Gender, Language and Culture: A Study of Japanese Television Interview Discourse (review)

In this Ph.D. thesis rewrite, Lidia Tanaka uses conversation analysis (CA) to examine the influence of gender, age, and role on turntaking in Japanese television discourse. In introductory chapters T provides overviews of CA and Japanese linguistics (Ch. 1, 1–32), the interview genre (Ch. 2, 33–56), and turntaking (Ch. 3, 57–98). Subsequently, T uses data to examine gender, age, and status asymmetry (Ch. 4, 99–136), aizuchi (backchanneling) (Ch. 5, 137–74), and aizuchi asymmetry (Ch. 6, 175–200). Ch. 7 (201–6) is the conclusion.

Frequent typographical and infelicities in diction sometimes render the text incomprehensible: ‘Host sends more aizuchi in sentence-final positions (13%) than the guests (19%)’ (171). Given the importance of gender and age in this book, T’s word choice is ironic: women are termed ‘females’, a characterization that emphasizes a woman’s reproductive role, and participants over fifty are labeled ‘old’. Worse, it is not until the appendices (221) that readers discover that participants T labels ‘young’ are actually aged 37–49.

T discusses neutrality of interviewers and formality of interviews, but all data comes from Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s talk show Tetsuko no heya ‘Tetsuko’s room’. T fails to mention that Osorubeshi Tetsuko ‘Tetsuko the Terrible’ is infamous for rudeness to guests and can make or break their acting careers, circumstances hardly conducive to formality and neutrality. T’s glosses miss colloquialisms, and her translations render informal Japanese into stilted English, implying a formality not present in the Japanese original. Tetsuko’s room is at best a marked example of the interview genre.

Analysis can be arbitrary. T says a guest’s sore toka ‘like that’ acknowledges Kuroyanagi’s ‘contribution’ to the conversation (113), but it is equally likely he was discounting Kuroyanagi’s interruption. T says that the presence of soide (abbreviation of sorede ‘then’) in speech marks a shift from formal to informal, even though soide appears in ‘formal’ speech as well (118–19). Generalizations, such as statements that final particle (FP) kashira is used exclusively by women and FP na exclusively by men (28), or that data is formal because FPs are limited to ne, kashira, and yo (94), were belied by the data, which includes male kashira (121), male wa (130), female na (77), male na (121), female sa (120), and informal no (88).

T concludes that turntaking is minimally affected by gender, traditional men’s and women’s speech styles remain de rigueur, and women cannot use male speech to establish authority. T then calls for further studies of how Japanese women establish authority. Perhaps T overlooked Ms. Kuroyanagi’s repeated use of men’s speech to establish authority over subordinate male guests.

Despite poor English translations and glosses, T’s Japanese transcripts remain excellent data. Unfortunately T’s analysis cannot be accepted without careful checking of references and data, tasks difficult for monolingual English readers. I hope T will revise this book further.