Ostasienwissenschaften Meyer-Struckmann-Preis 2016: Florian Coulmas

Mit dem Meyer-Struckmann-Preis für geistes- und sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung, 2016 ausgeschrieben für Ostasienwissenschaften, wurde Professor Dr. Florian Coulmas ausgezeichnet. Florian Coulmas ist Senior-Professor für Sprache und Kultur des modernen Japan am Institut für Ostasiatische Studien der Universität Duisburg-Essen. Die Jury würdigt mit Coulmas einen Wissenschaftler, der als Direktor des Deutschen Instituts für Japanstudien in Tokio wegweisend die internationale Forschung zum demographischen Wandel einer nicht-westlichen Industrienation bereichert hat. Nach Einschätzung der Jury besitzt der Linguist, Soziologe und Japanologe sowohl durch seine fachliche Expertise im Bereich der sozialwissenschaftlichen Japanforschung als auch als Soziolinguist ein internationales Renommee. Im deutschsprachigen Raum machte sich Coulmas darüber hinaus als populärer Sachbuch-Autor zu aktuelle Japanthemen einen Namen

Strategies of Impoliteness in Japanese Spontaneous Talks

If, on the one hand, Japanese language, with its richness of marked allomorphs used for honorifics, has been considered one of the most attractive languages to investigate the phenomenon of politeness, on the other hand, a very small number of studies have been devoted to Japanese impoliteness, most of them limited to BBSs’ (Bulletin Board System) chats on Internet. Interestingly, Japanese native speakers declare, in general, that their language has a very limited number of offensive expressions and that ‘impoliteness’ is not a characteristic of their mother tongue. I tried to analyse some samples of spontaneous conversations taken from YouTube and other multimedia repertoires, in order to detect the main strategies used in Japanese real conversations to cause offence or to show a threatening attitude toward the partner’s face. It seems possible to state that, notwithstanding the different ‘cultural’ peculiarities, impoliteness shows, also in Japanese, a set of strategies common to other languages and that impoliteness, in terms of morphology, is not a mirror counterpart of keigo

“I don’t want to live too long!”: Successful ageing and the failure of longevity in Japan

This chapter examines ‘successful aging’ through its impacts on formal care workers in Japan. It is based on one year of fieldwork conducted in urban Japan and examines the affective, ethical, and cultural forces that result at times in resilience, compassion, and intimacy between carers and elderly clients, and at other times, in violence, abuse, and abandonment. I argue that locating the source of this divergence in individuals (i.e., adverse coping strategy) reproduces the same neoliberal model of success for care workers as it does for the elderly. Instead, care and abuse in formal care settings can be seen as symptoms of broader political and economic transformations that have been occurring in Japan since the 1990s

The nationalization of writing

published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe