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Women in the Language and Society of Japan: The Linguistic Roots of Bias
Feminist critics have long considered language a primary vehicle for the transmission of sexist values in a society. This much-needed sociolinguistic critique examines the representation of women in traditional Japanese language and society. Derogatory and highly-sexualized terms are placed in historical context, and the progress of nonsexist language reform is reviewed. Central to this work are the individual voices of Japanese women who took part in a survey, expressing their candid thoughts and concerns regarding biased gender representations. In their own words, they give voice to the reality of being female within the constraints of a traditional--and sometimes misogynistic--language.
- GenresFeminismNonfictionJapan
240 pages, Paperback
First published April 7, 2010
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March 3, 2024
Here I go again, disagreeing with everyone else on goodreads.
This book is mistitled. Instead of having a subtitle of "The Linguistic Roots of Bias", it should be titled "A case study on embedding bias into your research and calling it objective."
Honestly, why is research into sex differences in language usage so terrible? This is an interesting topic! Why is it that only feminist researchers bother with it, and why is that they do such a terrible job? This book is riddled with research problems. In the first place the women who took part in the survey were not a random sample, or even a convenience sample, which may have had at least some hope of having representation, no, the author selected women participants. Not sampled. Selected. Based on something she called 'keen interest in language'. What does that mean? It's not defined. Does that mean that they studied another language? Does it mean that they majored in Japanese? Does it mean that they took a gendered linguistics class? I don't know. To be a decent researcher you have to define your terms.
But it wasn't only the sampling method that has problems, the research view from which she is working is phenomenological, which basically means that it's based on the perceptions of the participants. That's great, I'm glad she has a section where she says that clearly. But she only says it clearly once, and then completely ignores it to go on and baldly state that things are so. For instance, on page 166 she says 'High mister was created jokingly'. How does she know that? Does she show any evidence to back this up? Does she trace the etymology? Did she interview the person who first came up with it? No. She perceives that it was created jokingly. And that perception is legitimate, she's a native Japanese speaker, but just because she perceives it that way doesn't mean that everyone perceived it that way and since this is phenomenological, she should be more clear that this is her perception and not simply what is.
It wasn't just the methodological foundation that was problematic: the methodology itself was incredibly biased. The survey prompted these women to write down every instance of words that were derogatory towards women. Way to prime your participants. Way to insert bias from the very get go. Way to make sure that your hypothesis "women are spoken of derogatorily in Japanese" is upheld. Way to purposely design your research in order to show what you believe is there. What she should have done, what would have been a better research design is to first of all NOT select her participants, and second of all to have them write down every word they could think of that speaks about women in some way. Then she could have had the participants group the words that they wrote down into positive and negative categories. Instead she had them focus on things that were negative, and thus that's all they came up with. Imagine that. Worse, it wasn't until the very last page that she lets us know that two of her participants literally couldn't think of anything negative, even though they had been primed to do so! That's significant! Women who had been selected purposefully for this survey wrote that they couldn't think of anything, what would be the percentage if she just surveyed random people?
And some of the things that they came up with that were categorized as negative were clearly simply because they had been primed to do so. "bijin" (beautiful person 美人) is not a negative term, if you say it to any random woman on the street, it will make them blushingly happy (I tested this). If you want to say that it perpetuates a stereotype of what constitutes beauty, then make that case, but you can't just say that it's a negative term without showing your work. You especially can't say that it's universally a negative term, or universally should be a negative term without demonstrating why that is the case, because it clearly isn't perceived as a negative term by a lot of women.
It wasn't just the research design and implementation that was problematic, the argumentation was nonexistent. Things were just asserted. They were not defended, they were not explained. They were just said. Where they were explained, the argument was circular. My personal favorite was on page 107 "While 'onna no kuse ni' [though she's a woman] connotes the breach of the socially acceptable range of demeanor as well as behavior for women, 'otoko no kuse ni' [though he's a man] is simply used to criticize the cowardice or weakness of a man, rather than his behavior being outside of what is considered acceptable for men." That assertion doesn't make sense, let alone make a convincing argument. Acting in a cowardly or weak manner is behavior that is outside of what is considered acceptable for men, that's why this phrase is critical of men. Both phrases are equally critical of the sex they are targeting, both phrases are targeting the same thing, behavior that society disapproves of. Yet somehow she tries to argue away the hurtfulness of the one targeted at males. Based on what? Her perceptions of how men feel about it? How is that fair? Shouldn't she do another study where she has men list all of the negative words that are derogatory towards men and look at their perceptions of them? No. Because you see, how they feel doesn't matter, it's just how the women feel that matters. Women's perception of how words are used towards them is all important, the perceptions and intentions of the men and women who use them matter not at all. Funny, how she doesn't extend that same grace to men, their perceptions of words used towards them doesn't matter, no, what's important is that she perceives them as less painful than ones directed at women.
