Japanese Language and Literature

The Japanese Language of Food Enjoyment with the Five Senses 五感で楽しむ食の日本語

Tatsuya Fukushima — 2025-04-19

Front matter and TOC

Suwako Watanabe — 2025-04-19

Contributors

Suwako Watanabe — 2025-04-19

Back matter

Suwako Watanabe — 2025-04-19

Everyone Wants to Speak English: The Struggles of an American Study-Abroad Student in Japan

Hiromi Tobaru — 2025-04-19

This case study examines an American undergraduate student’s study abroad (SA) experience in Japan, focusing on his self-perceived interactional experiences. Despite achieving notable success in language acquisition and developing social networks during his SA period, the student viewed his experience in the context of academic language learning—specifically, learning Japanese—as a failure due to his predominant use of English. This study explores the gap between the student’s experience and perception through quantitative and qualitative analysis of the student’s language use. Quantitative analysis revealed that overall, the student used Japanese more frequently than English, but most of his interactions outside the classroom involved either English or a combination of English and Japanese. Qualitative analysis uncovered the student’s struggle in reconciling the locals’ preference for English conversations with his own desire to use Japanese when interacting with Japanese local people. The results also indicate that the student encountered challenges in effectively using English as a global language, illustrating the complexity of navigating intercultural interactions. These findings suggest that the global dominance of English impacts and, at times, complicates the language-learning experiences of Anglophone SA students in Japan.

Development of L2 interactional resource in pragmatics instruction: Use of Japanese interactional particle ne in assessment activity

Saori Hoshi — 2025-04-19

The present study examined the development of interactional competence (IC) by JFL learners in an explicitly instructed setting, focusing on their use of a Japanese interactional particle ne in spontaneous conversation with NS classroom guests. More specifically, the study explores the impact of pragmatics instruction on the learners’ change in participation in assessment activity (Goodwin 1986) using ne in conversation. The instruction, incorporating metapragmatic discussion of the interactional functions of ne and recurrent conversation opportunities with NS classroom guests, was implemented in a third semester beginning Japanese class for one semester. The study focuses on learners’ appropriation of ne in ways that are consistent with the instructional content, and that potentially extend beyond it in terms of form, function, and activity-relevant participation. Qualitative analyses revealed greater evidence of interactional competence through the contingent use of ne in different sequential positions (follow-up and initial ne), while there was a difference in developmental trajectory between the contextual understandings and actual use of ne among individual learners. The findings suggest a critical role of explicit pragmatics instruction in learners’ metapragmatic development and use of ne as an index of interactional competence for the creation of alignment and intersubjectivity between participants in interaction.

Demystifying the Self: Metaphors of Sin and Self-Sacrifice in Miura Ayako’s Early Novels

Ryota Sakurai — 2025-04-19

This essay examines an alternative to dominant postwar notions of subjectivity in the Japanese cultural sphere through an analysis of Miura Ayako’s mid-1960s novels: Hyōten (Freezing Point, 1964), Hitsujigaoka (Hill of Sheep, 1965), and Shiokari tōge (Shiokari Pass, 1966). It argues that Miura’s depictions of sin and self-sacrifice serve as metaphors that critique prevailing ideas of subjectivity. Her doubly minoritized position as a female writer and a Christian significantly shapes this counternarrative while simultaneously complicating its construction and expression. Drawing on Iida Yūko’s conception of ōtōsei (responsiveness) and hidokusei (being read), the essay examines the discursive stakes of Miura’s fiction. Her work debunks the myth of self-contained individuals and presents the self neither as an idealized autonomous agent nor as doomed to a precarious existence, but as relational, inherently engaged in efforts toward reconciliation with others. This counter-vision unfolds in her novels through metaphors of sin and self-sacrifice, framed within the popular domestic novel form of the 1960s.

The Fiction of the Ninja

Robert Tuck — 2025-04-19

The claim that the legendary thief Ishikawa Goemon attempted to assassinate the warlord Oda Nobunaga by dripping poison down a thread into the latter’s mouth is a staple of English-language histories of the so-called ‘ninja.’ Despite its widespread circulation in popular histories of Japan, there is good reason to believe that this famous assassination attempt never actually happened. In this article, I trace the Ishikawa Goemon legend through a range of Japanese-language documentary and literary sources, attempting to find a source for the poison-thread tale. I conclude that the story is not only fiction but modern fiction, resulting from a misunderstanding of the climactic scene of a 1962 ninja movie, Shinobi no mono, as depicting an historical event. The poison-thread technique, I also suggest, is not an authentic historical technique at all but a borrowing from a 1925 novel by the mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo. The article concludes by exploring how the poison-thread story managed to circulate unchallenged for more than fifty years, and by offering some observations on the serious methodological flaws of English-language ‘ninja’ histories to date.

The Household and Its Discontents: Ejima Kiseki's Seken Musuko Katagi

Thomas Gaubatz — 2025-04-19

This article examines the “character pieces” (katagi-mono) of Ejima Kiseki (1666–1735), with a focus on Seken musuko katagi (Characters of Worldly Young Men, 1715), in the context of the normalization of the townsman household (ie) around the turn of the eighteenth century. In light of the increasing centrality of the household to townsman identity and the control it exerted over the energies of all its members, Kiseki’s humorous sketches of deviant heirs represent a comic deconstruction of the ideology of the household, alternately subverting its norms or exemplifying them ad absurdum to reveal their internal contradictions. In particular, Kiseki’s work focuses on the contradictory roles played by the “leisure arts” (yūgei) in townsman culture, both as a means of exemplary status performance and as a highly stigmatized form of status transgression.

Generic Reconsiderations: But is it Japanese Literature?

Nina Cornyetz — 2025-04-19

As translated Japanese literature crosses over to become world literature, there still are Orientalist assumptions about modern Japanese literature across the global academy at large, as of limited scope, rejecting fictionalization, and exploring states of mind. The objective of this essay is to counter essentialist and dated assumptions about modern Japanese literature by highlighting the actual breadth and diversity of English translations that negate these stereotypes. I even question postulating any homogeneous genre under the rubric “Japanese literature.” I begin with a broad survey of English-language reviews by non-area-specialists of three contemporary texts of Japanese literature in translation: Mizumura Minae’s (b. 1951) A True Novel (Honkaku shōsetsu, 2002), Kirino Natsuo’s (b. 1951) OUT (AUTO, 1997), and Kaneshiro Kazuki’s (b. 1968) Go (Gō, 2000). I follow that survey by revisiting and putting into question the dominant literary discourse by Japan specialists regarding just what constitutes “modernity” in Japanese literary studies. I then return my focus to the three contemporary Japanese novels already introduced. In the following order I will take up the complexities of each of the three novels’ plots, narration strategies, focalization, issues of ethnicity and race, relation of the individual to social conflicts and issues, and degrees of fictionalization versus realism. Finally, I will show how these various aspects of each of the three can moreover be seen as complementary to some of the most highly regarded fictions of the belle lettres traditions of Japanese modern literature, and hence belong in an alternative genealogy of modern Japanese literature.

Generational Struggle: Postwar Korean Views of Anti-colonial Violence in Minshu Chōsen and Hinawajū no uta

Robert Joseph Del Greco — 2025-04-19

Considering a variety of historical incidents, this study examines how liberated Koreans living in postwar Japan wrote about resistance movements of the colonial period. I argue that as part of the mission to develop a new founding mythos for the modern Korean nation (envisioned as a single unified state) several of these authors focused on establishing the necessity for violent anti-Japanese resistance, valorizing the historical incidents of it, and tying these acts to the development of Marxist political consciousness. By juxtaposing the agitprop editorials of a Korean centered postwar magazine, ‘Democratic Korea’ (Minshu Chōsen, 1946-1950), with Ho Nam-gi’s 1951 epic poem The Song of the Musket (Hinawajū no uta), I connect the efforts of political activists with the budding movement of Korean cultural workers using the Japanese language as a medium. In both cases, Koreans voiced their anti-colonial critique directly to the former colonizer and situated Korean resistance movements within a broader and ennobled historical context.