Language and Japanese Society: Mainstream, Minorities, and Modernity

Nanette Gottlieb has published widely on Japanese language and language policy, broadening out from an early focus on the writing system to examine various aspects of the interrelationship between Japan’s language(s) and society—the sociology of language in Japan. The pluralization of “language” in the previous sentence is crucial to the first of her books reviewed here, Language and Society in Japan:it highlights the fact that Japan, despite the efforts of Nihonjinrontheorists to convince the world otherwise, is anything but a monolingual and monocultural nation. This theme has been taken up by other researchers since the 1990s, but whereas books such as John Maher and Gaynor Macdonald’s 1995 edited volume ¹brought together individual studies of various linguistic and cultural minorities, the value of Gottlieb’s book is that it combines an up-to-date overview of mainstream Japanese language and society with analysis of the sociolinguistic situations of many of these minorities in an integrated way.

The rather bland title implies that the book’s target audience is not specialized but people such as students of the language and academics specializing in other areas of Japan studies or in the sociology of language in general. Indeed, the overall tone of the book fits this perception, with much material that introduces key aspects of the Japanese language and society, and does so succinctly and clearly. The structure of the book means there is some repetition, with, for example, policy on the Ainu language and people being discussed in both chapters 2 (not 3, as chapter 4 claims) and 4, but this is a minor quibble in a far-ranging and informative study that weaves together the different strands of Gottlieb’s scholarship and research over many years.

The first chapter, “The Japanese Language,” gives a foretaste of the issues discussed later in the book by distinguishing between “the national language of Japan” and “language in Japan” and by looking at Japanese from various perspectives, such as the Nihonjinronview of Japanese language, kokugo,and Nihongo;it also notes the many varieties (regional, male, and female) subsumed in “the Japanese language.” The second chapter briefly outlines the place of languages other than Japanese within the archipelago: Ainu, Okinawan, Korean, Chinese, English, and (increasingly) others. Similarly, the rest of the chapters, organized around the theme of language and identity, include a good deal of background that will be familiar to those with a strong interest in language in Japan. For example, an assessment of the role language has played in national identity since the Meiji period in chapter 3 is followed by a historical account of language policy, including policy on Ainu, English, and Japanese as a foreign language, in chapter 4.

However, there is also much to interest readers with a deeper knowledge of the field, notably in the chapters on writing and reading, discriminatory language, and shifting electronic identities, all of which examine contemporary developments. The discussions of dyslexia, literacy rates, and signs of a decline in reading indicate some cracks, albeit small, in the image of Japan as a highly literate nation. On the other hand, the stress placed on the role of newsletters and other self-produced materials (first printed, now electronic) in citizens’ movements that have been denied coverage in the mass media highlights the social and political value of that literacy. The final chapter on the impact of computers and the Internet builds on Gottlieb’s 2000 study, ²but the phenomenal speed with which technology has advanced in the intervening years means the focus here is more on how these developments are changing the ways people in Japan read, write, and interact with each other and with...