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ItemVarying orientations to sharing life stories: A diachronic study of Japanese women's discourse(Cambridge University Press, 2022-09-06)Language change across the lifespan is relatively underexplored in sociolinguistics. While studies of individuals' language across life stages are often considered to complement large scale studies of community-level language change, this study aims to explore how changes to family environment and social mobility interact with individual speakers' stylistic practice across life stages. It examines ethnographic interviews of five women, originally from the same area in western Japan, the same high school, and similar socio-economic background, conducted by a single researcher eleven years apart. The chronological and inter-participant comparisons reveal a complex pattern of stylistic practice and stance taking as the women share stories about career, family and relationships with the researcher. The study also discusses audience design in language variation and explores how the participants utilise their discursive repertoires in their interaction with the researcher, whose background is significantly divergent from theirs. (Language across the lifespan, stylistic practice, Japanese)
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ItemSpeech Styles in longitudinal interviews with women from the Kobe area--language changes and life stage （継続的インタビューデータにみる神戸出身女性話者のスピーチスタイル――ことばの経年変化とライフステージ――）(Hizuji, 2019)Studies in Dialects 5. ISBN: 978-4-89476-990-8
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ItemJapanese Women's Speech through Life-Transitions (1989-2000): An Analysis of Youth Language Features(WILEY, 2021-05-20)This study analyses four women’s speech from Kobe who were interviewed by the same researcher in 1989 and in 2000. We focused on highly indexical pragmatic youth language features (discourse markers and end‐rising intonation) to understand about societal pressures that young women in Japan face when transitioning into adulthood. The analysis reveals a complex picture; some women use them more as time goes by, while others use them less. The vast ethnographic information helps us to understand their persona style (Eckert 2008), and to have an insight into their linguistic capital (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1978, Woolard 2008).
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ItemNo Preview AvailableWriting Identity onto the Screen(International Institute for Asian, 2017)
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ItemWeddings and white dresses: Media and sexual citizenship in Japan(SAGE, 2017)Representations of gender and sexuality in mainstream media operate to both shape the contours of, and contest the limits to, sexual citizenship. The ‘citational practices’ of media representations mould contemporary understandings of these limits. In this article, the author examines mainstream and social media reports of two separate same-sex wedding ceremonies in Japan; the first at a queer community event in 2007 and the second at a major theme park in 2013. Through citations and quotations, a multitude of voices are embedded in the media texts. In the 2007 case, increased media visibility is mitigated by citational practices that clearly mark the same-sex wedding as devoid of legal standing. Whereas media reports situate the 2013 ceremony in the context of marriage equality trends internationally, an instance of possible discrimination is emphasised as being a ‘misunderstanding’. Similarly, a microanalysis of a light news documentary of the ceremony uncovers citational practices that highlight the importance of ‘forgiveness’ or ‘tolerance’ for ‘mutual coexistence’ in society. Furthermore, the reporting confines the ceremony to a ‘fairytale’-like ‘foreign’ domain. The process of ‘othering’ issues of sexual citizenship is linked to a cyclical process since the 1950s wherein representations of queerness are posited as ‘new’ forms of being in Japan. Discourse surrounding sexual citizenship is thereby projected into a non-domestic, non-specific future time.
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ItemAustralia’s ‘Asian Century’: Time, Space and Public Culture(Japan Focus, 2015-02-10)In this essay we consider ongoing public-cultural discussions about Australia’s situation in ‘the Asian century’ as symptomatic of a conjunctural moment in Australian social life: a historical phase that is given distinctive shape by the convergence of the discourses of paranoid nationalism and free-market (inter)nationalism. We argue that the co-existence of these two (deeply contradictory) imaginaries as the dominant available rubrics for configuring ‘Australia’ and ‘Asia’ in relation to each other results in a profoundly impoverished understanding of current conditions. We propose that an account of some very differently configured relationships between ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia,’ drawn from people’s material experiences of everyday cultural life, can provide resources for those interested in thinking beyond the hyperbole of economic opportunism and the paralysis of paranoid nationalism. We begin by briefly considering ostensibly progressive innovations in governmental and public-cultural framings of the Asia-Australia relationship since the late twentieth century–– ‘Asia as market’ and ‘Asia literacy’––before turning to some stories that we argue offer much richer resources. These stories include our remembered experiences of late 20th-century Australian children’s media––always-already infused with a certain Japanese flavor. We also consider the contemporary translocal experiences of Asian Australians, Chinese international students in Australian cities, and Asian-Australian media and research collaborations. Such phenomena, we argue, constitute Australian social life as translocal and inter-cultural, thereby fundamentally challenging the presumed radical separateness of ‘Australia’ from ‘Asia’ on which currently dominant framings of Australia’s situation in the ‘Asian century’ are founded.
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