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If Japanese sociolinguistics can be likened in range and complexity to a forest, this book by the sociolinguist and Japan specialist Nanette Gottlieb would best be described as a Kyoto rock garden. It is cool and calm. It lies within a circumscribed landscape and gives pause for thought.
Language and society in Japan makes an important contribution to the study of the sociology of language in Japan, focusing on key sociopolitical issues affecting language use there in recent years. The connecting theme of the book is the relation between language and identity from the Meiji Period (beginning in 1868) to the present. Gottlieb introduces this theme by saying, "Language has played an important role in Japan's cultural and foreign policies, and language issues have been and continue to be intimately connected both with globalizing technological advances and with internal minority group experiences" (p. vii). With this in mind, Gottlieb examines the role of the institutions of media and schools in spreading the standard form of Japanese, and the role of the media in language engineering.
In chap. 1, the author introduces the social context of the Japanese language and its varieties. She proceeds down a well-trodden path, looking at the body of ethnocentrist literature known as Nihonjinron , a collection of cultural myths and folk beliefs in which Japan and the Japanese are characterized as uniquely different, existentially static, and racially and linguistically homogeneous. A useful addition to the excellent discussion on language varieties and Japanese in the world would have been some discussion of "new dialects" (different from standard Japanese, more frequent among younger speakers, and common in daily conversation), an important area of research (Inoue 1993). The author touches upon and might have elaborated further the issue of dialect attitudes. Dialect security/insecurity is a metaphor for the powerful center/periphery dichotomy of modern Japan. It is a canonical theme in sociolinguistics and is linked to what is known as hoogen kompurekkusu 'dialect complex'. Certainly, the theme winds through the author's discussion as in her mention of the imposition of dialect placards as punishment for the use of Okinawan.
Chap. 2...