Paper short abstract

The presentation calls for Japanese Studies to move beyond treating language and culture solely as abstract systems or subjective experiences. By focusing on language as a social practice shaped by social contexts, we can also conceptualise “Japan” as a dynamic set of situated practices.

Paper long abstract

What are Japanese Studies, and how should they be practiced? In my presentation, I want to use historical examples of language-related practices and ideologies to examine what I see as a tension between the stated aims of Japanese Studies as a form of “cultural” studies and the pedagogical reality of a language teaching curriculum.

By situating this problem within broader methodological debates in area studies and the social sciences more generally, I argue that the main issue revolves around oscillation between objectivist and subjectivist approaches to “culture” and “language”. Objectivist traditions, exemplified by structuralist linguistics, treat social practices as rule-governed systems that can be analysed independently of the practicing subject. However, this removal of the subject obscures how practices are produced and sustained through social interests and power relations. Conversely, critiques of objectivism often retreat into phenomenological subjectivism, emphasising “lived experience” while lacking a systematic account of regularity in social life.

“Language” or “culture” must be understood as a set of rules allowing researchers to explain regularity in practice. However, by appealing to rules (laws, norms, or abstract models) objectivist approaches avoid addressing the messy, practical logic of real action. Such a perspective cannot explain how speakers construct language creatively and appropriately to changing social situations, power relations, and contexts. Meaning depends not only on linguistic structure but also on social relations – hierarchies of power, authority, prestige, age, or class. The same problem appears in anthropology and cultural theory: when concepts like “culture”, “structure”, or “mode of production” are treated as sole agents that cause behaviour, abstractions become reified and mistaken for social forces.

Using language as a key example, I argue that meaning and practice cannot be understood apart from social relations, and I call for Japanese Studies grounded in a theory of practice that constructs “language” not as a code but as social practice that does things socially, depending on who speaks and under what conditions, and “Japan” not as an abstract object but as a field of historically situated practices.

Paper short abstract

This presentation examines multilingualism in Japan, using Tokyo’s Ameyoko as a case study. Approaches to identifying, counting, and mapping languages give way to studying how linguistic interactions and social spaces influence each other.

Paper long abstract

Multilingualism can be examined historically by tracing how languages arrive, spread, retreat, or change over time. It can also be approached by studying the classical sociolinguistic question of who speaks what to whom. However, geographic approaches are increasingly difficult to apply because speakers and languages are mobile, and minorities and immigrants have become superdiverse. Consequently, the study of language distribution across (immutable) space is giving way to the study of language use in social space.

Research in urban centers now routinely focuses on the use of language across language boundaries (translanguaging), and linguistic diversity is thereby not explained solely by attending to the speaker. Social space receives more attention because speakers move through spaces filled with expectations and norms about language use. When space is seen as socially constructed, we must ask: how do linguistic interactions shape social spaces, and how do social spaces influence linguistic interactions? This implies that language is not simply regarded as a tool that conveys propositional content or gives its speaker away through variation (dialect, sociolect, genderlect, etc.). Language and space are emergent and dialectically related.

My presentation exemplifies this view by focusing on interactions in Ameyoko in Tokyo’s Taito Ward. The physical layout of this space defines the spaces that emerge through linguistic interaction, as do different kinds of knowledge, experiences, and perceptions. Drawing on data from Ameyoko’s linguistic soundscape, I zoom in on synchronized moments of understanding across language boundaries, the use of a lingua franca, the use of incompletely acquired language, or the use of set linguistic tokens in specific spaces. The interactions observed are emergent and hard to predict. Yet they are not ad hoc or random, because all linguistic interactions reflect attitudes and experiences shaped by relations of power. I argue that understanding these complexities is key to understanding contemporary language use, the social spaces it creates, and, ultimately, present-day society.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines AI-powered translation through the linguistic theory of Tokieda Motoki (1900–1967). Drawing on Tokieda’s processual view of language, it highlights the differences between human interpretation and algorithmic language processing and reflects on the implications for area studies.

Paper long abstract

The recent advances in generative AI are poised to bring about considerable changes in the way language is understood, not just at universities, but in broader society. As fast, free and “good enough” machine translation becomes widely available, “language barriers” – at least in the form that we have come to know them – may soon become a thing of the past. Yet a world where everything is translatable is not necessarily a world where nothing is lost in translation. On the contrary, as the sheer quantity of translations is set to exponentially increase, the number of misinterpretations will likely follow suit. This paper starts from the assumption that, in order to meet the challenges of intercultural communication in the future, students and practitioners of area studies need more than just practical language competence; they also require a solid theoretical footing in how language is expressed and interpreted, particularly with regard to the social – and human – aspects of language.

It is from this perspective that the paper revisits the work of Tokieda Motoki (1900–1967), a strikingly original thinker whose work has otherwise become largely forgotten. Tokieda, who rose to prominence at the height of Japanese imperialism, came under heavy criticism in the postwar period and remains a controversial figure today, not least because of his entanglements with assimilationist policies in Japanese-occupied Korea. This paper argues, however, that the advent of AI has made Tokieda’s ideas newly relevant: not only was he the first Japanese linguist to explicitly criticise the notion that language can be studied as an abstract system separate from the humans that speak it – an idea around which modern generative AI is built – he also built his own unique “processual theory of language” (gengo katei setsu), which treats language as a fluid and reciprocal process of expression and interpretation. With the aim of stimulating theoretical debate about language and area studies in the age of algorithms, this presentation asks what Tokieda’s “three preconditions for language” – the subject (shutai), the context (bamen) and the message (sozai) – reveal about the nature of AI-powered translation.