Paper short abstract:

In this paper I discuss the status of newly created words in Japanese that refer to new social phenomena or trends such as konkatsu (marriage hunting) or ikumen (men engaged in child-rearing and homemaking). My analysis is based on words collected from articles in Japan Times from 2015 and 2016.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I discuss a series of newly created words in Japanese that refer to new social phenomena or trends such as konkatsu (marriage hunting) or ikumen (men engaged in child-rearing and homemaking). One of the main properties of these words is that they are not translated, but transliterated in the romanization system in foreign texts related to Japan. My analysis is based on words collected from recent articles in Japan Times and has a quantitative dimension and a qualitative dimension.

My interest in these kind of words is twofold. On one hand, I discuss how these words are created in Japanese and what are their phonetic, morphological and semantic properties. I argue that they are created taking as a model a well established compound. For example konkatsu is created in a similar way with the well-known shūkatsu. I also examine the role of loans from English in the creation of these new words.

On the other hand, I will discuss the status of these words in the English text (their syntactic integration, their orthography and the way of paraphrasing their meanings), as well as the way in which the usage of these words influence the image the foreign readers have about Japan.