Organizer: Janet Shibamoto Smith, University of California, Davis

Chair: Cindi SturtzSreetharan, California State University, Sacramento

Discussant: Nobue Suzuki, Nagasaki Wesleyan University, Japan

The Japanese are not widely known as emotionally expressive. Images of reserved and conventionally etiquette-oriented Japanese are far more common than of the direct and emotionally expressive. Indeed, maturity in Japan demands muting public displays of affect (Matsumoto 1996). Nonetheless, Japanese people love, hate, desire, and mourn. But the everyday expression of emotion, its role in social life, and the relation of these real life expressions to the dominant discourse of emotion remain virtually unexplored. Discourses of normality are seen as primary disciplining and normalizing forces on the social subject (Foucault 1977, 1978). Ideally such focus on ?discourse? provides a link between the social scientist's discursive world and language. Although the issue of discourse opens the door to language as a key instrument in the distribution of power in both our institutional and personal lives, however, in fact, actual language structure and use are generally overlooked (MacDonald 1995). This panel argues that it is precisely in the structure of the speaking that goes into the construction and circulation of discourses that the mechanisms underlying their power are to be found. Here, we focusing on the dominant discourse of emotion in Japan, we present a series of detailed examinations of how this discourse plays out in real time verbal exchanges. Each paper exposes the limits of the discourse's normalizing force and probes the spaces in which disqualified knowledges of marginal/ized groups -- zainichi Koreans (Ryang), regional men (SturtzSreetharan), men in love (Shibamoto-Smith), and complaining women (Occhi) -- persist as alternative strategies.

Sonia Ryang, Johns Hopkins University

By using the data taken from women who are bilingual in Korean and Japanese, I try to understand the linguistic expression of love, when the subject's capacity to use one language is confined in specific areas such as public or political affairs, as opposed to her capacity to use the other, which is more dominantly reserved for personal realm. My findings are, however, not consistent, in that when Korean women who are educated in Korean schools, and therefore speaking Korean at school and Japanese at home, are generally unable to capture fine and detailed expression of their emotion, desire, and love, even when they write and speak in Japanese, the language they reserve for private and personal affairs. Is their bilinguality constraining the capacity to express themselves? The question seems all the more curious, since Japanese popular culture is replete with romanticism and if these Korean women were exposed to these popular-cultural products, surely their self-expression is expected to reflect cliche. But they do not and seem to genuinely struggle to look into their selves in terms of romantic love. Perhaps, the problem is extra-linguistic: I examine how Koreans are excluded from mainstream Japanese popular culture. The way women are treated inside their ethnic community may also provide clues. Here, I shall first capture current trends in the theory and practice of romantic love. With these as a measuring point, I show examples that explicate the distance between the current discourse of love and the reality of my informants.

Cindi SturtzSreetharan, California State University, Sacramento

In many parts of the (Western) world, (heterosexual) men are not strongly associated with emotional displays, with the possible exception of anger. This is even more true in Japan where (hetero-normative) men are not even associated with anger, but rather variously with stoicism and non-expressivity, and are often described as lacking in emotion. Linguistically, however, Japanese men are associated with speech styles which are described as direct, aggressive, rough, and (occasionally) vulgar. How do men achieve discourse styles characterized as rough and, yet remain unexpressive? Most of the descriptions of Japanese men are based on white-collar Tokyo men; we have very little knowledge of how other Japanese men do emotion. Using naturally occurring all-male informal conversations, this paper examines the ways in which regional men from the Kansai (Western) area of Japan linguistically express emotions such as anger. Conversations which take place among three life-stage groups -- students, salarymen, and retirees -- are investigated. My findings suggest that specific discourse structures are used to achieve emotional effects depending on the age, context of conversation, and participants. Findings show that men draw on various linguistic and discursive resources to achieve particular emotional stances. These resources include "playing" with the structures of the language. By providing empirical evidence of Kansai men's linguistic practices with specific emphasis on the ways in which men express emotion, a deeper understanding into how men use specific linguistic structures, at the everyday local level, to create, maintain, and manage particular emotions is achieved.

Janet Shibamoto Smith, University of California, Davis

Japanese men are not generally known as great lovers. Rather, they are imagined as gray-suited, briefcase-carrying sarariiman whose primary loyalty is to their workplace and whose role in love, marriage, and domesticity is extremely limited. Emotions - especially romantic love - are seen as left to women. Our thoughts about Japanese male speech patterns follow the same line. Japanese men speak in monotonic, direct ways and, when it comes to revealing their hearts, they do not. This paper reports evidence of men's need to and potential for emotional expressivity. The men under investigation are men in love. Evidence concerning men's romantic expressivity is drawn from two sources, one only indirectly suggestive of how men in love express their feelings. Romance fiction provides a rich source of data concerning how men in love are imagined to think and to speak their feelings. This paper reports a linguistic and narrative analysis of male protagonists' declarations of love across three decades of Japanese romance fiction (Shibamoto Smith 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005). I also analyze data drawn from kokuhaku 'confession' websites that proffer advice on successful love declarations to ordinary Japanese men and women. This more direct source of data, when paired with the confessions from the romance novels, allows a fuller understanding of an arena of masculine emotionality and personal expressivity than is possible under the predominant assumptions of male speaking patterns as normative, distanced, and public.

Debra J. Occhi, Miyazaki International College, Japan

One genre of discourse impinged upon by the Japanese ideology of emotional reserve is that of women's complaint. Stereotypical descriptions of the stoic endurance of Japanese women, as well as their prescriptively gentle submissiveness, abound in scholarly and popular literature. The very notion of onnarashisa 'femininity' includes using reserved speech. Under this rubric complaining is framed as abnormal. Language hygiene writers claim that a woman who speaks frankly will be teased and labeled hysteric. These aspects of the dominant ideology support the notion that JWSL (Japanese women's standard language) is imbued with a power differential derived from the gendered social hierarchy. Yet Japanese women do find means to voice their complaints. This paper explores where, why, and how this may occur by examining specific instances of overt complaining in both spoken and textual natural contexts of occurrence. Analysis of this corpus of women's complaints and of the responses to their complaints contributes to our understanding of how power -- in its various legitimated and subversive forms -- is exercised within the gendered dynamics of contemporary Japan.