Gender, Language, And Modernity: Toward An Effective .

gender, language, and modernity:toward an effective history of Japanesewomen's languageMIYAKO INOUEStanford University"Women's language" is a critical cultural category and an unavoidable part ofpractical social knowledge in contemporary Japan. In this article, I examinethe genealogy ofJapanese women's language by locating its emergence in thelate 19th and early 20th centuries when state formation, capitalist accumulation, industrialization, and radical class reconfiguration were taking off. Ishow how particular speech forms were carved out as women's language in anetwork of diverse modernization practices. I theorize the historical relationship between Japan's linguistic modernity—language standardization, therise of the novel, and print capitalism—and the emergence of Japanesewomen's language, [gender and language, modernity, language ideology,metapragmatics, reported speech, Japan, Japanese women, effective history]Japanese women's language is a socially powerful truth.1 By this, I do not meanthat the phrase refers to the empirical speech patterns of women but that Japanesewomen's language is a critical cultural category and an unavoidable part of practicalsocial knowledge in contemporary Japan. By using the phrase "Japanese women'slanguage," I refer to a space of discourse in which the Japanese woman is objectified,evaluated, studied, staged, and normalized through her imputed language use and isthus rendered a knowable and unified object. Doxic statements, such as "Womenspeak more politely than men" or "Women are not capable of speaking logically," arecommonly heard in daily conversation. Scholars, too, have produced a highly reflexive and abstract—and therefore privileged—knowledge of how women speak differently from men. They have systematically located male-female differentiation at alllevels of language—phonology, semantics, morphology, syntax, speech acts, and discourse (in the technical linguistic sense), as well as extralinguistic features such aspitch; they have explained how female-specific values, attributes, and social roles areregistered in speech forms and in the management of conversation.2Women's language also is a national issue, a reflexive parameter oi civil orderand social change. Nationwide opinion polls are regularly conducted on whetherwomen's language is becoming corrupted, and, if so, how corrupted. National sentiments over the perceived disappearance of women's language are thereby crystallized and circulated in the form of numbers and statistics.3 This linguistic consciousness of how women speak is closely connected with notions of culture and traditionin the assumption that women's language is uniquely Japanese, with unbroken historical roots in an archetypical Japanese past, and inescapably linked to an equallytraditional and archetypical Japanese womanhood. Kindaichi Kyosuke, pne of thefounders of modern Japanese linguistics, noted in his discussion of women's language:American Ethnologist29(2)392-422. Copyright 2002, American Anthropological Association.

gender, language, and modernity393"Japanese womanhood is now being recognized as beautiful and excellent beyondcompare with the other womanhoods of the world. Likewise, Japanese women's language is so fine that it seems to me that it is, along with Japanese womanhood, uniquein the world" (1942:293).4 Kikuzawa Sueo, who is noted as one of the first modern linguists to bring attention to women's language, observed: "Women's speech is characterized by elegance, that is, gentleness and beauty. Moreover, such characteristicscorrespond with our unique national language" (1929:75). Women's language also isviewed as cultural heritage, on the brink of vanishing and in urgent need of preservation.5 As Mashimo Saburo, another scholar of Japanese women's language, puts it,"We cannot hope for contemporary Japanese women to be as witty and tactful aswere those in the past, but, at least, I would like them to have a sincere and humble attitude and to preserve the cultural heritage passed down from the ancestors withoutdestroying it" (1969:81). Talk of women's language implicates the perceived continuing contradiction between Japanese tradition and modernity.Japanese women's language also is a transnational social fact. An article appeared in 1995 in The New York Times (Kristof 1995) titled "Japan's Feminine Falsetto Falls Right out of Favor." The subtitle reads: "Traditionally, women have spokenin a falsetto pitch, but now they're beginning to find their own deeper sounds" (1995:1). In this article, Japanese women's voices are described as being "as sweet as syrup,and as high as a dog whistle. Any higher, and it would shatter the crystal on the seventh floor," and "they are not speaking, but squeaking" (1995: 1). Based on a Japanese male sociolinguist's research, the article compares the pitch of Japanesewomen's voices and that of American women's voices and reports that Japanesewomen's voices have significantly dropped these days because of the change inwomen's status in Japan. Japanese women's speech—as if another disassembled andfetishized part of a woman's body—now draws intensive international attention as indexical of how far Japan has progressed or caught up with America.The questions to be answered are: How and why did some speech forms andfunctions come to be identified as women's language? How and why have thesespeech forms and functions become promoted from unselfconscious sound to a universalized, national symbol that is both a socioculturally and linguistically discrete index? Most importantly, how did such an indexical practice—a linkage of speech withsocial structure and cultural meaning—come to be possible to begin with? Scholars ofNational Language Studies (kokugogaku) often date the origin of women's languageas early as the fourth century, and they commonly construct a seamless narrative ofJapanese women's language passed down to the present.6 Evidence of women's language is traced in premodern literary works and in records of terminology used by sequestered groups of feudal women such as court ladies, Buddhist nuns, and women inthe pleasure quarters (geisha and prostitutes).7This primordialist discourse, however, does not provide an adequate historicallinguistic account of the development of contemporary women's language or of acontinuous descent from ancient origins. Rather, this discourse merely assumes an essence of Japanese women's language that originated at some ancient time andteleologically descended without interruption or transformation down to the present.The isolated and discontinuous examples are meant to illustrate the continuous essence assumed to lie behind them. For present purposes, I make the point that because it denies historical contingency and ignores emergent phenomena this discourse paradoxically erases the material traces of women's diverse linguisticexperience and affirms the transcendental national narrative of culture and tradition.It hides histories by articulating (teleological) History.

