the negative viewpoints (which did not extensively outnumber the positive ones) writers were often responding to issues within Japan rather than just the idea that “katakana is for foreign names”. For instance, many people disliked katakana names because they associated them with older women, reflecting an evidencable trend in naming practices (see the charts in this open access research study). Others though opposed katakana naming because they viewed this very trend as rooted in an older, sexist belief that women didn’t need kanji names. That is, the problem isn’t that the names are now “old fashioned”, it’s that they reflect a legacy of thinking women weren’t important enough for kanji. There were also more minor gripes as well, such as people who believed katakana names were only for dogs. All together though, these beliefs show people attending very closely to katakana use around them and discussing use in the past in a way that is highly dynamic. There was also some fun discussion of why people use katakana for Japanese words that aren’t names though too, like this post below.
“Why do some people on this forum use katakana in weird places?”
The addition to this article that I think is the most important though is an overview of how Japanese learners understand unexpected katakana use. As I noted in my first book, textbooks don’t really provide any guides to katakana use beyond “it’s use for loan words… usually”. While loan words represent the primary use of katakana, certainly, it’s far from the full story. Given that learners of Japanese therefore eventually encounter wago/kango written in katakana, they obviously get a bit confused. And one place they go to undue this confusion is www.reddit.com/r/learnjapanese. Now if you were to go there and ask why katakana is used for wago/kango, this is the likelihood of each type of answer you would get.
“Style/generic” means “individual preference” or “it just happens”, “marked speech” means “conveys accent”, and “old texts/tech” refers to historical writing or early videogames
Not bad, to be honest! All of these are legit explanations in some contexts. And some people also noted that katakana can produce certain affects, such as “cold” or “cool” feelings. But this latter camp was made up of only 24 comments total. In contrast, there were no comments about the social practices I discussed earlier. As a result, I end the paper by noting a need for awareness raising in Japanese education, as it seems that few learners are aware that katakana (non-)use often responds to katakana use of other social groups. It was a fun paper to write, and I hope you can see it next year!
Finally, I also completed a book chapter for an upcoming text on language ideologies in Japan. My focus here was on ideologies centered around Japanese script-use, with a particular interest in practices that developed after the Second World War. This chapter is more of a review of studies and phenomena to date rather than a research project; it’s the kind of thing I hope is really useful as an assigned reading in Japanese culture classes more than analysis of newly harvested data. But I got to summarize a lot of really great and interesting work here, as well as create some fun images, like this very cursed representation of Iroha in gyarumoji…
You’re welcome!
…and I was even able to draw on some recent practices I noted in my slang reviews, such as the idiosyncratic script use of the “plastic surgery talent” Allen produces as part of their “kurimango” language style.
Seems like it takes a long time to type but it does stand out.
Beyond that, I also will have the book chapter on Japanese media research I wrote last year some out in 2024 or 2025. So low publications this year, but lots of writing, and lots of work. I’m delighted to say I still find the research I’m doing fun and exciting after six years, and I hope you’ll have a blast reading them when they come out!
Informal Research Outputs
The first informal research output to talk about is, of course, this blog! When I started blogging in 2020, I was hoping to have an outlet for more casual research that wasn’t paywalled by academic journals, and try to find a way to use my skills for the benefit/interest of Japanese users around the world. It’s been great to see this goal bear fruit, as in 2023 I have seen interest and visitors grow in leaps and bounds. By end of year, almost 35,000 people have checked out what I’m doing a total of almost 55,000 times. That’s just wonderful, so thanks to all of you for being here.
Really delighted to see this.
All in all, it was a busy year for blogging! There were the eleven slang reviews so far (12 comes out on the 31st!), the updates to the dictionary, and, if you missed them, a whopping 11 other posts:
That’s way more than I expected, and some of them, such as the Twitter questions and “Things I Learned” series, I hope to do much more of in 2024. So quite happy with how much writing I’ve squeezed in through my free moments this year.
I’ve also been doing the old social media nonsense, where I make the internet suffer through my bad puns and memes. And occasionally produce things that are actually worth reading. Maybe. Probably not. Anyway, through this I’ve now somehow hit over 9000 followers on Twitter (and so, yes, I did get to do the DBZ meme I was very happy)…
…and I’m slowly developing my portfolio on Bluesky. It’s by far the best Twitter alternative I’ve tried, and so I’m sticking around. I haven’t bailed on Twitter yet, but that’s probably coming sooner than later. So if you’re over on the new place, hit me up! There’s no question that its smaller than Twitter still, but the community is quite active and there’s much less vile stuff just shoved into your timeline.
We’ve also made some major milestones with our podcast Lingua Brutallica. As of December, we’ve officially produced 50 episodes interviewing metal artists and scholars about their lyrical habits. The chance to interview artists around the world, learn about their craft, and even make some formal connections with major labels has been great, and we really can’t wait to see what happens next year. Our editor Jon did a great job with this poster covering our 2023 bands to celebrate our “line up” for this year.
It’s been fun!
If you don’t like metal but do like Japanese, consider checking out this year’s interview with Isiliel (Spotify) or last year’s with Sigh (Spotify/YouTube), as they focus on language use in Japanese. And hey, if you like the interviews, consider subscribing! We’ve already got the first EP of 2024 done and ready to go.
And last but not least, I’ve also begun working with English Journal Online to translate some of my Japanese slang research into, well, Japanese. You can check it out here. It’s been a fun project so far, and am very much looking forward to keeping it up in 2023.
Currently growing my beard back actually
Projects in 2024
In terms of research, 2024 is mainly going to be focused on getting out the research I did this year. There’s a few other projects in the works though. One is a study with Dr. Mie Hiramoto on discourse around men’s VIO, or hair removal in your private areas. Not a topic I ever expected to be working on, but I’ve very much enjoyed working with her these last few years and she invited me on, so I’m happy to help out. We’ve done a presentation on the topic and have another scheduled for a conference in Perth next year, but haven’t set down and written the study itself yet. Hopefully the paper itself will get written and see the light of day end of 2024 or early 2025.
I analyzed discourse around the topic on the website Girls Channel. Negative responses fell between these categories.
I’m not doing too much other research in 2024, for reasons that I’ll be announcing next year, but I do plan to get at least one individual project completed and keep all the blogging etc. going. I also sent out my first ever grant proposal this year for something that I very, very much hope will be happening next year, and I’ll announce it in March/April if it goes through. It’s incredibly exciting, but it requires funding, so if you don’t hear anything from me… I suppose that means bad news. In contrast, if it goes through, you absolutely will be hearing about it here, so keep your finger on the F5 button I suppose.
The other big side project I’m planning to complete next year is my third textbook! At the time of writing, I’m finishing Chapter 9 out of 12, and I think I’ll be done before mid 2024. I hope people find it useful, as it will be available free on this website once it’s out. Please do forgive the inevitable typos though; unlike my other two textbooks, this one isn’t being “battle tested” in a classroom, so I’m sure there will be a few imperfect elements in the first version.
Sample page from the keigo chapter.
And that’s basically it for 2023! It’s been an incredibly productive year, even if there’s only one Robertson (2023) to show for it to date. Doing projects with scholars I’ve long respected, watching people enjoy my blogging, and continuing to teach Japanese is a joy, and I look forward to whatever 2024 brings. Hopefully lots of naps! But if not, and it certainly won’t because I’m an academic, hopefully lots of interesting things to learn about Japanese. All the best to all of your for a wonderful new year too, and thanks so much for taking an interest in what I do.
If you enjoy my writing, considering subscribing to get articles sent directly to your email! We also appreciate contributions via Ko-Fi to help keep this website ad-free.
This last year has been a busy one for me, with lots of new projects started, old projects completed, and big ones moving slowly, but steadily, to completion. First and foremost, it’s been a big year for this blog itself! Both views and visitors have more than doubled compared to 2021. This compares quite well to only minor growth between 2020-2021. So what’s different?
