Keigo in Modern Japan: Polite Language from Meiji to the Present (review)

Patricia Wetzel takes on the ambitious task of presenting and illuminating keigo to a non-Japanese audience by analyzing it from various perspectives: linguistic, historical, ideological, sociological, and, not least, the "commonsense" view of the ordinary native Japanese speaker. Almost half the book consists of two appendices and detailed notes, discussed below. In just over a hundred pages Wetzel succinctly combines rigorous linguistic analysis with a historical and sociological account of how keigo came to occupy a central role in descriptions and discussions of Japanese language and society. This "triangulation" approach gives a far more rounded and detailed picture of keigo and its role in Japanese society than anything else available in English. Wetzel's long-term personal involvement in the subject, her descriptions of her experiences and observations as a learner of Japanese and a participant in hanashikata-kyōshitsu (speaking classes/schools), and her elegant, lucid style are reminiscent of anthropologist Liza Dalby's Kimono and Geisha.¹ Keigo is equally authoritative, readable, and enjoyable.

The book details how what is today taken to be traditional, historical, and fixed is in fact a relatively recent and artificial construct, one that serves an important ideological function. The author argues that the modern grammar and awareness of keigo are products of Japan's contact with the West in the late nineteenth century—of the respective needs for Western linguists to describe aspects of a language very different from their own, and for Japanese linguists to make explicit and classify what was taken for granted; and, more generally, of Japan's desire to define itself in comparison with the West. Wetzel's research reveals that the term keigo was only coined in the late nineteenth century and did not come into wider use until the postwar period. This does not, of course, mean that "polite language" (as she chooses to translate keigo) did not exist before this, but rather that a variety of terms were used instead, all of which are discussed in detail here.

The first two chapters, "Keigo in Linguistics" and "Keigo in Kokugogaku," outline the Western and Japanese traditions of keigo research respectively, bringing out the different underlying philosophies and highlighting the fact that even kokugogaku is heavily influenced by Western philology and etymological analysis. These chapters are more challenging for the nonspecialist than the later ones because of the technical linguistic analysis. To illustrate how Japanese analysis of keigo continues to evolve, the approaches of three linguistic accounts, each entitled simply Keigo and published in 1975, 1987, and 1994 respectively,² are summarized and compared.

The third chapter, "Inventing Keigo: Standardization," gives a historical account of keigo in the modern period. It describes how polite language first began to be categorized and codified in the Meiji period, and how it was presented as a coherent system and promoted via the national education system. The story continues through the Taisho and early Showa periods and into the "golden age" of keigo in the immediate postwar period and its reexamination in the late 1990s.

Chapter four, "The Modernization of Keigo," takes a sociological approach. The author applies Norman Fairclough's idea of the "technologization of discourse" and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of linguistic capital to the proliferation of "how-to" literature and classes on language usage, including keigo, in Japan. This is where Wetzel's participant-observation of such classes provides some rich data, in perhaps one of the most personally engaging sections of the book. The descriptions of quizzes on honorific and humble forms, baffling to many of her fellow students (Japanese native speakers), are familiar to anyone who has experienced the Japanese education system as student or teacher—the reduction of complex sociolinguistic behavior to questions with clear right or wrong answers.

These experiences feature again in the final chapter, "Keigo Common Sense," which examines how keigo relates to social practices in Japan. Wetzel argues that Japan's "linguistic...