Personal Pronouns and Gendered Speech in Popular Manga (Japanese Comics)

Manga – Japanese comics – are often said to be influential in young women's using more masculine first person pronouns. However, research hitherto has not focused on the actual distribution of personal pronouns in manga, leaving that relationship unclear. To assess this question, I examined the different forms found in the lines from a corpus of six popular series. Against popular expectations, I found that no female characters used masculine first-person pronouns, with few examples of them using masculine second-person pronoun. With this gap between popular thought and actual usage patterns in mind, I then reexamine manga's possible role in influencing language change

For Whom and by Whom Children Are Named: Family Involvement in Contemporary Japanese Naming Practices

In pre-modern Japanese naming practices, familial relationships were frequently demonstrated systematically through personal names, but with changing lifestyles, family structures and naming trends, such systematic ways of creating familial ties through personal names have largely been lost. However, personal names may still express familial ties, but in different ways than in previous times. To consider this, this article utilizes a unique data set of 303 messages in municipal newsletters from parents about how they chose their child’s name, focusing on who was listed as choosing the name; whom the child was named for; and common elements within parent−child pairs and sibling sets. Parents themselves were most frequently noted to have selected the name, followed by the child’s older siblings; in comparison, grandparents were listed rarely. The use of a shared kanji ‘Chinese character’ between parents and children was also not common; however, it was more frequently observable in siblings’ names. Although the data set is small in size, the data strongly suggests that contemporary families are focused more on creating intragenerational connections between siblings, rather than intergenerational familial ties, which may be a result of the nuclearization of contemporary families