But the biggest increase in readership in no question comes from the steady stream of people every day coming to check out the Living Slang Dictionary I put together early this year. The inspiration for this project was just an off-handed comment from someone reading a slang review, who requested I put all the terms in one place. Basically, I just thought “why not?”, and while quite a simple little page it has turned into a resource I’m really excited about and proud of. I even got featured in The Japan Times! Which is something I certainly never thought I’d be able to say.
Publications
But what about the research I’m actually supposed to do? You know, for my job? There’s been a lot of progress this year, I’m quite happy to say. Some things did take much longer than expected, and I’d be lying if I didn’t recognize that some end-of-2022 deadlines I set for myself are now end-of-2023 deadlines. But still, some major milestones and big publications came out in 2022. First and foremost, I now have 100 citations according to Google! So if you’ve ever cited me, thanks so much for making that happen. It’s really cool to see people engaging with my work in exciting ways – I even recently skimmed through a PhD thesis that really drew on my ideas, which was a true honor to see.
Wheeee
I also had a number of new papers come out: most were written in 2021, but a few I was lucky enough to both write and see published in 2022. First and foremost, I completed a special issue of Japanese Studies with Dr. Tamaki Mihic of Sydney University on “Writing Restricted Variation in Contemporary Japan”. This was a big project we started back in 2020, and involved collaborating and organizing with people throughout Australia and Japan. I had never done a special issue before, and certainly learned a lot from the process. Hopefully, this means I can avoid some mistakes that happened early on if I ever try again. The most unfortunate, and avoidable, mistake was that we invited too many people early on, ending up with more contributors than the journal allowed, so we had to cut people early on. This was not pleasant and could have been avoided if we sent out fewer invitation emails – we were nervous about having enough, contacted a bunch of people, and ended up having to many. Still, the project ultimately came out great I think, and I’m very proud of the work we all did. Aside from assisting with the introduction, I also wrote a paper on Ojisan gokko, now often called Ojisan kōbun, wherein young women pretend to be lecherous old men. I’ve written about ojisan themselves on this blog, as well as posted about the phenomenon more briefly and done a public lecture, but the article represents the most complete and academic discussion of what’s going on, focusing on why the form of play matters from a linguistic perspective. The special issue also has great papers from Tamaki Mihic, Hitomi Masuji, Hannah E. Dahlberg-Dodd, and Dale K. Andrews, so be sure to check them out!
Vol 42 (1)!
I then also published a piece in Japan Forum on language ideologies surrounding debates over the “best” use way of writing Japanese throughout articles in The Japan Times from its founding until the late 1980s. This study took a huge workload in terms of data collection. I had to sift through around a century of news articles, copy everything that mentioned any script or script reform, and then analyze all of it for themes. This was all made more difficult by the fact that search keywords I was using brought lots of false positives I had to nevertheless read in order to confirm I could ignore: “kanji”, for instance, is a Japanese last name too, and words like “hiragana” appear in articles and advertisements that have nothing to do with writing reform. The whole thing took months of steady data collection (and rejection), and ended up involving 469 articles that all had to be coded for themes and analyzed. Not looking to do a project of this size any time soon! But the findings were quite interesting. Most surprising to me was that rather than the ramp up to WW2 causing pro-romanization or anti-kanji movements to disappear, it instead caused a reframing of the entire debate. Arguments against kanji continued, but did so by framing hiragana, katakana, or even the Roman alphabet as the real Japanese script. While the idea that kanji are “Japanese” is well recognized, this current understanding is therefore by no means historic or absolute. I did upload a public lecture on this paper if you’re curious and can’t access the full article, but the written version is by far the most complete discussion of how beliefs about writing systems themselves influenced debates over the “best” writing system throughout Japanese history.
Proud of this one!
Finally, I had an unplanned paper come out too. Across 2022 I had the pleasure of speaking multiple times with Louise D’Arcens, a medievalist researcher at Macquarie University with an incredible history of publications. While I was receiving mentorship, she mentioned that she was organizing a special issue on medievalism outside of Europe, and I noted that some data I had on the practices of Japanese musicians might be tangentially related. Long story short, I ended up scrambling together a paper for the special issue, putting everything else on hold to get it done in time. I don’t think I’ve ever had to do as extensive reading outside my field for something like this before, and I was quite nervous to attempt to contribute to studies outside my normal wheelhouse, but it was a really good experience and I had a lot of fun rethinking the way I normally explain things and write (i.e., writing for a non-Japanese audience). The study breaks down the motives and methods behind three Japanese extreme metal bands’ reflections on sengoku era Japan. While framed primarily for people interested in mediated reflections on the past, I certainly snuck a bunch of linguistics in there too, so if either analytical lens in your bag please check it out!
The hard copy was very pretty
Other Research Work
Beyond actually publishing, I also worked on getting things ready to publish! The endless cycle of academia! Early in 2022, I sat down with my colleague, podcast cohost, and good friend Jess Kruk to write a kind of experimental article for the journal Perfect Beat to contribute to a special issue on metal music in New Zealand. For this paper, we created an annotated version of our Lingua Brutallica interview with Matt Hyde of Beastwars, cutting the talk down and noting where his comments shed light on interesting sociolinguistic ideas. The paper has passed peer review and editing, and should be out early this year!
More traditionally, I also completed a long collaborative project I’ve been working on with Alexandra Hambleton of Tsuda University and Mie Hiramoto of NSU. Combining my work in sociolinguistics and language in Japanese media; Alex’s expertise in rage studies, critical feminism, and transgressive Japanese media; and Mie’s incredible knowledge of gendered language & media in Japan, we sat down to analyze the show Aggretsuko from multiple angles and unpack what it means to be “transgressive” but also “Sanrio”. The paper took a while due to balancing schedules and figuring out the best way to blend everyone’s contributions, but all in all it came out well, avoiding ending up as just some kind of Frankenstein’s monster (in my mind!, we have to wait for the reviewers). Hoping you’ll be able to see it late this year, as we just barely got it to a journal for review in December of 2022.
The third thing I wrote was a chapter for an upcoming Oxford Handbook on Japanese linguistics, wherein I review studies of language in “scripted” media in Japan. This overview won’t come out until 2024 likely, but it’s passed internal review so I’m pretty sure I know what the chapter will look like. I was also happy to be able to sneak in something I’ve wanted to write for a while: a critique of yakuwarigo work in contemporary research. It’s a mild critique, as I certainly find much about the yakuwarigo discussion interesting, but one that I’ve wanted to put into words for quite some time. Quite delighted to finally have a place to do so, and I believe it’s fine if I share it in advance here:
The end
Finally, the biggest work I’ve been doing has been on finishing up my book on language & extreme metal in the Asia Pacific with Jess Kruk. We’ve finally got a name for it, we think: Peripheral Linguistic Brutality: Translocal Metalness in the Asia Pacific. The title might get longer, might get shorter. But as it stands we have three chapters completely drafted and the last four are on the way. Those 0KBs in the image below show that some are… still very much on the way. Data analysis and coding doesn’t show up in this progress report! But we are getting there, with all chapters moving steadily along! And also think we’ll have this done on our end by the end of 2023. The first proposal to a publisher is sent, although obviously we don’t know the response, but we are hoping to get this into the world for a 2024 publication.
Numbers go up!
Other Projects
And to close things off, there’s been a few public works and lectures in 2022 as well. One was talking about social media and academia for an Australian postgraduate group, which was a lot of fun but unfortunately not recorded. The biggest recorded project was our podcast on the sociolinguistics of metal, Lingua Brutallica. We had an incredible year of interviews, with some great chats with bands we’ve loved for a long time. Give us a listen if you like language and/or metal! We are very excited for our interviews this upcoming year.
Can’t believe these bands said yes, but they did!
I also attended a few conferences and gave some public lectures. One was the aforementioned talk on language ideologies in The Japan Times, which I gave online for my alma mater of Macalester College. Additionally, I gave a speech as part of the NSW teaching community languages project on effective use of games and nonstandard language forms in language teaching. This was a bit outside my normal topics, as I’m talking about gaming in class and teaching rather than linguistics, but it was a cool project to be part of. And fun to reflect on the part of my job that doesn’t usually come up in presentations. Community language teachers in Australia work hard at something I really think is important, so I do hope they (and you!) found the talk useful.
