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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.