The grammatical expression of social relations in Japanese

Changes in the functions of Japanese honorifics have accompanied changes in Japanese society over the course of a millennium, revealing strong evidence of mutual influence. The system began as a way of indexing respect for social superiors and humility of inferiors, allowing interactants to acknowledge allotted positions within a complex, hierarchical social system—the Japanese imperial court. This focus on the role of honorifics in reinforcing established, metaphorically vertical social relations is strongly maintained in the language ideologies of contemporary Japan. However, political and societal changes in pre-modern and early modern Japan and subsequent developments during the country’s rapid modernization were associated with the development of the honorific system into one that has far broader functions related to indexing other dimensions of social distance. While expressing vertical distance remains one important function of honorifics in Standard Japanese today, their use in marking closeness to ingroup and distance from outgroup has become even more important. The metaphorical expression of horizontal relations between speaker and addressee is the third major way in which honorifics index distance in contemporary Japan. Associated with this change in function has been a clear process of grammaticalization through which lexical honorifics expressing subjective judgements concerning the speaker’s relationship to referents develop over time into grammatical honorifics expressing intersubjective meanings, unrelated to propositional content but relevant only to the relationship between speaker and addressee.

Japanese Merchants Diaspora in the 17th Century into Southeast Asia

This study aimed to investigate the Japanese Diaspora in the 17th century into Southeast Asia. This article discussed critically the motives, process, and the effect of Japanese diaspora in the Southeast Asia. Reseacher utilized historical method with descriptive approach. The process being performed namely heuristics, critism, interpretation, and historiography. Japanese history regarding abroad migration is an interesting issue between scholars who studied migration, anthropology, and minority studies over the decades. Edo period in Japan is one of the most studied field for many scholars for Japanese studies, since it shaped the characteristic of Japanese culture until today. Trade of Japan is significant part of its economical development since the pre-modern era. In the 17th century, Japan established a solid trade network with Southeast Asia regions, namely Siam, Malacca, Cambodia, Vietnam and Manila. The emerge of maritime trade with Southeast Asia encouraged Japanese merchants to travel and create settlements in some regions. The Japanese diaspora was encouraged with vermillion seal trade which allowed them to do journey overseas and settled in some places, which eventually increased the number of Japanese merchants in the Southeast Asia. However, after the Sakoku policy there was restriction of trade relation ehich prohibited overseas maritime trade, except for China and Dutch. Sakoku policy caused Japanese merchants who stayed overseas could not return for many years, then they settled themselves as Japanese communities known as Nihon Machi in some places within Southeast Asia. History of early modern Japan between the 16th and 19th century provides a broader narratives of global history as it was surrounded by intense global interaction.

Tracing the Influence of Ming-Qing Buddhism in Early Modern Japan: Yunqi Zhuhong’s Tract on Refraining from Killing and on Releasing Life and Ritual Animal Releases

This essay traces the Japanese reception of Zhuhong’s Tract on Refraining from Killing and on Releasing Life in the early modern period. Ritual animal releases have a long history in Japan beginning in the seventh century, approximately two centuries after such rituals arose in China. From the mid-eighth century, the releases became large-scale state rites conducted at Hachiman shrines, which have been most widely studied and documented. By contrast, a different strand of life releases that emerged in the Edo period owing to the influence of late Ming Buddhism has received comparatively little scholarly attention despite the significance for the period. Not only may the publication of a Sino–Japanese edition of Zhuhong’s Tract in 1661 have been an impetus for Shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi’s Laws of Compassion in the late-seventeenth century, but also approximately thirty Japanese Buddhist texts inspired by Zhuhong’s Tract appeared over the next two and a half centuries. As Zhuhong’s ethic of refraining from killing and releasing life was assimilated over the course of the Edo and into the Meiji period, life releases became primarily associated with generating merit for the posthumous repose of the ancestors although they were also said to have a variety of vital benefits for the devotees and their families, such as health, longevity, prosperity, and descendants.

Overview of the research work of Prof. Fumiko Sugimoto

Professor Fumiko Sugimoto has been analysing the history of the 18th century and first half of the 19th century with a focus not only on the temporal axis but also on the relationships between specific spaces and the people who live and act as subjective agents in these spaces. During the past few years, she has been endeavouring to decipher the history in the period of transition from the early modern period to the modern period by introducing the perspective of oceans, with a focus on Japan. Through the study of history in terms of spatial theory that also takes oceans into consideration, she is proposing to present a new concept about the territorial formation of modern states. [Main subjects] Law and Governance in Early Modern Japan Judgement in Early Modern Society The Evolution of Control over Territory under the Tokugawa State A Human Being in the Nineteenth Century: WATANABE Kazan, a Conflicting Consciousness of Status as an Artist and as a Samurai Early Modern Maps in the Social-standing-based Order of Tokugawa Japan The World of Information in Bakumatsu Japan: Timely News and Bird's Eye Views Early Modern Political History in Terms of Spatial Theory The Emergence of Newly Defined Oceans and the Transformation of Political Culture.

Can You Question Science in a Pandemic? Provocations on the History of Health (and Food) in Japan After COVID

This article, through a series of provocations and anecdotes from my research into dietary health in early modern Japan (1600-1868), makes the case for transhistorical thinking as a productive analytical mode, allowing the past to speak to present concerns in creative and unexpected ways. As this volume seeks a fresh approach to Japanese Studies post-pandemic, addressing this tension between past and present, I argue, offers a productive way to turn the challenges of COVID-19 into opportunities for greater impact and interconnection. Now, however, is a bad time to question science. Vaccine hesitancy, resistance to mask mandates, and the overall politicization of commonsense health guidelines among a substantial plurality of the population indicate a sustained mistrust of health science expertise precisely when belief and compliance would do the most medical and social good. Doing the history of health in Japan through a transhistorical lens, I argue, exposes how a set of social divisions and challenges that may appear through a presentist lens to be as novel as the virus itself, and tied inextricably to the demands and paradoxes of modern state-based public health regimes, are in fact variants of issues that have been faced in dramatically different historical circumstances. This article follows these themes through three broad provocations that resonate between health’s past and present, drawn from the nineteenth-century history of diet and nutrition in Japan: skepticism of doctors and a critique of medical expertise; prioritising preventative versus retroactive care; and balancing health with opening the economy.