This willful blindness towards how language can victimize men was rampant in this book. The word 女滝 (medaki, female waterfall, connoting a small and quiet waterfall) is presented as negative and worthy of complaint. Okay. I can see why women might find their entire sex being associated with quietness offensive. But 男滝 (odaki, male waterfall, connoting a big and noisy waterfall) is automatically positive? Why? I think men might find it offensive to have their entire sex associated with being noisy. And anyway, it's not the quietness and the noisiness that are the reason for the male and female kanji being used. It's the size. No matter how much you try to explain it away, or scream about how it's stereotypical, on average, males are bigger than females. This is true across all cultures. It's true across species! (not all species, obviously, turtles for instance) Yet somehow we are supposed to pretend that this is not a universal observable fact that might be used as a comparison. "This waterfall is to this waterfall what a man is to a woman...bigger." It's completely logical. Simply because you don't like the connotation of a second order effect of size, ie, that the quietness and noisiness is dependent on the size, small amounts of water falling is quieter than large amounts of water falling, doesn't mean that you should jump to the conclusion that these words were designed to demean one group or the other.
The research behind the section on the sexism inherent in kanji (ideographs) was so shallow as to be laughable. She is talking about how some words use the woman kanji 女 as a radical in a kanji compound, a word made up of multiple kanji to express further ideas, for example 安 (an, safety, house radical above woman radical) [funnily enough she didn't complain about this one]. One of her participants said that 'the vast majority of kanji composed of onna hen have negative conntations.' Great, that's her participant's perception. But is that true? Did she list out every kanji that has the onna radical and have her participants rate them on negativity or positivity? No. She didn't. She just presented what her participant said as truth, without bothering to talk about how this was a perception and not necessarily illustrative of the entire population. Another kanji that feminists like to take aim at is the word for 'like' 好 which is composed of the woman and child kanji shoved together. This tends to tick people off because it's supposedly based on the love that mothers have for children, which assumes that all women love children, or all women are mothers, or some such idea. Leaving aside the tenuousness of that argument, this is where the research is so shallow. Kanji is borrowed from Chinese. The Chinese are the ones that originally thought up these compounds, that has bearing on how they came to be. In Chinese 好 is 'hao' which is 'good'. Women and children are good. How is that sexist? If it can be argued that it is sexist, it is sexist towards men. Why aren't men considered good? Is not the fact that they are not included in the goodness itself a misanthropic statement?
Funny how no one ever mentions that.
The book was built on a few cherry-picked views of women who had been primed to only see the negative. The research was poor, the argumentation non-existent. Worse, the book was three times as long as it should have been. It was tautological, instead of relying on logical arguments, the author tried to convince readers by constant repetition. The first 2 thirds of the book was a historical overview of the working conditions, political conditions, and religious conditions of women in Japan from the beginning of time to the 1980s, and had very little to connect it to the rest of the book. The research mentioned was old. For how the book was published in 2010, most of the bibliography is from the 70s-90s.
Finally, in something that I find particularly galling, the subtitle.
The subtitle states that linguistics is what causes bias.
That is a whopping assumption. She knows it's an assumption. How do I know that she is aware that this is an assumption? She has a section at the very end, on two pages, about how there are different views. The view that language causes behavior, that behavior causes language, and that behavior and language interact in a way that is not easily disentangled. She says that she believes the third viewpoint, which is great, so do I, but that viewpoint wasn't strong enough for her research to have value, so she put the title that she did in order to make her results seem more important. The fact that she only explained this issue in the very last section of the book where everywhere else she has been using her data to argue that language is causing sexism was nothing short of research malfeasance and dishonesty.
Sigh, I read this book hoping to find some info I can use in my own research. I got nothing. Absolutely nothing, except another source saying that katakana is used to write out non-Japanese words. The funny thing is that is a perception and isn't exactly accurate, and I had enough sources for that already.
I wasted research funding on purchasing this.
This book is mistitled. Instead of having a subtitle of "The Linguistic Roots of Bias", it should be titled "A case study on embedding bias into your research and calling it objective."