394american ethnologistThis teleological History often is insinuated into the way we conceptualize semiotic processes. Ochs's (1990, 1992) concept of indexing, for example, accounts forhow final particles in Japanese—a set of verb-ending forms—came to mark the genderof the speaker. Ochs's (1990, 1992) model postulates a two-tier semiotic process,namely, direct indexing and indirect indexing. Accordingly, certain contextual dimensions of speech, namely, affective and epistemological dispositions (or stances) ofparticipants "are directly indexed in all languages, are central dimensions of all communicative events, and are central constituents of other dimensions of communicative events" (Ochs 1990:296). Although these contextual dimensions of speech arethus directly indexed in speech, according to Ochs's framework, other contextual dimensions, such as the social identities of participants and the social relationshipsamong participants, are less likely to be directly indexed. Rather, they are marked indirectly through the mediation of the direct indexing of affective and epistemologicaldispositions (or stances). In this two-tier semiotic process, Ochs thus observes, "certain social meanings are more central than others. These meanings however help toconstitute other domains of social reality. That is, a domain such as stance helps toconstitute the image of gender" (1992:343). In the case of Japanese language, the finalparticle is an affective and evidential marker with which speakers signal their socialattitudes or stances toward the statements that they make. Certain final particles indexassertiveness and intensity, while others index uncertainty and hesitancy. Ochs observes that because of the culturally preferred symbolic association between genderand affect in Japan—women are associated with softness and men with assertiveness—use of those particles indirectly indexes the speaker's gender. For example, useof the particle wa, which directly indexes the affective disposition of softness, in turn,indirectly indexes the female identity of the speaker. Ochs thus explains, "Because oithe strong conventional and constitutive relations between affect and gender, the direct indexing of affect evokes gender identities or gender voices of participants aswell" (1990:295).This widespread theoretical account of indexical processes entails what onecould usefully call a "history effect." The account creates a simulated temporal orderin which a direct index (affect) is assumed to have temporally preceded an indirectone (gender). The particle wa is recognized as the marker of female gender, and thetacit assumption is that this indexical linkage followed naturally from concrete speechsituations in which women socialized themselves to speak softly by complying withthe cultural expectation of female behavior. Over time, the account assumes, wacame to index softness, through women's longstanding cumulative and collective useof it—a mechanical, indeed, evolutionary, process of repetition out of individualchoice, convention, or social conditioning. But this is a history with neither a beginning nor an ending. Barthes would call it a "myth" that "deprives the object of whichit speaks of all History. In it history evaporates. It is a kind of ideal servant: it preparesall things, brings them, lays them out, the master arrives, it silently disappears: all thatis left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comesfrom" (1982:141).This seemingly stable indexical order of affect and gender on the one hand, andof gender and speech forms, on the other hand, did not exist until the late 19th century. Prior to that time, the particle wa, for example, could be associated neither withsoftness nor femininity. Quite the contrary, educators and intellectuals considered it avulgar speech form. The lesson to be drawn from this history is that the symbolic connection between softness and femininity, assumed today to be a natural outcome ofrepetitive practice, emerged at a specific point—a historical threshold in the recent