Community Languages chat
And finally I presented with Jess at ASAA on our upcoming book! At bigger non-linguistics focused presentations like this, we don’t usually expect many people to come listen to our presentations, but we actually had a really sizable audience this time around which felt great. Very motivating to see people interested in what we are working on, and to field some really good questions.
Australia!
So that’s 2022! It’s been a busy one, but I’m really happy with this output, even if some things got kicked back (we planned to have the book drafted by December which, well, obviously didn’t happen). For 2023 my main focus in getting our book done, but I also have some exciting collaborative projects, and hope to do some grant applications as well. I’ve got some projects in mind for 2024 that require going abroad, so securing potential funding (and places to stay/work) is key. Thanks for reading this post, thanks for keeping up with my research and blogging across 2022, and thanks for having an interest in what I do! I hope to have a bunch of cool free Japanese resources, blog posts, and other stuff posted throughout this upcoming year, so stay tuned.
If you enjoy my writing, considering subscribing to get articles sent directly to your email! We also appreciate contributions via Ko-Fi to help keep this website ad-free.
Just like last year, I’m ending my general blogging this year 2021 with a reflection on the research I’ve done so far, and some hints and discussions of what’s coming up in 2022. This year has been a chaotic one, of course. While things were less “shocking” than last year, in that most of the COVID-related teaching complications I encountered this year we’d seen last year, the Sydney outbreak was certainly a major impact on research and life in general. At bare minimum, it moved our second semester online unexpectedly, and of course caused additional impacts to students, staff, and the entire sector that weren’t a lot of fun.
As such, even though our 2020 experiences helped online teaching go a bit smoother than last year, I didn’t get quite as much done as I hoped. Still, I’m pretty happy about how much I put out this year given the circumstances, and don’t regret putting the importance of our Japanese classes first. Plus, there’s plenty of time next year to finish off all the things I didn’t get to this year! So with that in mind, here’s what I was able to get either in print or off to journals this year:
Completed/Submitted Research Projects
Paper on Superdiversity and Extreme Metal
Out of the articles I submitted this year, this was the first to see print. It’s also the article that took me the most time, and the one I think is the most impactful in terms of the types of claims its making and the dialogues it’s contributing to. This article is also my first co-authored paper, which is quite exciting, as working with a friend and colleague was an excellent experience overall.
That said, despite my beliefs about the paper’s importance, it was actually one of my least “planned” projects. The origin of this paper is mostly due to chance. Basically, I was listening to some death metal while working, as one does, and I stumbled across this Japanese band named Gotsu-Totsu-Kotsu. While their music was great, what really stood out to me was their use of katakana for grammatical particles.
Katakana particles
As someone who looks at social uses of script, I started to wonder if perhaps katakana was now, well… metal? I talked about this idea with Dr. Jess Birnie-Smith, a friend and colleague of mind who I met back when we were both doing our PhDs at Monash University. She mentioned that the band Chthonic, a well-known band from Taiwan, had similar interesting graphic practices that potentially reimagined certain written forms as “metal”. As we began talking about this, we realized the bands are also distinct in that, unlike many metal bands, they avoided the use of English. As a result, beyond just their uses of script, their entire lyrical practices raise questions of how “metalness” is produced without relying on the language most commonly associated with the genre. So we continued to chat back and forth about how to frame the article so that it made important sociolinguistic arguments, set up a research design, did a lot of background reading from music/metal studies, and ended up reaching out to both artists to see if they would sit down for interviews with us… and they said yes! And through these interviews and deep-dives into their lyrics we came up with some really interesting data.
Ultimately, in this paper we use the two bands’ lyrical practices and interview comments to make critical interventions into discussions of superdiversity in contemporary sociolinguistics. We specifically address the issue of items that have always existed in a location being uncritically viewed as “local only”, and important items (e.g., “English”) being seen as inherently international or necessary to participate in international scenes. So, it’s a paper that uses metal as a data source, but it’s not designed to focus on “metal studies”, although we obviously hope its of use and interest to people in that field. Rather, we look at how linguistic items that already existed in each place before the arrival of metal become reimagined as “metal”, and, most importantly, find that this happens because of the already extant links between the items and local identities rather than through a process which overrides said links. This creates uses of language which require understanding of the local context and the global metal scene to fully unpack. So, for instance, is katakana metal? Well, yes, to one artist. But that’s not the whole story. The script’s use to date in Japan is also influencing the selection (the artist finds it “inorganic” and “accursed” but also “old” which works with their samurai theming), and its only one part of a larger practice of how he goes about producing “metalness” without using English in Japan.
In the end, this was a fun and exciting paper. Collaborating worked out well, and we both were able to finally get published in Language & Communication, a journal we had been rejected by in the past respectively when we tried to go solo. So by our powers combined! and all that. I’ll talk more about this later, but this paper is also just the start of some exciting work Jess and I have planned using extreme metal in the Asia Pacific to make interventions into key issues in sociolinguistics, and so we’re excited to see such great reception right out the gate.
Japanese Studies Special Issue
Another exciting project this year was a special issue on variant script use in Japanese for the journal Japanese Studies. I mentioned this project in 2020, but we’ve finally made it through the trials of peer review and are going to see print in early 2021. This was one of my first big projects (e.g., larger than paper sized) working with another scholar, in this case the great Dr. Tamaki Mihic of Sydney University, as well my first attempt organizing a team of scholars to produce a group work. There were some things that didn’t go well – we reached out to too many people at first which lead to awkward cuts that I am disappointed by – and we did lose some publications along the way. But ultimately we have a really exciting issue coming out with five really distinct and important papers in it. I’m especially happy that each paper uses a different framework or angle to analyze the phenomenon of variant script use, and each draws on a data set that the others don’t, producing a discussion of the motives for script selection that is more holistic and collaborative than anything that has come before.
Script variation in Japanese
My contribution discusses Ojisan Gokko, a practice where young Japanese women pretend to be old, lecherous men and message each other in a sort of escalating contest of who can be the sketchiest. I’ve written about it briefly on this blog (here), and given a presentation (here), so I won’t go into much more detail, but the article gets into the real nitty gritty of the practice that I couldn’t do in any other forum. Dr. Mihic’s article then analyzes nonstandard script use in the book ab さんご by Kuroda Natsuko, an experimental novel which won the 148th Akutagawa Prize. Dr. Mihic’s paper specifically examines how the script use in the text creates a sense of unfamiliarity, and challenges readers’ conceptions of how Japanese can – or should – be written. We then have a paper by Dr. Masuji Hitomi which looks at how distinct representations of すみません are interpreted based on the context of use, and whether the word is written in hiragana or katakana. What’s great about this paper is that there hasn’t been a lot of discussion on variation focused on specific words (outside of pronouns), so the paper fills a key gap in the literature so far. I also actually have been in some contact with Dr. Masuji since I was doing my PhD thesis, as her thesis was a fantastic reference that was leaps and bounds ahead of anything else I found at the times in terms of theoretical quality, so it was really cool to loop back and work with her here.
Ojisan Gokko in action
Our forth paper is then by Dr. Hannah Dahlberg-Dodd, and examines the use of katakana in the speech of characters across a variety of Japanese video games. Specifically, the paper looks at how the script serves as a form of “othering”. This builds on a lot of excellent work Dr. Dahlberg-Dodd has done on Japanese media and language, so definitely check out her other papers as well. The data set is fantastic, and the examples are – I say with no exaggeration – more interesting than any uses of katakana I’ve analyzed or seen. Finally, the issue will close with a piece by Dr. Dale Andrews that looks at script play via a very novel data source: the votive tablets at Shinto shrines. Specifically, Dr. Andrews shows how people are using script and kaomoji and other artistic flourishes on these tablets as part of anime pilgrimages, connecting the virtual and “real” worlds and creating a sense of community through writing-restricted forms of variation and play. It’s a really unique paper that draws upon an incredible cool data set, so be sure to give this one a read.
