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Paper short abstract

Through the examination of the corpus built from Yomiuri, Asahi and Twitter data from 2011 to 2014, this paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the Fukushima effect in Japan's media focusing on a discussion of nuclear phase-out from the point of view of corpus-driven discourse analysis.

Paper long abstract

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster led to catastrophic environmental and economic consequences and temporarily eroded the public attitude towards nuclear energy not only in Japan but globally. In 2011, the Japanese DPJ-led government gained worldwide attention for the plan to phase-out. However, while some countries seized the opportunity to move away from nuclear energy and to expand the use of renewable energy sources, the succeeding Japanese LDP-led government, despite growing public distrust towards nuclear facilities, eventually decided to restart nuclear plants and continue to rely on nuclear energy in 2012.

In this paper, I examine the discourse of nuclear phase-out represented in Japanese media, contrasting data from two newspapers (Yomiuri Shinbun and Asahi Shinbun) and social media (Twitter). To explore the discourse, I undertook a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of a large corpus of newspaper articles and tweets on nuclear phase-out in the period of 2011-2014. The analysis shows not only the growing media convergence between social media and the mass media and thus their close interrelatedness but also instances in which social media has become more influential than the legacy media outlets.

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Paper short abstract

Based on analyses of actual face-to-face and telephone conversational interactions, I explore and show how Japanese speakers produce and make interpretable affective stance displays in their everyday interactions by means of contextually situated combinations of verbal resources.

Paper long abstract

For a long time, mainstream linguistics was "dominated by the intellectualist prejudice that language is, essentially, if not solely, an instrument for the expression of propositional thought" (Lyons 1982:103) and its theories and methods have been heavily influenced by 'the written language bias' (Linell 1982). Consequently, affect has commonly been viewed as "too slippery an area of language for 'scientific' investigation" and "consistently set aside as an essentially unexplorable aspect of linguistic behaviour" (Besnier 1990:420). It has since transpired that any element of the linguistic system may be mobilized for affective stance display and that, as Sorjonen and Peräkylä (2012:9) emphasize, "it is not single resources in isolation but the cooccurrence of resources from different modalities and levels of modality that display emotional stances and their intensity […] at specifiable places in interaction".

In this paper, I explore and demonstrate how Japanese speakers produce and make interpretable affective stance displays in their everyday conversational interactions by means of contextually situated combinations of verbal (and certain vocal) resources. The individual resources and combinations may be conventionalized to different degrees. Whereas some of the resources, such as affect-descriptive adjectives, are quite transparent, there is a large number of resources whose function is not primarily thought to be that of means used for affective stance display. Some express specific affective stances, others serve as affective markers or contextualization cues (sensu Gumperz 1982) that make discourse interpretable as affectively charged, they may specify the intensity of otherwise expressed affects, etc.

The paper is based on close analyses of recordings of spontaneous face-to-face and telephone conversational interactions between Japanese young people who identify as friends. The approach I take is informed mainly by conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, while the subject matter I concern myself with in this paper forms a part of my larger research project focusing on affective stance display and affiliation management in Japanese social interaction.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the emergence and developmental trajectory of Japanese victimhood discourse using the texts of 74 years of Hiroshima's Peace Declarations and 20,000 atomic-bomb survivors' questionnaire responses.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the emergence and developmental trajectory of Japanese victimhood discourse using the texts of 74 years of Hiroshima's Peace Declarations and 20,000 atomic-bomb survivors' questionnaire responses.

On 6 August 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb explosion left the city of Hiroshima barren. An estimated 140,000 civilians were dead by the end of the year. With this, World War II came to an end, but a war of discourse on identifying the victim and the culprit began. The war of words emerged in the process of making sense of the unprecedented scale of human tragedy: Some offered justification for the nuclear attack as a necessary evil to save many lives from Imperial Japan’s aggression, while others condemned the inhumanity of mass civilian genocide which left those who barely survived with lifelong physical, psychological, and socioeconomic damages.

Meanwhile, the survivors themselves have taken a long journey of self-identity change. From ostracized victimhood to established citizenship as witnesses of an ultimate event that touches upon every human being across national, cultural, and political borders. Their journey is entwined with the 74 years of the Hiroshima city’s annual peace declarations, the role of which is to reflect the citizens’ sentiments and to communicate with domestic and international audiences.

This empirical study scrutinized all declaration texts in the original Japanese versions and the English translations, with a special focus on how the actors associated with the concepts of ‘victimhood’, ‘aggressor’ and ‘peace’ may be expressed. The results of quantitative and qualitative discourse analyses reveal that the survivors’ collective and individual perceptions of victimhood changed over time, but the contents and the developmental trajectories of discourse change are different in the original Japanese declarations and in their English translations. Two distinct narratives were established for the victimhood of A-bomb survivors, giving rise to a debate on Japanese victimhood culture.