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Paper short abstract

A close reading of Hoshi Shin’ichi’s dystopia shows how the suppression of the word “war” masks rather than prevents violence, challenging strong assumptions about linguistic determinism.

Paper long abstract

Hoshi Shin’ichi’s dystopian short fiction is often read as an ironic exploration of technological rationality and social conformity. This paper proposes a different emphasis: Hoshi as a critic of linguistic engineering and of strong interpretations of linguistic relativity. Focusing on the postwar dystopian story “The Man in White” (Shiroi fuku no otoko), in which the word “war” (sensō) is systematically eliminated from language and thought in the name of peace, the paper argues that Hoshi exposes the fundamental limits of coercive language reform as a tool for ethical or social transformation.

The narrative depicts a society that equates the eradication of a word with the eradication of the phenomenon it denotes. State authorities police linguistic usage with extreme rigor, convinced that lexical purification will prevent the recurrence of violence. However, Hoshi constructs a deliberate tension between the disappearance of the signifier and the persistence of what the signifier once named. While institutional actors internalize the imposed linguistic logic, aggression continues to manifest itself in everyday practices—not only in their own actions, but most strikingly in the spontaneous play of children, who reenact conflict despite lacking historical memory.

Through close reading, this paper shows that Hoshi does not confirm a strong Sapir–Whorf position in which language determines cognition. Instead, he dramatizes its failure. The children function as a narrative counterexample to linguistic determinism: without access to the term “war,” they nonetheless reconstruct its behavioral patterns. What is eradicated is not violence itself, but historical awareness and moral reflection on violence. Language reform thus produces amnesia rather than peace.

While the story can be situated within the broader tradition of dystopian and anti-totalitarian narratives in world literature, this presentation focuses instead on close reading in order to highlight a less familiar dimension of Hoshi Shin’ichi’s prose—one that complicates his common classification as a science fiction writer and foregrounds his ethical critique of language and power.

Keywords:

Hoshi Shin’ichi; dystopian fiction; linguistic relativity; language and power; postwar Japanese literature