All in all, I’m extremely excited for this collection of papers to come out. If there’s been on large flaw in research on Japanese writing variation to date, it’s been that the dialogues about it have all been extremely scattered across researchers and fields that don’t really chat. There hasn’t been any real collaboration wherein distinct fields are drawn upon to bring together a single point, which is really unfortunate given how many fields have discussed script use in Japanese. In doing a collaborative and cross-disciplinary essay collection here, I feel we make a real contribution to understanding Japanese writing, as the five papers working together to paint a picture that none could do individually.
Article on Medievalism in Japanese Folk Metal
I didn’t plan to write this article at all last year, so it’s a bit of a surprise that it is on this list. As part of my professional development, I ended up discussing research and collaboration with Macquarie University’s Professor Louise D’Arcens. Prof. D’Arcens’ work focuses around the concept of Medievalism, or “post-medieval receptions and constructions of the Middle Ages”. So initially, of course, I didn’t think there would be much overlap with my work on Japanese sociolinguistics. However, when I mentioned to Prof. D’Arcens that I happen to be looking at language use in the Japanese extreme metal scene right now, she said she had just finished reviewing a paper on medievalism in black metal. This lead to me mentioning that three of the bands I’d interviewed sung about Japan’s middle ages, to which she asked me if I’d like to write a paper about it for a special issue on medievalism. And I said, well, sure?
So, the first problem is that I had not read a single thing about medievalism before that point. There was therefore a lot of background reading required to even start the paper. Luckily though, the more I read, the more I could see how the work I was doing could contribute to this field, and fortunately Prof. D’Arcens was quite encouraging for me to make rather bold claims. Ultimately, I don’t think I’ve ever written a paper that draws upon more diverse scholarship across more diverse fields than this one, but (and I risk saying this before seeing the peer review feedback) I think I’ve come up with a rather exciting paper.
Basically, in my submission I look at how and why three Japanese folk metal bands (Gotsu Totsu Kotsu, Rakshasa, and Allegiance Reign) revisit Japan’s histories, pasts, and mythologies. I use “folk metal” broadly here. None of the bands call themselves folk metal and none have the “folk metal” sound some people associate with the genre. Instead, I just call them “folk metal” because they use the metal genre to sing about and discuss the (imagined) past.
GTK, Rakshasa, and Allegiance Reign live show poster
You’re probably not surprised to know that folk metal in Europe has already been written about in works on Medievalism. But writing about Japanese bands wasn’t as simple as saying “hey look this is Medievalism too, but in Japan!”. That wouldn’t make a good or interesting paper at all. And yes, Medievalism does refer to the European middle ages, not just any medieval period, so “it’s Medievalism but in Japan!” is not appropriate from that angle either. Furthermore, and most importantly, this angle is also factually incorrect (and this is a key argument of my paper).
What I try to do with this paper instead is show that the bands often do what looks to be “the same thing” as European bands (or even one another) at face value, but that their motives and methods are actually quite distinct. While they are at times “borrowing” things they’ve seen before, they are also putting their own spin on both linguistic and stylistic practices, and responding to pressures around them and local dialogues about metal and history that do not have any direct connection to the European metal scene. So ultimately, you end up with something that is inspired by medievalism, in that all three bands enjoyed medievalist messages and themes in metal they listened to and that lead them to produce their own metal bands, but is not simply an imitation of it. As a result, the paper closes by asking that we question both what we imagine medievalism-inspired works to look like and our understanding of how the forms medievalism produces takes the shapes that they do. While writing this paper took me way out of my field, I’m glad I tried, and I’m quite hopeful it will see print in early or mid 2022.
Analysis of Joe Biden’s Comments in the 2020 Debate
One of the first blog posts I wrote for this blog was an analysis of Japanese translations of Joe Biden’s comments “will you shut up, man?” and “it’s hard to get a word in with this clown, sorry, this person” during the 2020 debate. At the end of last year I cleaned this article up, added some sources, figured out how to frame it to make it useful as a linguistic study, and then sent it off! And then this year it came back with revision requests, I made a bunch of changes, and then finally got it into print.
This was another challenging piece in some ways, as I wrote for a journal outside of my field and attempted to intervein in some dialogues that are not in my direct wheelhouse. Primarily, I attempted to enter dialogue with studies on “risk” and translation in journalism. I did get to do some fun reading to prepare the piece though, and I highly recommend Matsushita Kayo’s “When News Travels East“, which was my favorite find of this background work. This is a stellar introduction to news translation in Japan. The book is interesting, easy to read, and gives a lot of great details in a way that even a non-academic audience can digest. It functions as both an excellent introduction to Japanese journalism, while also serving as a great piece of scholarship in its own right.
Really great read.
Anyway, the first draft of this paper was not highly received, unfortunately. Both reviewers found some merit, but had substantial critiques. So I did a lot of work this year to reframe it, moving the paper more into a linguistic focus so I could stress the value of the analysis a bit more clearly, increasing my background reading and incorporating new findings, and then resubmitting the paper with I’d say about 50% of it changed. The introduction and ending in particular were completely reformed. Fortunately, that was enough to get the reviewers and editors to like what I had to say, the paper just came out at the end of this year!
It’s a small scale study, but I hope people find it useful and – given the data set – quite fun to read. Every few years I like to do some work that dabbles in translation, and so I’m glad I was able to do so again in 2021.
Language Reform & Ideology in The Japan Times, 1897-1981
The final paper I completed this year is currently out for initial review. So who knows if it will actually be out anytime soon. Reviewers might hate it! But I certainly hope not, as this paper took a gross amount of time to write. My data here covers almost 100 years of articles on writing reform in The Japan Times through use of their fantastic archive, with the data gathering and coding (500+ articles in total) taking much longer than the writing process itself.
Wayyyyy to much data. This is less than half of one of four folders.
In this paper, I look at how language ideologies influenced discussions of writing reform throughout the history of The Japan Times, and how said ideologies were manipulated, abandoned, and reformed in service of arguments surrounding Japanese writing reform across the paper’s history. In doing so, I also try to give a bit more detail than has existed so far on the history of The Japan Times, and its roll in discussions of writing reform. I won’t give away too much yet, but between the almost century of papers I analyze, The Japan Times serves as an outlet of – and supporter of – wildly conflicting views. Initially supporting full romanization, the paper moves to kana-only advocacy in the run up to WW2, switching to support of kanji while under government control. It then reverts to romanization advocacy under US censorship, continuing this view for a bit after the US left Japan before suddenly switching to kanji advocacy again and calling romanization supporters insane radicals. Throughout all this, beliefs about what kinds of people write Japanese in which ways are are mobilized in fascinating ways, as you can get a glimpse of in the excerpt below.
Excerpt of a paragraph from the submitted draft
Ultimately, I use the data set to show how throughout the history of the paper, beliefs about who writes Japanese in which ways and why are circulated, altered, and abandoned in response to changing political and social pressures. The paper therefore ends up serving as a (hopefully fascinating) catalogue of how these beliefs were mobilized to support and attack various forms of writing reform in Japan. I certainly hope the review process goes well, and you’ll all have the chance to check it out in 2022. There’s some fantastic quotes inside about why people who oppose romanization are everything from intellectually disabled to Chinese thralls to Japanese patriots to a vague “everyman” public group, so I’m really looking forward to sending the coverage of these ideologies and their evolutions out into the world.
Review of Dr. Marcus Nornes’ Brushed in Light
Finally, I was also invited by the International Journal of Asian Studies to do a book review of Brushed in Light by Dr. Marcus Nornes. Somewhat embarrassingly, this is the first book review I’ve ever written. But I was quite touched to be invited to review the book, and even though it is outside my field I found it quite fantastic. You can read my full review here, but in short the book is an incredible work of scholarship. Unlike any academic book I’ve ever read, its also a great coffee-table book, as its filled with beautiful images that perfectly supplement the scholarship and arguments throughout.
Brushed in Light cover
If you’re interested in script in China, Korea, or Japan, and especially script in film and/or as an artistic practice, I highly recommend you check this book out. It isn’t something I would have read unless I’d been asked to review it (due to being outside my field not due to a lack of interest), but the minute I opened it up I was completely enthralled. I actually ended up buying a hard copy as my review was only digital, which should give you a hint of how much I liked it.
Media, Lectures, & Press
Outside of papers, I also had the opportunity to give a number of public lectures and interviews this year. I’m going to keep this section a bit short, as I’ve already written a post this year detailing the various public lectures I’ve given in 2021. So if you want to see any of the “academic” discussions I’ve done this year, please check out the videos in that post.
However, since writing that blog I’ve also had the pleasure of participating in two fantastic podcasts. The first is Japan by River Cruise (Twitter), a comedy podcast with a rather amusing and unique theme. This podcast has done some fantastic interviews over the last few years with a number of scholars – including some of my direct collogues – and I was therefore really delighted that I finally got a chance to talk to Bobby & Ollie. They were gracious hosts, and made the whole experience smooth and fun. So please give our chat a listen if you’re keen! We had a lot of fun talking about jokes and puns in the extras as well, so give them support on their website to check that out, or click the image below to check out the episode itself!
I was also interviewed by Japan Station, the podcast of JapanKyo.com. This was a more long-form chat than with JBRC; there were less jokes, but we got to do a deeper dive time-wise into the nitty-gritty of my research and questions like how one maintains interest in a language after years of study. Tony did a great job editing my rambling into something that sounded remotely sensible, so if you’d like to know a bit about how I came to do what I do and why please do check out our talk! The JapanKyo website hosts a lot of interesting talks and documentaries as well, so don’t forget to give them a look as well.
Beyond that, the only talks I gave are ones where I was the host! If you want to hear some deep-dives on the roll of language in extreme metal, please give my podcast Lingua Brutallica (Twitter, Spotify, Podbean) a shot! We released over 12 interviews this year, and are hoping to do even more in 2022.
Research Plans for 2022
So what’s planned for next year? Well, honestly, I hope it will be a little quieter. Beyond the editing I’ll have to do for a few of the articles above after they pass peer review, my main plan is to focus on my second book. So what’s that all about? Well…
Book 2: Language, Identity, & Metal in the Asia Pacific
As I mentioned above, I recently published a paper with Dr. Jess Birnie-Smith looking at the language use of two Asian extreme metal bands. We found this paper fascinating to research and write, and it inspired us to examine the question of how “metalness” is produced via language more broadly. Over the last two years, we’ve been interviewing dozens of bands from Australia, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Japan, with the goal of producing a book on how/why artists in the Asia-Pacific utilize certain language forms in their lyrics. Perhaps more simply, we are looking at how extreme metal serves as a space for exploring identities and certain forms of language use.
We’ve done some initial presentations on the topic too!
As for the countries chosen, we do admit its a bit arbitrary. We both live in Australia, and together we speak English, Japanese, Indonesian, and Chinese. However, the four contexts are distinct in ways that allow for important comparisons. Australia shares linguistic and historical cultural connections to metal’s origins in Europe and America, but is still geographically distinct and has its own current contemporary cultures and linguistic ideologies. Japan does not have these direct links to European cultures, but it is similarly a major economic power, and has a long and active metal scene with some international renown. Taiwan is then peculiar in that the scene is heavily influenced by a single band, Chthonic, which has achieved international success, and therefore serves as a peculiar context in being similar to Japan in some ways except with a “flagpole” act that the local scene centers around. And finally Indonesian bands deal with questions of censorship and oppression absent in the other contexts, helping us look at what happens in spaces where making metal music is not just “edgy” but actually dangerous.
Our goal, ultimately, is to look at how questions of scale (e.g., the worldwide “metal” scale and the local “metal” scale in particular) are influencing language use across these contexts. Are there similarities across the contexts, or between them and the “origin” European and English-dominant scene? Are their distinct phenomena that can’t be found in said origins? How do local discussions of language outside of metal influence language use during “metal” acts? We are designing the book to answer these kinds of questions, using the musical genre to stage interventions into issues we see in linguistics while shedding light on an understudied aspect of how these subcultures operate, and what they mean to those who participate in them as artists, lyricists, and fans.
Chapter in Oxford Handbook of Japanese Language
The second goal for next year is to finish an invited chapter to an upcoming Oxford Handbook of Japanese Language studies. My specific chapter will be titled “Approaches to ‘scripted’ speech in media”, and examine study to date on language use in Japanese media. The chapter is basically a provocative literature review. I’ll be going over what’s been done before, showing the methodologies that have been used, showcasing the important findings, and (hopefully) making clear statements about what is lacking in study of language in manga, anime, and similar media to date.
While my submission is due in mid-2022, it is likely this book will come out in 2024. There are a massive number of contributors – and I can say without hesitation that all of them are fantastic – so do look forward to the massive tome that we will create. It was an absolute honor to be invited to write in the same space as so many excellent scholars, and I really hope my chapter will be an interesting and important reference document for future studies of media and language in Japan. 頑張ります！
Annotated Article for Perfect Beat
One short project I’m doing is another collaboration with Dr. Jess Birnie-Smith, this time for the journal Perfect Beat. This year we noted a call-for-papers for a special issue of this journal focusing on New Zealand and, well, just a few weeks before that we’d published an interview with New Zealand metal band Beastwars via our Podcast. As we don’t have time to write a full article, we proposed editing our interview into a more digestible form, and publishing it with commentary surrounding certain sections regarding why they are important and what they tell us about language and linguistics. It’s a bit of an odd way to write an academic piece – we’ve never written anything like it – but the editor said they like the idea! So assuming the reviewers accept it, this should be a fun little experiment for 2022.
Paper on Aggretsuko
Finally, I’m also working on a co-authored paper on the TV show Aggretsuko. I don’t want to go into too much detail here, as the exact framing and total number of authors is still in development, but we are using a number of fields to examine what it means to be “Sanrio transgressive”, if that makes any sense.
My contribution to this article focuses on Retsuko’s use of language. I’ve written a bit on language in this show here on the blog, but the article is much more of a deep dive. One of the key findings of my data, which came from copying and coding every utterance Retsuko makes in the first three seasons, is that Retsuko’s language use is ultimately quite conservative despite being “metal” on face value. When screaming in her karaoke booth, Retsuko does drop certain markers of politeness. However, stereotypical markers of Japanese “women’s speech (which is a problematic term, of course)” are maintained or actually increase as Retsuko performs a “metal” identity, and terms that rough/crude men use around her at work are inaccessible to her even when she’s expressing extreme rage. So while she’s allowed to enjoy music that one might not traditionally associate with young Japanese women (a non-association you make at your own peril!), Restuko is not allowed to even briefly transgress gender norms. Indeed, one key point of my collaborator’s data is that Retsuko is only allowed to rebel as long as she returns to work in the end, expressing frustration (through behavior or language) but ultimately going back to the grind (and its accompanying gender norms) at the end of the day.
A little glimpse at a very, very rough draft.
I don’t know exactly how the article will conclude, but it’s exciting to be writing a piece that will draw on 2-3 distinct data sets and fields. I should stress that I’m actually a fan of the show. We aren’t trying to do a “take down” or something like that. But we are looking at what it means to be “transgressive” while still being a Sanrio project, and also are critically examining exactly how much the show pushes against social norms despite some rather… edgy? advertising and promotion.
The capitalist product attacks capitalism?
Final Thoughts
So in the end, 2021 was pretty productive research wise. A number of the articles I discussed here were started in 2020, but I did write more than I expected, and consequently have more articles under review currently than I thought I would at the end of the year. That said, my initial plan was to have the Aggretsuko article and a few chapters of my second book ready by the end of this year, so I have had to adjust a bit. Opportunities came up that I didn’t expect, and some articles (especially the Japan Times one) took way longer than I planned. Still, I’m quite proud of – and happy with – what I’ve been able to send out in to this world this year, especially given all that went on, and I’m really excited for the articles under review to see print. I certainly hope people enjoy reading them! Next year should be a lot calmer, as the book is the primary goal, but I need to keep my eyes open so that I can have interesting stuff to work on once the book draft is done. Indeed, most of these projects were started by looking around during downtime when I was writing Scripting Japan, with data coding at times even starting in 2019.
Anyway, in closing I just want to say thanks so much for taking the time to read this post, and for engaging with my work on the Japanese language. I know it’s not as fun as my slang reviews and more casual studies, but I hope it was of interest nonetheless. I of course plan to keep up said slang reviews and other casual blogging over 2022, so if you’ve been enjoying that content don’t worry! The fact that I’ll be working on a book next year won’t stop me from writing more casual posts. In fact, I’ll probably need to keep them up to stay sane and get a break from the book writing. I also have a few more projects planned for this website that I don’t want to talk about in case I end up moving more slowly then expected (or worst case, bailing on them), so be sure to follow me on Twitter to get the latest updates!
Have a lovely holiday season, and see you in 2022!
If you enjoy my writing, considering subscribing to get articles sent directly to your email! We also appreciate contributions via Ko-Fi to help keep this website ad-free.
It feels difficult and even flippant to write a personal research reflection on 2020. This year has brought unimaginable challenges for all of us, both professional and personal. Writing anything positive seems self indulgent, and mentioning any specific disaster feels disrespectful to those who have had it much worse. Nevertheless, I wanted to end this year with a post reflecting on some of the research I’ve done this year, and looking forward to exciting research in a hopefully-more-relaxed 2021. By nature this post will be somewhat self-indulgent, but I hope it also is of interest to people with a similar passion for Japan- and language-related research.
This has been a surprisingly productive year for me. Teaching took up way more time than I initially budgeted, as is par for the course with the move to online teaching, but I still managed to complete many projects I planned before the pandemic (if bit behind my initially assumed deadlines).
Publication 1: Scripting Japan
My only publication that came out this year was my first monograph. As I wrote earlier this year, this project built upon some of my prior publications, but also including unpublished data from my PhD and the results of a new survey I conducted during 2018. I’m still waiting to see if there are any reviews or if the book makes any kind of splash, but I’m quite happy to have it out in the world. I personally think one of the latter chapters, which looks at how Japanese readers imagine the authors of texts with identical content but distinct script use, has some really important findings. For instance, noting that marked hiragana use was associated with young woman, unreliable and unemployed males, and older men by different respondents was fascinating for me, and I quite enjoyed unpacking the reasons why such diverse interpretations of a single script’s marked use appeared. If you’re interested in variation in the Japanese writing system, please give it a read! I’d be happy to hear your feedback/thoughts.
Publication 2: Special Issue for Japanese Studies/Ojisan gokko shiyo!
Since early this year, I’ve been working with the wonderful Dr. Tamaki Mihic of USyd (check out her recent book here) on special issue of the journal Japanese Studies. This has been tricky, as it was the first special issue either of us has been part of. We made a number of mistakes. The worst was inviting too many contributors. This caused us to make difficult cuts to authors that we had really hoped to work with, and it all could have avoided if we were a bit more informed regarding the maximum number of articles journals allowed. Our first proposal document was also rejected, and we spent more than a little time going back to the drawing board to come up with the proper framing for the issue itself. Ultimately though, we’ve been successful in getting the issue accepted, and organizing a great team of writers. All the articles have been sent off as the end of this year. We’re really proud of the group of people we got together, and it’s been great learning how to collaborate with another academic to lead a larger project like this. Hopefully, the issue itself will be out by late 2021 or early 2020.
The topic for this special issue is “Writing-restricted variation in contemporary Japanese”. For anyone familiar with my research, this is obviously a topic close to my heart. What I’m really excited about though is that this issue takes steps to correct the scattershot nature of research on this topic by collecting multiple studies in one place. These studies do not all agree in their theoretical approaches, and each uses a distinct data set. Dr. Mihic’s article looks at script variation from a literary studies perspective, I employ a more sociolinguistic approach, and then other contributors analyze data from video games, advertising, surveys, and even temple votive tablets from their own distinct angles. Taken together, this does not show unsettled debate within study on writing-restricted variation in Japanese, but rather the validity – and ultimately necessity – of multiple approaches in fully understanding why writers of Japanese don’t stick to consistent norms for how they represent Japanese vocabulary. The question of “why” Japanese writers play with writing-restricted forms is a complex one, and our issue helps show how a diverse work approaching diverse data sets from diverse angles is necessary to fully unpack the phenomenon.
My own contribution is a piece on Ojisan Gokko (pretending to be an ‘ojisan‘), a practice in which young women text each other as though they were older, lecherous men. I’ve written on social images of the ojisanon this blog, but the practice itself is interesting in that it is restricted to the written mode. That is, the mocking of ojisan is not based just on ways ojisan speak, but rather the specific ways they (are perceived to) use hiragana, katakana, kanji, emoji, kaomoji, and punctuation. My paper ultimately notes how this complex combination of writing-restricted variants came about due to a series of Japanese social actors observing, mocking, and/or critiquing how others write online. As a result, I argue that ojisan gokko is not just an imitation, but rather an activity that allows young women a space for becoming the arbiters of what is ‘correct’ writing through judging what is ‘cool’. In doing so, this also provides them a method for community development, and for resisting and critiquing ojisan as the traditional custodians of ‘proper’ language use.
An example of ojisan gokko.
Publication 3: Work on Extreme Metal Lyrics in Australia & South-East Asia
This study is a bit out of my normal wheelhouse, but began through an encounter with Japanese script use that caught my eye. I’ve long been a fan of the extreme metal genre, and one algorithm or another lead me to a Japanese extreme metal group called Gotsu Totsu Kotsu. I liked GTK’s music immediately, with this track being a particular hit for me, but noted in their lyric videos and lyric booklets that things which ‘should’ be written in hiragana were in katakana. At the time, I just kind of put a pin in this as something to investigate later, but it got me thinking about how ‘metalness’ or ‘brutality’ is produced in the Japanese context.
GTK uses katakana where hiragana is ‘normally’ used.
I ended up discussing this idea with Dr. Jess Birnie-Smith, a friend, collegue, and fellow extreme metal fan currently working at La Trobe. She proposed that instead of just looking at GTK’s script use, a more interesting project would combine analysis of GTK’s lyrics with those of other bands in SE Asia that avoid English lyrics entirely. In particular, we decided to look at Taiwan’s Cthonic and Indonesia’s Jasad. Bringing her specialty in chronotopic frames (time-space configurations) and our shared interest in indexicality, we set about looking at how these bands reimaged local language items as ‘metal’. We also sent requests for interviews with all three bands, and to our delight and surprise, all three said yes.
The paper is currently under review, but we hope it will see publication sometime in 2021. Our ultimate argument, based on our lyric analysis and interview data, is that while these bands avoid English entirely, they are still directly influenced by subcultural practices in the English-language metal scene. However, these practices are not adopted as-is. Rather, they are modified to fit a local context, with the artists using local language items in a novel ways that are both rooted in local understandings of the items they choose and a broader understanding of what language forms are ‘metal’.
GTK’s album cover features a haritsukebashira
For instance, GTK has a song which uses the term haritsukebarshira, an obscure term for a Japanese torture implement which resembles a cross (see image above). This term is obviously Japanese, and its use reflects GTK’s focus on ‘samurai’ style imagery. Stopping at this level of analysis ignores the more globalized nature of the practice though, as our data shows that GTK is also directly communicating with the ‘metalness’ of using archaic vocabulary relating to death, war, and torture. As a result, a non-metal Japanese reader sees only half the story (the samurai links), while a non-Japanese speaking metalhead will see only half as well (the ‘metalness’ of torture vocabulary, but likely misconstruing the translation of haritsukebashira as ‘cross’ to reflect the references to religion common in English metal lyrics). There’s been a lotofgreatwork on globalization and language use in the hip-hop scene, which shows how the use of items “from” English in non-English settings challenges traditional understandings of language boundaries and language ownership. What we hope to add here is evidence that this can happen without even any explicit borrowings, as the non-English lyrics we look at are on paper entirely ‘local’, but would have never existed without the influence of/desire to participate in a global subcultural scene, and cannot be fully accessed without understanding of the language items’ local and global referents.
Publication 4: Translating Joe Biden’s Comments in the 2020 Debate
My final submitted publication for 2020 is built directly upon a blog post I wrote earlier this year. A colleague of mine suggested I clean it up a bit and submit it to a journal, as so I spent the last few months of this year doing just that. The article is short, just under 6,000 words, but I hope it will see publication in early 2021.
How do we translate a phrase like “Will you please shut up man?”
Ironically, despite being the shortest thing I wrote in 2020, this piece required the most background reading. I did extensive reading on the history of news translation, and learned a lot about the particularities and difficulties of this process. If there’s one work I can really recommend from these readings, it’s Dr. Kayo Matsushita‘s “When News Travels East”. This is a fantastic, easy to read, and detailed overview of news translation in Japan, and I’d highly recommend it for anyone who wants to know more on the topic.
Moving Forward: Research in 2021
2021 still seems far off despite being a few days a way, but I have some projects I’m already excited for. One of which, of course, is more work on this blog (thanks for reading!). But in terms of formal projects the following are in the works:
And that’s it for now! Thanks for bearing with me on what’s been a rather self-indulgent journey, but I hope some of these projects seem of interest to you, and give you a heads up on something you might want to look out for when it reaches publication. I obviously don’t know for sure what 2021 research will look like, but I’m personally quite excited to be doing some collaborative work, and combine my sociolinguistic study with other fields for a more holistic look at some phenomena than anything I could do myself.
A book on the language & ‘metalness/brutality’ in Australia and SE Asia.
Building on the paper Jess & I wrote, we’ve decided to start on a book looking at how metal lyrics are crafted in non-NA/European contexts. As part of our literature review for our paper, we realized that while lots of people talked about metal lyrics, there hadn’t been any real investigation into metal lyric creation practices – be it from corpus linguistic studies or interviews with musicians. We therefore don’t really know how language and metalness are related in the minds of these musicians. Of course, this problem is doubly true in non-NA/European and (especially) non-English contexts.
For my part this year, I’ve been preparing for this book by investigating the Japanese context, conducting 1-2 hour long interviews with musicians via Zoom. So far, I’ve been honored to speak with the following bands:
Gotsu-Totsu-Kotsu: ‘Samurai’ metal, playing a distinct style of death metal incorporating Japanese lyrics and slap-bass styles.
Defiled: An old-school style death metal act with a unique take on a really traditional sound, active since 1992.
Somnium de Lycoris: An interesting new progressive metal act which has a style I’ve not encountered before in the Japanese scene.
Ode to the End: A really solid death-core project, which works in some really great riffing into their short, punchy tracks.
Obviously, this is just a start, but already some interesting themes and distinctions are emerging. Jess is starting new work on the Indonesian and Taiwanese scenes soon, and we’ve both been working on the Australian scene. The research in this latter context though is done in a casual mode, based on an idea Jess had to try to make our research more accessible. Our interviews in English are all available to listen to as part of a podcast: Lingua Brutallica.
This project is still developing, but we are hoping to have our proposal out by the end of 2021, and get the book published by late 2022/early 2023.
A paper on script-based ideologies in pre-war issues of the Japan Times.
There isn’t much to say about this project yet, as I’ve just started looking at the data, but my university has access to early issues of the Japan Times and there’s some really interesting stuff in the news articles there reflecting ideologies about how Japanese should be written. The paper that will come from this data hopefully will contribute to work done by academics like Dr. Nanette Gottlieb in shedding light on the history of writing-system related debate in Japan, but add new information to this discussion by focusing on how belief about the users of writing systems influenced pre-war arguments about how Japanese should look in the future.
Two potential co-authored papers. I’ve got two co-developed projects that are on the table at the moment, albeit only in the earliest stages of planning. The first is a work leaning to the literary studies field with Dr. Tamaki Mihic, who I developed the Japanese Studies special issue with this year. Dr. Mihic has found some interesting script use in a number of Japanese novels, and we’re looking at how we might tackle this together.
Another is a project based on the TV show Aggretsuko, which I have looked at casually before on this blog. When watching this show, I noticed that the main character speaks using stereotypical markers of “women’s language” in Japan, but switches to stereotypical markers of vulgar speech and “men’s language” when switching to her “metal” persona. Honestly though, this didn’t seem interesting enough for a paper. However, I’ve been discussing potential directions to examine this show with Dr. Alexandra Hambleton of Tsuda University, who has done great work on Japanese media and is looking at discussions of rage in Japan. Again, discussion of this as a potential project is only in the first stages, but I think the blend of these various fields could lead to a very interesting paper. Certainly more so than if I just took the linguistic angle.
Thanks to everyone who made this year a good and productive one, and to all the new researchers who I got to know. Ironically, despite the lack of physical conferences this year, I think I’ve met more people than in most prior years, and if anything this expansion of my network has been a key delight of an otherwise rough 2020. I’m not sure how exactly to end this post, so I’ll just say that I hope it hasn’t been too self-indulgent, and wish you all the best for the new year. Do reach out if there’s anything you’d like to work on in the upcoming year – I’m always open to new collaborations, and expanding my understanding of language, language use, and Japan.
If you enjoy my writing, considering subscribing to get articles sent directly to your email! We also appreciate contributions via Ko-Fi to help keep this website ad-free.
In July of 2020, I published my first monograph: Scripting Japan. This text was the result of a long running interest in the Japanese writing system. Arguably this interest truly sparked in the final year of my undergraduate Japanese study, but it really built up steadily throughout my postgraduate career, becoming the main area which I currently research. Scripting Japan stands as the first statement of my work in this area so far, being the culmination of around a decade of thinking about – arguably way too much thinking about – variation in written Japanese. My goal in this post is not simply to advertise or discuss the contents of the book though, but rather detail how it came to be. More specifically, how scattered research found its shape into a book form, and my reflections on the process of publishing itself. I know there are already countless guides to “getting in published”, and indeed some excellent books that I certainly used. However, I do hope that in putting my own story out there, I can at least provide some further assistance in navigating the academic publication process. I’ll begin by briefly detailing how I even began thinking about Japanese writing as a topic of research, and then move into the meat of how I turned my work in this area into a publication.
I believe that my first interest in the Japanese writing system as a topic of study (rather than something studied as part of gaining literacy in Japanese) begin during my final year of my undergraduate studies. The capstone for my Japanese major was a translation project, and I decided to attempt a select groups of poems by the poet Takahashi Mutsuo (高橋 睦郎). I had stumbled across translations of his early work a year earlier, and acquired a copy of この世あるいは箱の人 (kono yo arui wa hako no hito, A Person of this World or a Box) out of curiosity. Apparently used copies now range up to 300 dollars? This certainly wasn’t the case in 2004. Maybe if it was I my entire career would have been different, because I certainly couldn’t afford that at the time.
I immediately found Takashi’s poems, or what I could of understand of them, beautiful. Their difficulty also intrigued me, and inspired me to use poems from この世あるいは箱の人 as my project. I soon found there was a bit of hubris in my choice, as many of the poems were beyond the level of a learner with only four years under their belt. Still, I was able to eventually translate five poems in a way that I was satisfied with, and the project was well received.
My final presentation focused on some of the particular difficulties of translating Takahashi’s work. For instance, my translated title of A Person of this World or a Box is certainly awkward, but this was intentional. The Japanese is, in my understanding, a bit awkward too, and the translation maintains an ambiguity (is the person of a box, or is the box a separate possibility) in the Japanese. However, one element which I just had to say “I have no idea how to translate this” during my presentation was Takahashi’s particular uses of script. Takahashi has a penchant for writing things which “should” be in hiragana, like the question word どこ (doko, where) or the reference pronouns これ・それ・あれ (kore, sore, are, this (near me), that (near you), that (away from us), in kanji. He also enjoyedkanji which are so obscure that even most dictionaries won’t pick them up. I particularly remember 泛 being a source of misery, as it took extensive effort to find out that it was read as ukabu (to float). Both standard dictionaries and most online sources did not even recognize it as an extant kanji. I immediately understood that these choices were important, but I had no idea how to render this into English.
At the time, I checked Takahashi’s orthographic peculiarities up as a personal foible. But when I moved to Japan and started living there, I began to see more and more script variation occurring around me. Some of this was obviously the nonstandard use of a script for emphasis, as has been commented on by many people to date, or forms of play wherein “incorrect” readings were attached to kanji. But what really grabbed my attention was the use of katakana for non-loan words (for non-Japanese speakers, this is considered highly nonstandard) in non-native speech. This is common in Japanese media, but my first encounters were via “the gaijin clown” Mr. James who slung hamburgers in katakana-represented Japanese for McDonalds for a few years, or a Toshiba commercial for a bread maker wherein an actress pretends to be low-level non-native Japanese speaker (fake nose and all, see below). At the time, this katakana use was explained to me as expressing accent. I of course understood that this interpretation existed, but I couldn’t follow it to the end. How exactly does changing か to カ indicate that ka should be accented? Why do all non-native speakers have the same “script accent”? Once again though, I kind of just put a pin in this and didn’t think about it for a number of years. I actually applied to graduate school intending to study how Japanese learners of English learned/engaged with revision strategies.
As a chance assignment though during my coursework, I happened to revisit this question of marked katakana use in non-native speech after encountered a few manga which used it extensively. The small assignment was well received, and I was encouraged to expand it into my Master’s thesis. Through this study, I was able to secure my first two publications, which ultimately argued that an ideologically defined “gaijinness” was motivating the script use (pronunciation issues were then an assumed trait from this identity, not the main motive). After this, I then branched out into looking at variant use of all three major scripts across the dialogue of all speakers in a selection of manga for my PhD. When I completed the PhD, I was lucky enough to receive a small publication grant which allowed me to spend three months focusing on turning my PhD into publications. It is here that in many ways my book writing process began.
That said, it is quite likely that I made a massive mistake early on. Rather than attempt to turn my thesis into a book, I instead cut it up into three articles. My supervisors smartly encouraged me to avoid this particular path, but I sort of stubbornly soldiered on. I believed that getting publications out in journals would be easier than finishing a book (this is true), which would help my career prospects (this is debatable); that my book would be better if I could expand my PhD data to include some extra studies (this was very true); and that potential employers would be happy to know I had a clear plan for a book once hired (this would have been true… if I’d had a book out already). I knew that in some fields, like history, looking for a job without a book/book contract was akin to printing an application directly into the trash, but I had been told that in linguistics/languages it was possible to get hired off good articles. As I have found a job I can attest that this is true, but I definitely misunderstood the tone in which “possible” is uttered. Ultimately, even with some solid publications, I had no success with job hunting. I didn’t get call backs, much less interviews, from over 95% of the applications I sent to. Some of this was of course network related. I found it very hard to break into work in the United States especially. But a lot in retrospect was probably based on the fact that I had no book or book contract.
While working part time at one institution, my direct supervisor mentioned that a contact from Routledge was doing quick visits with staff interested in publishing. So I sent the contact an email, and set up a brief five minute meeting. I made my pitch, and they told me they were interested. I wasn’t sure if it was a boilerplate comment at the time, but soon enough information on how to submit a book proposal came through. At the time though, I wasn’t supported to do research, so I didn’t make much progress. That Christmas though, another email came asking me if I was still interested in publishing via Routledge. I mentioned that I really couldn’t start on the book yet because I didn’t have a full time job, but that I was certainly still keen. They said they could wait, and that made me realize that my initial pitch actually did go well. I then set out with a general outline of the book in my mind, the studies I would need, and a timeline, and changed my CV to state that I had an interested publisher. Not as good as a contract, but better than before. Here is perhaps then the first concrete piece of advice I have: at least make initial contact with a publisher and see if they are keen at accepting a proposal. It’s not as good as a contract, but it’s a step in the right direction, and more trustworthy than the “oh yeah, sure, I’ll have a book for you once you hire me” route I had taken up until then.
After another year or so I finally grabbed a full time position. To be honest, I think my experience teaching introductory Japanese and stated interest in online teaching was the tipping point. I definitely made it clear in the interview though that I had a plan to have a book out in two years if they hired me, and attempted to clearly articulate exactly why I had waited to publish the monograph, focusing on how institutional support was necessary for the research that would make up the second half of the book. It ultimately took me two and a half to get the book out into the world, but I did start right away. I worked all year revising the first three chapters of my thesis into book chapters, and developing my proposal. Part of this involved contacting publishers of journals as well, and making sure they didn’t mind if I revisited data and ideas they’d published. Thankfully, all of them were kind enough to say yes. To ensure no self-plagiarism, I rewrote everything from scratch, using the data I had discussed but copying nothing else from the prior articles. There’s probably an easier way, but I was paranoid of breaking a rule. After a year of work, which included time on a smaller somewhat silly project that was of great interest to me (a type of project I always recommend as a breather), I had begun collecting and coding my new data and finished the proposal and initial three chapters. Once again, around Christmastime, Routledge contacted me. This time though, I had a positive reply, attaching my completed proposal. A somewhat censored version is available below.
The proposal was accepted, and the draft chapters were sent off to reviewers. While waiting for their replies, I started in on the final chapters, going back to revise the first three regularly as the book took shape. The reviewers all liked my first three chapters, giving some very useful suggestions but no major complaints, and so I spent 2019 just typing away. The first two chapters ended up morphing quite a lot as the latter chapters took shape, and I was fortunate enough to obtain an internal grant which covered 2 of my 8 hours of weekly teaching for one semester so I could better concentrate. I finished my first draft about mid 2019, and then just edited nonstop until just before the end of the year. Part of this involved sharing chapters with a trusted colleague, who was kind enough to provide feedback as things developed (a favor which of course I am slated to repay, not as an act of charity). Between the start of 2020 and mid-2020, I then liaised with copy editors, indexing, etc., with the book coming out in July of that year.
In looking at everything I did, I think I could have made the whole process and academic job search easier on myself by doing a few things differently (beyond going straight for a book as my first post-PhD publication). First, I should have researched publishers and reached out to them quite early, if even just with an email to test the waters. I was lucky that I had a chance to pitch directly, and that I’d practiced 5-minute lay pitches of my research extensively, but I could have been much more proactive. Secondly, while I am happy I held off on the book so that I could get the final chapters I want researched and written, I should have probably started writing it when I was looking for work. This is tricky. After repeated rejections or even non-responses, writing new job applications took up most of my remaining motivation. It was much easier to play video games or watch Netflix than write more after writing yet another cover letter. But as the first half of my book was based on my research, I definitely could have made a skeletal structure. I didn’t need to have my last chapters written to get the first ones framed. During interviews, I could then say my book was halfway drafted rather than just designed in my mind. Finally, while I absolutely needed official ethics clearance to begin working on data collection, the survey design could have been set up on paper. I did all this work while teaching my first year, which was sort of insane. The number of late nights during year one was extreme, and could have been reduced by preparing some documents while I was working casually. The existence of these documents then would have given my job applications a bit more weight, turning “I have a plan for a book” into “I have the book half written and the next steps ready to go”.
I know this isn’t ultimately as detailed as full books on getting it published, but I do hope that some details of this process are useful to you in looking to begin your own publications. Where to publish is of course a key question I didn’t touch on much here, as I sort of fell into a good place which publishes extensively in my area. But my general recommendation is to seek out publishers that have released work which influences you (and mention that in your applications!). The process of producing your book will be long, and you’ll definitely get lost in the weeds here or there, but if you just make sure to write a bit each day – week – month – whatever your schedule is, you’ll find that you’ll get there sooner than you think. And if there is one thing that is absolutely true about publishing, it’s that there is a distinct thrill to holding the finished product in your hands. Even though I’ve already found that I made a typo in mine. Oh well. I hope that, too, is a bit of encouragement in its own way.
Scripting Japan 