Japanese at Work by Haruko Minegishi Cook & Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith

Author:Haruko Minegishi Cook & Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

5

E:

nakatta yo ne.

“They weren’t, right?”

6

Y:

dakara sore wa sugoi ii to omoimasu . watashitachi wa toshokan

7

ni itte::, nanka sūdai no piishii o minna de kakotte yaru mitai na.

8

go-nin ni ichi-dai gurai de::.

“Therefore, I think it’s great. We went to the library and gathered around a few PCs to operate [them], like one PC per five students.”

9

G:

orera piishii nakatta.

“We didn’t have PCs.”

Y expresses her opinion that giving PCs to students is a great idea, noting that she was not given such an opportunity when she was in elementary school (lines 1–4 and 6–8). The nonreciprocal exchange of Y’s desu/masu forms and E’s and G’s plain forms indicates a hierarchical relationship in which Y is both younger and lower status than E and G. Note that G employs orera ‘we’ to refer to his own elementary school days (line 9). By using orera, G constructs a context of “we” who did not have PCs in elementary school versus Y, who did. That is, G uses this pronoun to draw a line between people in his and E’s generation and Y. Nakamura (2010: 137) notes that in Japan, “masculinity is something which a man has to prove to other men rather than to women.” If so, the easiest way for men to display their masculinity to other men is to use male-associated language. G’s use of orera allows him to present his masculinity to E, as well as to establish solidarity with him.

The previous two sections have analyzed the use of the male-associated first person pronouns, boku and ore, accompanied by desu/masu and plain forms. Desu/masu forms, which index “the speaker’s ‘in-role’ stance” (Enyo 2015: 362), and plain forms, which signify the speaker’s innate stance, play a significant role in displaying different types of masculinity in the course of the meetings. While desu/masu forms contribute to presenting the speaker’s sarariiman identity, the plain form works to construct the speaker’s innate self. Boku and ore interact with these pragmatic meanings of linguistic forms to project the masculinities that these modes of self perform. While in SturtzSreetharan’s (2006a) work, ore indexes a “manly man” model of masculinity, this study observes that it is used to express a spontaneous masculinity vis-à-vis the masculinity of a public social persona, the sarariiman. The innate masculinity and the sarariiman masculinity that male employees perform in business meetings complement each other and may be essential for these employees to balance their masculinity at work. Moreover, in addition to displaying masculinities with ore and boku, the male employees establish solidarity among themselves with orera.

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