Honestly, why is research into sex differences in language usage so terrible? This is an interesting topic! Why is it that only feminist researchers bother with it, and why is that they do such a terrible job? This book is riddled with research problems. In the first place the women who took part in the survey were not a random sample, or even a convenience sample, which may have had at least some hope of having representation, no, the author selected women participants. Not sampled. Selected. Based on something she called 'keen interest in language'. What does that mean? It's not defined. Does that mean that they studied another language? Does it mean that they majored in Japanese? Does it mean that they took a gendered linguistics class? I don't know. To be a decent researcher you have to define your terms.
But it wasn't only the sampling method that has problems, the research view from which she is working is phenomenological, which basically means that it's based on the perceptions of the participants. That's great, I'm glad she has a section where she says that clearly. But she only says it clearly once, and then completely ignores it to go on and baldly state that things are so. For instance, on page 166 she says 'High mister was created jokingly'. How does she know that? Does she show any evidence to back this up? Does she trace the etymology? Did she interview the person who first came up with it? No. She perceives that it was created jokingly. And that perception is legitimate, she's a native Japanese speaker, but just because she perceives it that way doesn't mean that everyone perceived it that way and since this is phenomenological, she should be more clear that this is her perception and not simply what is.
It wasn't just the methodological foundation that was problematic: the methodology itself was incredibly biased. The survey prompted these women to write down every instance of words that were derogatory towards women. Way to prime your participants. Way to insert bias from the very get go. Way to make sure that your hypothesis "women are spoken of derogatorily in Japanese" is upheld. Way to purposely design your research in order to show what you believe is there. What she should have done, what would have been a better research design is to first of all NOT select her participants, and second of all to have them write down every word they could think of that speaks about women in some way. Then she could have had the participants group the words that they wrote down into positive and negative categories. Instead she had them focus on things that were negative, and thus that's all they came up with. Imagine that. Worse, it wasn't until the very last page that she lets us know that two of her participants literally couldn't think of anything negative, even though they had been primed to do so! That's significant! Women who had been selected purposefully for this survey wrote that they couldn't think of anything, what would be the percentage if she just surveyed random people?
And some of the things that they came up with that were categorized as negative were clearly simply because they had been primed to do so. "bijin" (beautiful person 美人) is not a negative term, if you say it to any random woman on the street, it will make them blushingly happy (I tested this). If you want to say that it perpetuates a stereotype of what constitutes beauty, then make that case, but you can't just say that it's a negative term without showing your work. You especially can't say that it's universally a negative term, or universally should be a negative term without demonstrating why that is the case, because it clearly isn't perceived as a negative term by a lot of women.
It wasn't just the research design and implementation that was problematic, the argumentation was nonexistent. Things were just asserted. They were not defended, they were not explained. They were just said. Where they were explained, the argument was circular. My personal favorite was on page 107 "While 'onna no kuse ni' [though she's a woman] connotes the breach of the socially acceptable range of demeanor as well as behavior for women, 'otoko no kuse ni' [though he's a man] is simply used to criticize the cowardice or weakness of a man, rather than his behavior being outside of what is considered acceptable for men." That assertion doesn't make sense, let alone make a convincing argument. Acting in a cowardly or weak manner is behavior that is outside of what is considered acceptable for men, that's why this phrase is critical of men. Both phrases are equally critical of the sex they are targeting, both phrases are targeting the same thing, behavior that society disapproves of. Yet somehow she tries to argue away the hurtfulness of the one targeted at males. Based on what? Her perceptions of how men feel about it? How is that fair? Shouldn't she do another study where she has men list all of the negative words that are derogatory towards men and look at their perceptions of them? No. Because you see, how they feel doesn't matter, it's just how the women feel that matters. Women's perception of how words are used towards them is all important, the perceptions and intentions of the men and women who use them matter not at all. Funny, how she doesn't extend that same grace to men, their perceptions of words used towards them doesn't matter, no, what's important is that she perceives them as less painful than ones directed at women.
This willful blindness towards how language can victimize men was rampant in this book. The word 女滝 (medaki, female waterfall, connoting a small and quiet waterfall) is presented as negative and worthy of complaint. Okay. I can see why women might find their entire sex being associated with quietness offensive. But 男滝 (odaki, male waterfall, connoting a big and noisy waterfall) is automatically positive? Why? I think men might find it offensive to have their entire sex associated with being noisy. And anyway, it's not the quietness and the noisiness that are the reason for the male and female kanji being used. It's the size. No matter how much you try to explain it away, or scream about how it's stereotypical, on average, males are bigger than females. This is true across all cultures. It's true across species! (not all species, obviously, turtles for instance) Yet somehow we are supposed to pretend that this is not a universal observable fact that might be used as a comparison. "This waterfall is to this waterfall what a man is to a woman...bigger." It's completely logical. Simply because you don't like the connotation of a second order effect of size, ie, that the quietness and noisiness is dependent on the size, small amounts of water falling is quieter than large amounts of water falling, doesn't mean that you should jump to the conclusion that these words were designed to demean one group or the other.
The research behind the section on the sexism inherent in kanji (ideographs) was so shallow as to be laughable. She is talking about how some words use the woman kanji 女 as a radical in a kanji compound, a word made up of multiple kanji to express further ideas, for example 安 (an, safety, house radical above woman radical) [funnily enough she didn't complain about this one]. One of her participants said that 'the vast majority of kanji composed of onna hen have negative conntations.' Great, that's her participant's perception. But is that true? Did she list out every kanji that has the onna radical and have her participants rate them on negativity or positivity? No. She didn't. She just presented what her participant said as truth, without bothering to talk about how this was a perception and not necessarily illustrative of the entire population. Another kanji that feminists like to take aim at is the word for 'like' 好 which is composed of the woman and child kanji shoved together. This tends to tick people off because it's supposedly based on the love that mothers have for children, which assumes that all women love children, or all women are mothers, or some such idea. Leaving aside the tenuousness of that argument, this is where the research is so shallow. Kanji is borrowed from Chinese. The Chinese are the ones that originally thought up these compounds, that has bearing on how they came to be. In Chinese 好 is 'hao' which is 'good'. Women and children are good. How is that sexist? If it can be argued that it is sexist, it is sexist towards men. Why aren't men considered good? Is not the fact that they are not included in the goodness itself a misanthropic statement?
Funny how no one ever mentions that.
The book was built on a few cherry-picked views of women who had been primed to only see the negative. The research was poor, the argumentation non-existent. Worse, the book was three times as long as it should have been. It was tautological, instead of relying on logical arguments, the author tried to convince readers by constant repetition. The first 2 thirds of the book was a historical overview of the working conditions, political conditions, and religious conditions of women in Japan from the beginning of time to the 1980s, and had very little to connect it to the rest of the book. The research mentioned was old. For how the book was published in 2010, most of the bibliography is from the 70s-90s.
Finally, in something that I find particularly galling, the subtitle.
The subtitle states that linguistics is what causes bias.
That is a whopping assumption. She knows it's an assumption. How do I know that she is aware that this is an assumption? She has a section at the very end, on two pages, about how there are different views. The view that language causes behavior, that behavior causes language, and that behavior and language interact in a way that is not easily disentangled. She says that she believes the third viewpoint, which is great, so do I, but that viewpoint wasn't strong enough for her research to have value, so she put the title that she did in order to make her results seem more important. The fact that she only explained this issue in the very last section of the book where everywhere else she has been using her data to argue that language is causing sexism was nothing short of research malfeasance and dishonesty.
Sigh, I read this book hoping to find some info I can use in my own research. I got nothing. Absolutely nothing, except another source saying that katakana is used to write out non-Japanese words. The funny thing is that is a perception and isn't exactly accurate, and I had enough sources for that already.
I wasted research funding on purchasing this.
February 21, 2018
A very interesting book about Japanese society and how is seen and treated the Japanese woman. I really liked the explanations and the description of the Japanese woman in the ancient Japan so I really think this book is well written.
The fact that the book has at it's base true stories of Japanese women and their experiences, that makes this book more special.
The fact that the book has at it's base true stories of Japanese women and their experiences, that makes this book more special.
January 2, 2014
An immensely interesting book on the portrayal of women, both in Japanese language and its society. It takes us on the journey from the dawn of Japanese culture to present day Japan. I always knew Japanese society didn`t have the most positive view on women, but it wasn`t until after I`ve read this book that I realised just how much. The truth is, reality is even worse than I imagined it to be. Only a few decades ago, women had no rights at all. The discrimination of them seeped into every aspect of their lives - from age and marital status, to physical appearance and characteristics, which are by the way, largely prejudiced. This was certainly an eye-opener, as I had no idea this discrimination was so widely spread. Takemaru delivers us proof of it, ranging from disparaging comments in one`s workplace meant to ridicule to more serious examples, such as the deeply rooted belief that women are a useless species, `child-bearing` machines which should remain uneducated and subordinated to men in all aspects of life. There is a great pressure on them to get married before it is `too late`, to quit their jobs and stop pursuing their careers in order to be better wives and mothers, to look good, be quiet, humble and obedient. That just doesn`t sit well with me at all. Although I love Japan, its people and culture, unlike my many peers and college friends, I never idolised it. I always knew that they had their faults, just like everyone else and this mistreat of women is just another thing that proves that and another thing I`ll have to be wary of when I go there.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews