Language choice in bilingual couples as habit (excerpt from Piller, 2002, p. 137)

In my research with bilingual couples, habit emerged as one of the main reasons for a couple’s language choice. Partners from different language backgrounds met through the medium of a particular language and fell in love through a particular language. Once they had established a relationship through that language, it became a relatively fixed habit.

This means that entering a couple relationship was a moment of linguistic habit formation. At the same time, it was also a moment of drastic linguistic habit change, at least for one partner. At least one partner had to change their habitual language from one language (usually their native language) to another (usually an additional language).

The question of habit formation is an important one in language learning research. Around the world, education systems invest enormous sums of money into language teaching but the outcomes in terms of getting students to actually speak the language(s) they are learning outside the classroom are often unclear.

Efforts to revive Irish Gaelic provide a well-known example. In the Republic of Ireland, Gaelic is part of the compulsory curriculum of primary and secondary school students. Even so, only around 40% of the population reported in the 2016 census that they could speak Irish. However, when asked whether they actually did so, only 1.7% of the population reported that they regularly used Irish. So, knowing Gaelic and using Gaelic are clearly two different things.

The explanation for this pattern is simple: habit. Studying a language gives learners a new tool. But to actually use that tool on a regular basis outside the classroom requires a change of linguistic habit. In other words, language knowledge needs to be activated.

For the native German speakers in my bilingual couples research, falling in love and establishing a couple relationship with a native English speaker provided such a transformative moment that allowed them to activate the English they had studied throughout their schooling. (The converse pattern was much rarer as native English speakers rarely had studied German and so no basis for a linguistic change of habit existed).

Other than linguistic intermarriage, what transformative moments are there across the life course when people might change from one habitual language to another?

Professor Maite Puigdevall during her guest lecture at Macquarie University

This is the question Professor Maite Puigdevall (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain) addressed in her inaugural lecture in linguistic diversity at Macquarie University. Professor Puigdevall and her colleagues use the Catalan word muda (“change, transformation”) to refer to such biographical junctures where a linguistic change of habit is likely. They have identified six such transformative junctures across the life course:

• Primary school
• High school
• University
• Workplace entry
• Couple formation
• Becoming a parent

At each such juncture, a person starts to move in new circles, make new friends and establish new networks. Establishing oneself in such a new way may lead to all kinds of changes and new habits and a switch in the habitual language may be one such transformation.

Professor Puigdevall and her colleagues have used the muda concept particularly in relation to minoritized languages such as Catalan, Basque or Gaelic. At each juncture, such languages acquire “new speakers” (as opposed to the ever-shrinking number of heritage speakers). However, the life-course approach they propose has at least two implications for language policy elsewhere, too, including Australia.

First, language learning is a long-term investment. Results should not be expected immediately but are more likely to accrue later in life. A good reminder that the old adage non scolae sed vitae discimus (“we learn not for school but for life”) holds for language learning, too, and that we should vigorously contest the “languages are useless” argument that we so often hear, particularly in the Anglosphere.

Second, an investment in language education in school will pay off most when it is complemented by other policy interventions in favor of a particular language. For instance, in comparative research related to Catalan, Basque and Gaelic, Professor Puigdevall and her colleagues found that a significant inducement to turn Catalan into a habitual language was constituted by the bilingual (Catalan, Spanish) language requirement present for employment in the civil service in Catalonia.

Professor Puigdevall’s lecture inspired us to focus on moments in the life-course where bilingual proficiencies may be turned into bilingual habits. What new things will we learn in our next lecture in linguistic diversity when Dr Sabine Little (Sheffield University, UK) asks what we inherit when we inherit a language?

References

Piller, I. (2002). Bilingual couples talk: the discursive construction of hybridity. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Puigdevall, M., Walsh, J., Amorrortu, E., & Ortega, A. (2018). ‘I’ll be one of them’: linguistic mudes and new speakers in three minority language contexts. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 39(5), 445-457. doi:10.1080/01434632.2018.1429453
Pujolar, J., & Puigdevall, M. (2015). Linguistic mudes: How to become a new speaker in Catalonia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 231, 167-187.

Everyone wants to be a winner in the dating game; but it doesn’t always work that way …

A 2015 article in the New York Post argued that mobile dating apps, such as Tinder and its many clones, are ultimately ‘tearing society apart’ by drastically changing the way young single adults in Western society seek and pursue romantic and sexual partners.

A recent study by Mitchell Hobbs, Stephen Owen and Livia Gerber (2016) asks whether that assessment is really true. The project explores the experiences of dating app users and investigates how the technology has influenced their sexual practices and views on romantic ideals and long-term relationships.

Offline desires, online realities

Meeting sexual and romantic partners specifically through dating apps has four characteristics: First, users are able to engage in casual, one-off or short-term, sexual encounters without engaging in any further social interaction. Second, dating apps allow users to broaden their romantic networks, extending beyond their existing social networks. Thirdly, dating apps are an efficient means of connecting with several potential partners at the same time. And, fourth, the emergence of dating apps has perpetuated a culture in which communication is increasingly focused around self-presentation and self-commodification.

The latter characteristic in particular may generate a sense of anxiety and frustration around the need to create a successful profile.

Self-presentation in the dating game

Mobile dating apps were initially designed as a type of game to take the stress and emotional investment out of dating. The tactile functionality of the app, combined with users’ photo-based profiles resembles a virtual stack of cards: Profiles are presented like playing cards, and the user can swipe left on the screen to ‘dislike’ or swipe right to ‘like’ a profile. These profiles are only shown once – swiping left to ‘dislike’ therefore eliminates these profiles from the ‘game’. Mutual right swipes result in a ‘match’ and only then can communication be initiated. Successful tindering is therefore in part measured by the amount of matches one obtains, as one of our participants explained:

Yeah when you get matched it’s like ooh! That’s quite cool, that’s the fun part and that’s also probably quite the addictive part of it as well, I’d imagine. And yeah it’s obviously good for good feelings.

Despite this elation of getting a match, many – particularly male – participants expressed a sense of frustration over their lack of success (i.e. their lack of matches) when using dating apps, indicating that dating apps may be perpetuating the exact anxiety they were designed to eliminate:

Tinder is purely based on looks. It’s a numbers’ game essentially. It’s swipe how many times you want. Um so I don’t personally like it still as a primary means of finding a relationship.

Engagement with the ‘game’ creates a level of anxiety that appears to stem from not gaining access to the smorgasbord of potential sexual and romantic partners theoretically available through dating apps. As another male participant remarked:

Everyone is copping a root but me.

In the online sphere, unattractive men have less chances at winning mutual matches, creating a sense that the average-looking guy is missing out on the dating game:

The 10% of highly attractive people fucking all the time make the rest of us feel bad.

In an offline context, ‘average-looking’ guys might be able to harness their interpersonal and communication skills instead:

I’m not suited to this app. I’m trying to find the right phrase but like the profiles that you think would get like high likes because of certain things they put in isn’t really me and I don’t try and do it. I also just think I’m more traditional in so far as I like to bump into someone at a bar or room across- eyes across a room that’s how I actually connect with people because I think half of meeting someone the fun is body language like reading little bits of body language.

In sum, how to present oneself in the best possible light online is a major concern for the users of dating apps. Whilst some participants felt that they are not suited to mobile dating apps due to a lack of successful self-presentation strategies, others engage in self-commodification in an attempt to increase their dating app success.

Self-commodification in the Tinder game

Self-commodification becomes an essential part of designing one’s profile. One interviewee described how he helped his friend to improve his Tinder profile:

So I ask ‘Can I look at your profile and can I change it for you?’ So I get him a different picture and I make his profile his ‘buyer’ – he didn’t have a buyer. I made his profile a buyer, and said ‘You can always go back’ and it blew up! It was almost like in the movies.

Users have the option of adding additional information or captions (referred to here as a ‘buyer’ and elsewhere as ‘digital pick-up line’) to their profiles. While some profiles strategically communicate very little, some male participants reported feeling put off by long digital pick-up lines:

So most of the time apparently it’s just a highly sexualised or very blunt statement of intentions. Um there are funny ones. But um and then some like you see some girls will put- um have like a really long thing, really long statement about fun-loving. Everyone in the world apparently is fun-loving. Oh god. Worst, most overused statement I’ve ever- but anyway [sighs] um the- at the very end of these monstrous spiels sometimes they’ll write ‘say orange if you’ve read this.’ And so you’re expected if you match, the first thing you say to them is orange to show that you’ve actually read through it.

In general, men appear to be less particular about whom they swipe right on in an attempt to increase their chances of gaining a match. However, these swipes do not always result in the kind of match the users were looking for, as another participant indicated:

He was frustrated cause of like five matches he’d had in the last two weeks four of them turned out to be prostitutes. The thing that made him so angry was that one of them actually talked to him for a whole week before she told him her rates.

In sum, male participants reported many frustrations related to looking for love on the move: getting a match was not actually ‘as easy as play’ – and even if they got matches, they were not always the kind of match they desired.

Changing communication strategies for the sexual marketplace

Dating apps certainly do not take the stress out of trying to find love, sex and romance. On the contrary, they may be creating new anxieties around online communication strategies. Male users, in particular, expressed frustration over the need to brand themselves as desirable commodities in the sexual marketplace. If dating apps are indeed ‘tearing society apart’ it is not because they result in everyone having casual sex all the time but because they create many more desires than they can fullfil.

If you like this post, you might also like

• No Sex for Generation On-the-Move
• Language shift and phone sex
• To English with love

Reference

Hobbs, M., Owen, S., & Gerber, L. (2016). Liquid love? Dating apps, sex, relationships and the digital transformation of intimacy Journal of Sociology DOI: 10.1177/1440783316662718

“How bad is your cultural cringe?” (Source: Jenna Guillaume, BuzzFeed)

Keith: I’m still really shit at pronouncing Lisa’s surname. With the umlaut o.
Hanna: What is Lisa’s surname?
(laughter)
Keith: Do I get three goes?
(Keith, Australian, in a relationship with Lisa from Germany)

Despite the increasing value of multilingualism in a globalised world, English-speaking countries such as Australia remain stubbornly monolingual. At the same time the benefits of speaking more than one language are regularly touted in public discourse. My research investigates how speakers of Australian English with a partner from a non-English-speaking background feel about their linguistic repertoires. Embarrassment, as in the example above from Keith (all names are pseudonyms), comes up a lot. So does inferiority. Because of their low proficiency in foreign languages (often as a consequence of their poor quality or limited language learning experiences in formal education) these participants feel they are bad language learners. This response seems to be one way of engaging with and mitigating their own privilege as native speakers of the powerful global language, English, compared to their partners who learned English as an additional language.

“It’s my deficiency”: being a bad language learner

And I I think I was completely in awe of that the fact that she could speak so many different languages freely, and a little bit jealous, and at the beginning was a bit more kind of definite about trying to learn German, um and I think the whole experience intimidated me cause I think I’m the kind of person who if they don’t pick something up really quickly kind of just gives up very quickly (…) (Keith)

For Lisa and Keith, Keith’s first and Lisa’s second language, English, has been the language of their relationship. Keith sees Lisa’s language skills as impressive while blaming himself for his own inability to learn German. He feels that Lisa “probably speaks better English than most native English speakers in Australia”. While Lisa learnt languages formally in her school education as a child and young adult, Keith faces all the frustration of learning another language as an adult.

In his own education Keith’s choices were limited. Although he comes from an Italian migrant background, Italian was not available at his public school in inner Sydney in the 1990s. He decided to take Latin instead, but he dropped it after junior high school when he lost interest in his schooling. He has done no further foreign language study in contrast to Lisa, who studied four languages over many years in her schooling in Germany. So when it comes to saying Keith’s Italian surname their pronunciation reflects their differing language learning trajectories:

Hanna: And how are you at pronouncing Keith’s last name (laughs)?

Lisa: I am tempted to pronounce it Italian which then nobody understands (laughs).

Keith: She- like I’m reading out a, a pizza on the pizza menu from our local pizzeria and she makes fun of my Italian accent. You know like quattro formaggi, she’s like (puts on a strong Australian accent) quattro formaggi. ‘Cause she speaks Italian, you know, these fucking Europeans!

(laughter)

In Keith’s comment about his partner’s Italian pronunciation of his Italian surname we could read humorous disparagement of her ability to pronounce it in the Italian way; in Australia foreign names are usually anglicised or pronounced in an English way. Both his lack of educational opportunity to study Italian and his Anglicized pronunciation cause him in that moment to position himself as a (monolingual) Australian in opposition to (multilingual) Europeans.

Stephen, from Australia, who is married to Christina from Argentina feels similarly critical of his own poor Spanish skills. He describes his attempts to learn Spanish as “a token effort”, says he “hasn’t got an ear for languages” and it dismissive of his own attempts to learn Spanish:

Hanna: You said you’re the odd one out; how do you feel…

Stephen: No, not at all, because uh because I recognise that it’s my deficiency in not having had the time to devote to learning a language. Now, I I make the standard joke I have 50 words of [unclear] of Spanish that I know. I work very hard and uh it’s a standing family joke (…)

In fact, Stephen studied Spanish at night, has a Spanish speaking community in Sydney and has two children who are bilingual. He also regularly visits Argentina and has frequent Argentine house guests. Spanish is a regular feature in his life. In the interview he also says that learning Spanish is “a commitment I’ve probably made and haven’t fulfilled” and feels he is a “handicapped Aussie” compared to his multilingual relations.

Another participant, Amy, has a strikingly similar evaluation of her own language skills. When I asked her why she was interested in talking to me about language she said:

Well, I suppose, I suppose it’s just there and I suppose for me it’s that I’ve got to learn more Spanish (…) And I went to lessons and I started learning and I was enthusiastic because we were going to Columbia, but as soon as we came back from Columbia I was just like that’s it, I’m just not interested anymore. And I learnt that I’m not a good language learner(…) (Amy, in a relationship with German from Columbia)

Amy’s language learning experiences at school were typical for my participants. In twelve years of state school education all she studied was ten weeks each of Italian, German and French in her seventh school year. In contrast, she praises her partner for his excellent English language skills which he acquired in Columbia from the “movies and music” he consumed from their powerful northern neighbour.

A new kind of language cringe

It seems these participants characterise their persistent monolingualism as a personal failing, a source of embarrassment, a source of language cringe. In Australia language cringe is a child of the cultural cringe. It has traditionally been associated with being embarrassed about speaking Australian English, rather than the more highly valued British English of the mother country. However, in my research I have found a new form of language cringe, related to monolinguals who speak the most valuable global language compared to multilinguals who are non-native speakers. This kind of language cringe contradicts the idea that a native speaker will always be “better” than a non-native speaker through an acknowledgment of the level of skill and knowledge which come with learning an additional language to a high proficiency.

This is most obvious when it comes to accent, because language cringe views an Australian native accent as lower value than (some) non-native accents. Lisa points out that she found the Australian accent strange on first hearing.

Lisa: I just remember the first Australian I ever met in my life (…) we started talking in English and I just thought who the fuck is this person? (laughter) It sounded so outlandish I’d never heard that before.

When I asked Keith about what kind of accent he would like his daughter to have, he reluctantly admitted that he wanted hers to be more “international”. Stephen points out that on first travelling to the United States with his wife, the locals “struggled” with his “obvious Australian accent” while she “was much more readily understood”. The implicit high value of a native accent is challenged by the transferability of a more international non-native accent.

Understanding and being able to explain the grammar of a language is another site where language cringe manifests itself. Paul, from Sydney, met Sara from Spain while travelling around South America. He was quickly hired as an English teacher because he was a native speaker. But it was Sara who taught him enough English grammar to make it through the first lesson.

(…) when Sara and I first met I needed to get some work and we were in Chile, um I just before I arrived to Chile we’d split up for a few weeks on the way to. and I’d asked Sara can you hand out a few CVs to English schools when we get there, or when you get there, which she did and I basically arrived and there was a job waiting for me which was perfect. But I’d never taught, I’d never thought about English I had no idea [Sara laughs]. and so the very first lesson I had to do (…) and uh [laughs] they, you know, the school said uh here’s the book this is Headway, this is what you’re using, they’re up to page thirty two or whatever. I opened it up and it was the present perfect and I looked at it and I was like what’s the present perfect, what’s a past participle and Sara sat down and taught me. (Paul, my emphasis)

Sara also spoke four languages to, at that time, Paul’s one. Although Sara is the one with the multilingual skills, Paul was seen by the language school as a better language user because he is a native speaker.

Managing native speaker privilege

Like Keith, Paul is impressed by his wife’s linguistic skills but he also recognises that because of the privilege of the English native speaker Sara’s multilingualism may be less valued. Rather than being embarrassed about his own failings as an individual language user Paul draws attention to the wider failings of the native speaker ideology in terms of its tenuous relation to actual knowledge about language as a system or teaching expertise. Paul acknowledges his partner’s linguistic superiority and the inherent injustice of an employment situation where he benefitted from a discriminatory language ideology because he is a native speaker.

For my other participants it may be that their conception of their own language skills as inferior in relation to the linguistic repertoire of their partners is their way to manage the inequalities brought about by this privilege. Recognising their own limited linguistic repertoire and casting it as a personal failing may be a way to tip the scales back in favour of the linguistic repertoire of a multilingual partner.

These are the kinds of comments I have been hearing ever since the Guardian published an article last month on sexless young Japanese as the reason behind the nation’s low birth rate. As these reports went viral on social media, several people asked me for my thoughts on sexless Japan.

The gist of the currently trending discourse is this: The world’s third biggest economy’s population is shrinking and aging rapidly. By 2060, Japan’s current population of 126 million is predicted to drop by one-third because fewer and fewer babies are being born each year. These articles claim that the reason behind Japan’s declining birth rate is that many young Japanese are not having sex while others are in paid-for relationships with virtual anime girlfriends.

In her Guardian article, Abigail Haworth begins with an interview with sex and relationship therapist Ai Aoyama, aka Queen Love, who is photographed in her red kinky outfit, standing next to a middle-aged male client cuddling a small dog. Queen Love is quoted as saying “Both men and women say to me they don’t see the point of love. They don’t believe it can lead anywhere… Relationships have become too hard.”

Citing recent official statistics on young people preferring to stay single and losing interest in sex, Haworth goes on to report on the views of career-oriented women who claim that a marriage would only jeopardize their professional and private lives, as well as those of so-called soshoku danshi (“grass-eating men”) who have little sexual appetite and regard relationships as ‘troublesome’. Both groups are presented as having little to no interest in sex and, consequently, their generation is single-handedly leading their nation to the brink of extinction.

Anita Rani, the presenter of the BBC documentary series “No Sex Please, We’re Japanese” has a different group in the same generation of young adult Japanese to blame, namely Japan’s ultra geeks, known as otaku. In her article Japanese men who prefer virtual girlfriends to sex, Rani explains that otaku find real relationships troublesome and are instead enjoying virtual relationships with Nintendo-computer game characters. The reporter also cites ‘several surveys’ that show that even when men and women are in relationships, they barely have sex, and only 27% claim to have sex every week.

Then Rani claims that Japan’s shrinking birth-rate is a time-bomb and the country’s reluctance to accept migrants is another serious, contributing factor. This leads Rani to ponder: “Japan has managed to preserve its unique culture in an increasingly globalised world but could that very sense of identity stand in the way of solving its population problems?”

So, what do I make of all this?

Orientalist discourses of exotic Japan and its weird inhabitants are centuries- old. Unfortunately, they continue to be disguised as scientific facts and are increasingly commodified for media outlets’ profits in today’s digital age. In the global media, sex sells, weird Japan sells, and combining these two discourses sells big time. Journalists such as Haworth and Rani may well have been physically in Japan, but their analysis was obviously done through a stereotypical way of seeing and with the stereotypes of their Western audiences – and the dollar sign – in mind.

Have sex or not have sex, Japanese are never normal from the perspective of ill-informed journalists and researchers. Their sex life has become a commodified concern, and this ‘concern’ is deeply patronizing and racist as Beckie Smith argues in her recent article in The Independent:

We have a kind of voyeuristic fascination with Japan’s strangeness, spurred on by irresponsible journalism and sensationalised headlines. These stories gain traction because they support a simplistic view of East Asia which is at best patronising and at worst overtly racist. Lazy journalism supports these prejudices; every poorly written puff piece and ill-researched documentary serves, as one viewer charmingly put it, as “confirmation of Japanese weirdness”.

But if it is not heartless, materialist Japanese women, grass-eating Japanese men without any sex drive and creepy otaku that are behind the nation’s falling birth rate, what is? Well, Japan has slipped to 105^th place among 136 countries in the gender equality list; 25% of pregnant women have experience in being harassed in their workplace; 22,000 children are on waiting lists for day-care centres; and all five awardees of the Order of Culture and all 15 Persons of Cultural Merit selected by the Japanese government this year are male. Unfortunately, for women having children is largely incompatible with holding a job and the stay-at-home mum is an increasingly unattractive and economically unfeasible option.

A series of ethnographic research conducted by Ingrid Piller and myself with single Japanese women of this generation fleshes out this perspective further.

The women we interviewed in Australia mentioned sexism and gender inequality in the workplace as the main reasons why they had left Japan in the first place. Although all of them were seeking love and romance, most of our participants continue to remain unmarried and childless. This has nothing to do with the fact that they are all hard-nosed career women – they are not – and everything to do with the fact that ‘flexible’ mobile jobs such as those in the hospitality industry are incompatible with raising a family.

For instance, the bilingual Japanese flight attendants in their 20s and 30s we spoke to for research that has just been published in Language, migration and social Inequalities: A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work (Duchêne, Moyer and Roberts, 2013) had limited opportunities to pursue romantic goals due to their irregular shift work and frequent absence from their social networks. Their long-term goal was to marry, have children and quit their job. However, as their jobs did not enable them to save and the job was incompatible with that goal, the only scenario that made this a likely outcome was to find a bread-winner husband and revert to traditional gender roles.

In a neoliberal employment regime – of which low-cost airlines provide a prototypical example – there is less and less opportunity and time to enjoy intimacy, to care for children and to nurture family relationships. The women we spoke to were under continuous pressure to compete and to be ever more productive. They were well aware that their jobs were perpetually on the line in Japan’s ageist, sexist and cut-throat job market where the tradition of life-long employment has long gone.

Young adult Japanese women may have sex but they don’t want to procreate. Does that make them so different from their globally mobile but economically insecure peers in other countries? I don’t think so. It is not only this generation of Japanese that is opting out of starting families; the same is true internationally: Generation On-the-Move is trapped in perpetual insecurity and competition (aka ‘flexibility’), and the stability necessary to raise a family becomes increasingly difficult to achieve.

In addition to gender inequality and socio-economic insecurity, there is another way of looking at the issue of the shrinking Japanese population. Put in the bigger picture, a smaller population is more sustainable on a planet with limited resources. Ultimately, a sustainable approach needs to undergird the engagement with the root cause of perpetual gender inequality; it also needs to involve rethinking the issue of the shrinking national population itself in light of the world’s overpopulation and the promotion of multicultural Japan.

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2006). A Passion for English: Desire and the Language Market. In A. Pavlenko (Ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation (pp. 59-83). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2010). At the intersection of gender, language and transnationalism. In N. Coupland (Ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globalization (pp. 540-554): Blackwell.

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2012). Japanese on the Move: Life Stories of Transmigration. Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/japanese-on-the-move

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2013). Language work aboard the low-cost airline. In A. Duchêne, M. Moyer & C. Robers (Eds.), Language, Migration and Social (In)equality. A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Takahashi, K. (2012). Multilingualism and Gender. In M. Martin-Jones, A. Blackledge & A. Creese (Eds.), Handbook of Multilingualism (pp. 419 – 435). London: Routledge.

Takahashi, K. (2013). Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Kimie Takahashi (2013) Language learning, gender and desire: Japanese women on the move. Multilingual Matters.

It’s Valentine’s Day today. Valentine’s Day is a truly global event inextricably linking the emotional life of individuals with the capitalist world order. Young women around the world dream of romantic love and many men do their best to meet those dreams, showing how much they care by buying flowers, chocolates, lingerie, jewellery or any of the other consumer goods that have come to symbolize romantic love. Those that do not engage in the consumption bonanza also find their lives touched by Valentine’s Day: for instance, an estimated 198 million red roses are grown specifically for Valentine’s Day and that’s a huge amount of one particular crop to get ready, to harvest and to bring to market for one single day: the socio-economic structure of whole counties in Kenya, Colombia or Ecuador has been changed to make way for this floral industry.

Given the deep connections between individual emotions and the socio-economic order, it is not surprising that English, too, has found its way into this mix. A timely new book, Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move* by Kimie Takahashi, explains exactly those connections.

Following a group of young adult Japanese women studying overseas in Sydney, the book shows how, during their teenage years, the romantic desires of these young women had been shaped by Hollywood movies and other popular media. Teenage crushes on media stars are nothing unusual and each generation seems to have their own idols. However, for the Japanese women in the study the pop stars they had teenage crushes on (men like Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt) had a salient characteristic: they were white native speakers of English.

As a result, they ended up making a deep emotional connection between romantic attractiveness, Whiteness and English. While they outgrew their teenage crushes, their desire for white English-speaking men lingered on.

As the study shows, this was not only an idiosyncratic romantic desire that the five women who were the study’s main participants happened to develop. Rather, the association between learning English, going abroad and falling in love is actively fostered in many discourses promoting English language learning, from women’s magazines to language school advertising. Indeed, teaching ‘the language of love’ – Relationship English or Renai English – has become a form of English for Specific Purposes that is addressed in specific language learning materials and courses.

In sum, a range of powerful media discourses worked to inculcate particular emotional sensibilities in these women, which included a conflation of going abroad, learning English, and romantic desires.

Once in Sydney, of course, a different reality quickly hit: establishing contacts and relationships with locals (and particularly the kinds of locals they desired) was far from easy; becoming fluent in English was not as easy as they had imagined it would be once they were in Australia; and few of the men they met conformed to the chivalrous image of Westerners they had formed in their minds.

Each of the participants has her own life story and had to face her own trials and tribulations in Sydney. However, their emotional experiences are deeply shaped by the role of English as both an object of desire and a consumer commodity.

If you are looking for some academic reading this Valentine’s Day, Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move is the one. Don Kulick’s endorsement of the book sums up the reading experience you can expect:

Romance blossoms, hearts break, and lives change as Japanese women go troppo in the Antipodes and tell the author all about their dreams, adventures and experiences of learning English as a second language. This delightful book is the definitive answer to the question, ‘Is the concept of “desire” useful to students of language?’. The ethnography is wacky, the analysis is insightful and the writing is engaging and crisp. An absolute must-read for everyone interested in language and desire, language and learning, and language and globalization.

Enjoy! And Happy Valentine’s Day!

*In the interest of full disclosure: I was the supervisor of the PhD research the book is based on.

Takahashi, Kimie (2013). Language learning, gender and desire: Japanese women on the move Multilingual Matters

“وقتی پای عشق به میان می آید ژاپنی ها محبوب ترین موجودات روی کره ی زمین نیستند. تلخ است ولی حقیقت دارد.”

این ادعای میکو مشیزوکی شوارتز، یک به قولِ خودش “کارشناسِ” دو زبانه و دو فرهنگه و نویسنده ی كتاب آنلايني با عنوان  Nihonjin no Otoko wa Motenai (مردان ژاپنی محبوب نیستند)، است که من اخیرا به طور اتفاقی به آن برخوردم. این کتاب دراصل  به عنوان راهنمایی جهت کمک به مردان ژاپنی برای ایجاد و حفظ رابطه با زنان “خارجی” (این جا بخوانید “غربی”) تبلیغ شده است. ادعای کتاب این است که دربردارنده ی توصیه های آموزشی در مورد مسایلی از این قبیل است:

1. چگونه حالات چهره و زبان بدن را بفهمیم

2. چگونه نشانه های گفتاریِ انگلیسی را بفهميم

3. چگونه حتی با مهارت های انگلیسیِ ضعيف تاثیر خوبی از خود بر جا بگذاریم

4. برای اولین قرار کجا برویم و چه کارهایی بکنیم

5. چگونه عذر خواهی کنیم

صفحه یِ اینترنتیِ ژاپنیِ کتاب از تعریف و تمجید های پُرشورِ خوانندگان خود پُر است. بعنوان مثال تي- سَن با بيست سال تجربه ی زندگي در آمريكا اظهار داشته است:

[این کتاب باید به صورت رایگان رویِ میزِ درخواستِ ویزایِ سفارتِ آمریکا در توکیو قرار داده شود. افراد بسیاری وقت خود را تلف می کنند. به خاطر ژاپنی های شلخته است که آمریکایی ها هر روز دارند دختر های ژاپنی جذاب را از ما می گیرند (ترجمه از من).]

اگرچه محتوای اصلی و مفروضات بنیادی کتاب، که نیروی محرک اصلی آن به نظر می رسد، به اندازه ی کافی گیج کننده است، هشداری که بر صفحه ی اینترنتی کتاب  نوشته شده بود مرا بهت زده کرد. با خط قرمز (!) هشدار می داد که این کتاب:

“… کاملا به زبان ژاپنی نوشته شده است. اگر ژاپنی نمی فهمید، این کتاب برای شما مناسب نیست…. اما بگذارید دوباره تاکید کنیم که اگر ژاپنی را در سطح زبان مادری نمی فهمید، این کتاب به درد شما نمی خورد. فقط صفحه ی اطلاعات کتاب را به زبان انگیسی آورده ايم؛ آن هم به این دلیل که نظامِ ذخیره ی اطلاعات آمریکا ما را ملزم به انجام این کار کرده است. هدف این صفحه دعوت غیر ژاپنی زبانان به خرید این کتاب نیست. اگر شما یکی از خوانندگان احتمالی ما هستید شما را به صفحه ی ژاپنی خودمان دعوت می کنیم…”

چی؟! این باید یکی از عجیب ترین تبلیغ ها برای معرفی کتاب در طول تاریخِ چاپ باشد! چرا یک ناشر باید این قدر خودش را توی  درسر بیاندازد و دست به هر کاری بزند تا یک مشتری احتمالی را از خرید منصرف کند؟

من یکی که کنجکاو شدم. وب سایت آن ها مرا به این فکر واداشت که در ژاپن ارتباطات زبانی اکثرا چگونه به تصویر کشیده می شوند. همان گونه که پیلر و تاکاهاشی (2006، ص.60) اشاره می کنند، روابط زنان ژاپنی با مردان غربی هم در کتب تخصصی  و هم در کتب عمومی توجه زیادی را در رشته های مختلف به خود جلب کرده است. در چنین گفتمان هایی زنان ژاپنی به دلیل داشتن اخلاق جنسی قابل نقد در ایجاد رابطه با مردان خارجی (مثل درون مایه ی “تاکسی زردِ” شکولدا در سال 1991) معضل تلقی شده اند. در این روابط، مردان غربی نیز مورد تمسخر قرار گرفته اند. به عنوان مثال، “مرد جذاب”، شخصیت کارتونی یک مجله ی مربوط به مهاجران در ژاپن، یک بازنده ی کانادایی لاغر، بیعرضه، از نظر جنسی بی تجربه و بی دست وپا است که ناگهان وقتی برای کار به عنوان یک معلم مکالمه ی انگلیسی به ژاپن می آید به یک مرد محبوب و جذاب تغییر می کند (بیلی 2007؛ اپلبی، 2009). سِری پر فروش اگوری ساوری (2001)، “عزیز من یک خارجیه“، با لحن بسیار ملایم و محترمانه تری از یک ساختِ کارتونی به عنوان ابزاری بهره جسته تا راز های ظاهرا درک نکردنیِ روابط بین اللمللی را از سویی به صورت داستان عاشقانه نشان داده  و از سویی دیگر پرده از آن ها بردارد. اتفاقا کتاب اگوری اخیرا به صورت فیلم در آمده و از موفقیت تجاری چشم گیری برخوردار است.

اما نمره ای که باید به روابط بین زبانیِ میانِ مردانِ ژاپنی و زنان خارجی داد چند است؟ چنین گفتمان هایی نیز شایستگی بررسی را دارند چرا که، بر خلاف باور کلیشه ای حاکم، در ژاپن اکثر همسران خارجی را زنان تشکیل می دهند (جونز و شن 2008، ص.12). اصلِ این همسرانِ مردانِ ژاپنی عمدتا کره ای، چینی، تایلندی وبرزیلی است. اکثر آن ها به  اصطلاح nooson hanayome (همسران آسیاییِ غیر ژاپنیِ کشاورزان ژاپنی) نامیده می شوند که از آن ها انتظار می رود “یاد بگیرند” چگونه دقیقا مثل زنان ژاپنی باشند (پایپر 2003؛ سوزوکی 2005). به طور قطع برنامه ی “این خانم یک خارجیه” اثر توکیو ِتربی برنامه ی تلویزیونی محبوبی بود که برای چندین سال هرهفته اول وقت پخش می شد. هر قسمت یک مرد ژاپنی و همسر خارجی اش را به تصوری می کشید. ساختِ برنامه ساده بود- تمرکزش روی این بود که چگونه آن زوج یکدیگر را ملاقات می کردند؛ یک ارزیابی کلی از اینکه آیا آن زن به زندگی در ژاپن عادت کرده است و اینکه تا چه اندازه می تواند به نیاز های شوهر ژاپنی اش پاسخ گوید. هر قسمت شامل یک مسابقه ی آشپزی بود که در آن 10000 ین در اختیار زن خارجی قرارداده می شد و او می بایست با آن برای مصاحبه کننده و میهمانان دعوت شده مهمانی شامی تدارک می دید. در انتهای برنامه، شخص سرشناسی همواره پیشنهاد های مقدس مآبانه، تحقیر آمیز، و عاقل اندرسفیهانه ای را، که فکر می کرد به زن خارجی کمک می کند تا خود را با زندگی در ژاپن وفق دهد، ارایه می کرد (پیشنهادهایی مثل “ژاپنی ها کفش هایشان را داخلِ اتاق در می آورند”).

همانگونه که درجایی دیگر (جکسون 2009، صص43-44) بحث کرده ام، گفتمان های روابط بین زبانی به طرز قابل توجهی نژاد پرستانه شده اند. نام اتحادیه های سفید ها (نژادِ سفید پوستان) در ژاپن تلویحا چنین می رساند که موقعیت اجتماعی مسلمی (انگلیسی و رمانتیک) وجود دارد که به غیر سفید پوستان مربوط نیست. برعکس، خارجی های غیر سفید پوست در روابط بین زبانی شبیه فرصت طلبان فقیری به تصویر کشیده می شوند که  برای کاهش مشکلات اقتصادی، نیروی تولید مثلی و جنسی خود را با همسران ژاپنی خود مبادله می کنند (پایپر 1997، کوجیما 2001).

کتابی که در ابتدای این نوشته به آن اشاره کردم از این جهت از گفتمان غالب “مردان ژاپنی-زنان خارجی” متمایز است که مصر است اگر مردان ژاپنی می خواهند زنان خارجی را “به دست آورند” باید خودشان را اصلاح کنند و یک راه “به دست آوردن” زنان خارجی که این کتاب پیشنهاد می کند از طریق زبان است (فهم نشانه های زبان انگلیسی). قضیه از این قرار است: از زنان غیر غربی که درصدد برقراری ارتباط با مردان ژاپنی هستند انتظار می رود که ژاپنی را فرا گیرند. این در حالی است که مردان ژاپنی که زن غربی می خواهند باید انگلیسی را به طرز ظاهرا پیچیده و ماهرانه ای به کار گیرند. پیدا کنید پرتقال فروش را!

من از اینکه ناشر از من نمی خواهد برای این کتاب 25 دلار بپردازم خوشحالم چرا که من به چنین ترکیبی از ذات باوری (essentialism)، تبعیض جنسیتی و نژاد پرستی، که به آموزش زبان انگلیسی گره خورده است، نیاز ندارم و می توانم بدون آن هم به کارم ادامه دهم.

توصیه ی من برای این کتاب به زبان فارسی و ژاپنی: این کتاب را نخرید! この本を購入しないでください！

References:

Appleby, R. J. (2009a). Charisma Man: Discourses of desire and western men in Japan. Discourses and Cultural Practices Conference. University of Sydney, July.

Appleby, R. J. (2009b). Reflections on ‘Charisma Man’. The Teaching-Learning Dialogue: An Active Mirror. 35^th Annual international Conference of Japan Association of Language Teaching. Shizuoka, Japan. November.

Bailey, K. (2007). Akogare, ideology, and the ‘Charisma Man’ mythology: Reflections on ethnographic research in English language schools in Japan. Gender, Place & Culture 14(5), pp. 585-608.

Ieda, S. (1991). Ieroo Kyabuu: Narita wo tobitatta onnatachi. Tokyo: Kodansha.

Jackson, L. (2010). Bilingual child-rearing in linguistic intermarriage: Negotiating language, power, and identities between English-speaking fathers and Japanese-speaking mothers in Japan. Unpublished PhD thesis, The University of Queensland.

Jones, G. & Shen, H. (2008). International marriage in East and South-East Asia: trends and research emphases.Citizenship Studies 12(1), 9-25.

Kojima, Y. (2001). In the business of cultural reproduction: Theoretical implications of the mail-order bride phenomenon.Women’s Studies International Forum, 24(2), 199-210.

Piller, Ingrid & Takahashi, Kimie (2006). A passion for English: desire and the language market Aneta Pavlenko. Ed. Bilingual minds: Emotional experience, expression, and representation (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 59-83

Piper, N. (1997). International marriage in Japan: ‘Race’ and ‘gender’ perspectives. Gender, Place, and Culture, 4(3), 321-338.

Piper, N. (2003). Wife or worker? Marriage and cross-border migration in contemporary Japan. International Journal of Population Geography, 9(6), 457-469.

Suzuki, N. (2005). Tripartite desires: Filipina-Japanese marriages and fantasies of transnational traversal. In N. Constable (Ed.), Cross-border marriages: Gender and mobility in transnational Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Having lived and taught English in Japan for more than fifteen years, until last night I’d thought I’d seen it all. That was until I stumbled across the もし彼氏が外国人だったら英会話 (What if my Boyfriend was a Foreigner English Conversation [my translation]) iPhone application.

This application, as you might have guessed, is a novel new twist on foreign language ‘edutainment’. Consumers begin a virtual relationship with one of three characters, and as their romantic love story unfolds, English conversational ability is apparently enhanced! Wow!

 There are three virtual foreign boyfriends from which to choose from: First, there’s William, aged 20. He’s blonde haired and blue eyed, and sports a decisively British cricket vest. Or perhaps Daniel is more your speed? He’s 35, and a dead-ringer for Johnny Depp. Finally, there’s Keith. I’m not too sure what to make of Keith. At 25, he seems too young to carry off a yellow bowtie and pink sports coat. But then again, how would I know? Oh, and yes, of course William, Daniel, and Keith are all ‘white’.

If you get sick of the guy you first choose, no problem. He can be changed! (According to the blurb, ストーリーは選んだ相手により変化する。) Through daily telephone ‘conversations’ – which are actually just recordings of your ‘boyfriend’ talking – your listening ability is reportedly enhanced, and through a Quiz Mode, phrases from the ‘conversations’ can be practiced (毎日の電話会話でリスニング力を強化し、「クイズモード」で会話に出てきたフレーズ練習を行っていく。). Such cutting edge teaching indeed!

It’s no wonder there are so many glowing testimonials from satisfied consumers. According to one review, リスニングが楽しい♡, 単語じゃなくてフレーズとして覚えられるので使えそう！解説も丁寧で分かりやすい☆ (The listening is enjoyable. I can remember phrases and not just words, so it’s useful! The instructions are also really easy to understand.)

 So what are we to make of all this? There now exists, of course, an exciting body of literature articulating the way language learning and romantic desires are intertwined (see for example, Takahashi, 2010). The ‘language desires’ of the subjects in such studies are, of course, predicated on an idealized fantasy of what ‘foreign’ partners are supposed to be like, but they essentially are concerned with relationships between real people. In contrast, the iPhone app described here represents, as my friend and colleague from Senshu University, Peter Longcope, cleverly put it, an intriguing case of “Tamagotchi meets Rosetta Stone”. We are living in interesting times indeed!

Silly though it may seem, I never anticipated the day when the intertwinement of language learning, gender, race, and romance in the virtual world would emerge as a subject deserving of scholarly attention. Of course, the emergence of new forms of foreign language ‘edutainment’ such as the “What if my boyfriend was a Foreigner” iPhone app are significant because they are obviously perpetuating discourses about native speakers, nationalities, gender, and language learning that need to be challenged.

Takahashi, Kimie (2010). Multilingual couple talk: Romance,identity, and the political economy of language D. Nunan & J. Choi (Eds.), Language and culture: Reflective narratives and the emergence of identity. New York: Routledge, 199-207

Lotus Pond (part of Shinobazu Pond) in Ueno Park

“There are so many stupid Japanese women around, huh? Many Westerners are coming to our country and the stupid women love stupid white men.”

My husband and I were stunned by this comment thrown at us by a stranger in Ueno Park during our Language-on-the Move tour to Japan. The insult came from a middle-aged Japanese man who was standing near Shinobazu Pond holding a can of beer in his hand with a flat expression on his face.

“Excuse me? What did you say?!” My husband, a white Western man walking with his Japanese wife, was not going to let the insult pass and was getting ready for a fight.

“Not worth it!” I grabbed his arm and quickly dragged him away assuming that the stranger was a drunk or mentally ill. Ueno Park is notorious for the large number of homeless people living there and we had already seen so many of them along the way from the park’s entrance. Homelessness is one of the hidden dark sides of Japan’s declining prosperity as Shiho Fukada so poignantly demonstrates in her photography.

Although I hadn’t wanted a confrontation, the comment upset me. I have explored issues of misogyny and of animosity towards interracial relationships in Japan in my research but this was the first time I personally experienced this kind of harassment in a public space.  I was also intrigued by the fact that the man had insulted us in fluent English. I couldn’t get the incident out of my mind: Where did he learn English so well? Does he stand there all day insulting interracial couples walking by? What else does he do? Why is he doing this? How often have such comments resulted in a fight?

After we had looked at the pond and decided not to take the famous swan-shaped boat, we had to take the same way back passing the man again. I felt weary and he, too, noticed us. He was staring at us but said nothing this time. My curiosity got the better of me:

Kimie: “Excuse me, but may I ask where you learned English so well?”
Stranger: “I didn’t learn English. It’s God’s gift.”

Soon we were having a friendly conversation because it turned out that he didn’t mind Australians as much as Americans! He told us how Asian women were stupid going after White men, and how interracial marriage, which he called stupidity, weakens the nation. In his view, Japan should never have opened its doors to the West in the 19^th century. Ever since then, the country had been infected with evil Western influences. In particular he was aggravated by the fact that Japanese women are so into White men. “They say ‘I love you, I love you’ and the women love it. It’s stupid. If love is there, you don’t have to say it.” I asked him if he had a partner. With the same contempt, he said “How can I find a partner when women here watch stupid American romantic movies and expect me to say I love you?”

He also told us that he was a freelance writer and that we were standing right in his publishing office. “I write many things including haiku”, and he took out several hand-made copies of a small booklet. “If you’d like to take one, I’d appreciate a small contribution.” We paid and left. By way of farewell he said “I hope you will enjoy my work.”

When we sat down in a café later, I looked at his collection of twelve haikus. They were beautifully hand-written in English and in a fude brush pen with titles such as ‘Bird’, ‘Northerly wind’ or ‘Journey’.  “How interesting”, I thought to myself in that café in the Ueno Park.

Hideo Asano on the right and Kimie with his haiku collection, September 29, 2010

At that point I did not yet know that we had actually met Hideo Asano, a well-known Tokyo artist, writer and blogger! Attacking Japanese-Western couples seems to be some sort of street performance he engages in as this, rather disrespectful, YouTube video shows.  However, the haikus, poems and short stories on his website are beautiful.

Hideo Asano is a bilingual, English-as-a-second-language writer who could be an inspiration to many learners of English. On his website he writes:

I hope especially my work could encourage students who study English as a second language that anyone could reach to a higher level, striving with persistence, to reach to the point of realizing that the more you know the more you don’t know. English belongs to everyone who cares, a baseball player’s son can’t automatically be a good baseball player.

This must be one of the strongest encouragements to find your own voice in a second language I have seen in a long time! That Asano is left to peddle his art as a homeless person on the streets of Tokyo and to draw attention to himself by insulting others, in a country that is obsessed with English language learning and idolizes native-speaking teachers is a sad and deeply disturbing testament to the power of the intersection of linguistic and racial ideologies.

“Japanese guys aren’t the most popular creatures on earth when it comes to romance. Sad but true.”

That’s the claim of Meiko Mochizuki Swartz, self-professed bilingual, bicultural ‘expert’ and author of an online book titled Nihonjin no Otoko wa Motenai (Japanese guys aren’t popular) that I recently stumbled across. The book is essentially billed as a guide to assist Japanese men establish and maintain relationships with ‘foreign’ (read here ‘western’) women. It claims to offer instructional advice regarding such things as:

• How to read facial expressions and body language
• How to read verbal clues in English
• How to make a good impression even with weak English skills
• Where to go and what to do on a first date
• Learning when a good-night kiss is appropriate
• How to apologize

The Japanese web page has several glowing testimonials from satisfied readers. T-san, with 20 years’ experience living the United States, for example, is quoted as stating

「これ、東京のアメリカ大使館のビザ申請窓口に積み上げて無料配布するべきです。モテなくて人生無駄にする人が多すぎる。男がだらしないから可愛い日本人の女の子はみんなアメリカ人に取られちゃうし。」(This [book] should be placed free at the visa application counter of the American Embassy in Tokyo. There are too many guys wasting their lives. Because of such slovenly blokes, the Americans are taking all our cute Japanese girls [my translation].)

While the subject matter and underpinning premises that seem to drive Nihonjin no Otoko wa Motenai are perplexing enough, the warning posted on the book’s web page left me gob-smacked. In red font (!), it cautions that the book

“…is written entirely in Japanese. If you don’t read Japanese, this book is not for you…But let us emphasize again, if you don’t read Japanese at a native level, this book is useless for you. We only have this information page in English because the US-based store system requires us to have it. This page is not meant to invite non-Japanese speakers to purchase the book. If you are one of our potential readers, we invite you to go to our Japanese page…”

Huh?!? This must be the oddest blurb in publishing history! Why would any publisher go to such lengths to dissuade a potential customer?

I, for one, was intrigued! Their website got me thinking about how interlingual relationships are frequently portrayed in Japan. As Piller and Takahashi (2006, p. 60) point out, Japanese women’s relationships with western men have received substantial interdisciplinary attention in both the academic and popular literatures. In such discourses the women have frequently been problematized as possessing questionable sexual morals (as per Shoko Ieda’s (1991) yellow cab motif) for seeking relationships with foreign men. The western men in these relationships have also been the object of derision. Charisma Man, a comic strip character of an expat magazine in Japan, for example, is a skinny, ineffectual, sexually inexperienced, nerdish loser from Canada who suddenly transforms himself into a handsome, desirable stud when he comes to Japan to work as an English conversation teacher (Bailey, 2007; Appleby, 2009a, 2009b). Substantially less contemptuous in tone, Oguri Saori’s (2001) best-selling Daarin wa Gaikokujin (My Darling is a Foreigner) series uses a comic strip format as the medium through which to both romanticize and unveil the seemingly impenetrable mysteries of international relationships. Incidentally, Oguri’s book has recently been adapted into a film and is enjoying solid commercial success.

But what’s the score concerning interlingual relationships involving Japanese men and foreign women? Such discourses deserve our attention too, because, despite the dominant stereotype, the majority of foreign spouses in Japan are women (Jones & Shen, 2008, p. 12). These wives of Japanese men originate primarily from Korea, China, Thailand and Brazil. Many of them are so-called nooson hanayome (non-Japanese Asian wives of Japanese farmers) who are expected to ‘learn’ how to be just like a Japanese wife (Piper, 2003; Suzuki, 2005). To be sure, Tokyo Terebi’s Okusama wa gaikokujin (The wife is a foreigner!) was a popular television program that ran in a weekly prime time slot for several years. Each episode featured a Japanese man and his foreign wife. The program’s format was simple – it focused on how the couple met, an evaluation of how well the foreign wife had become accustomed to life in Japan and the extent to which she could meet the needs of her Japanese husband. Each episode included a cooking challenge in which the foreign wife was presented with 10,000 yen from which she had to prepare a dinner party for the interviewer and invited guests. At the close of the show, a well-known celebrity invariably offered some pious, painfully condescending and patronizing advice to the foreign wife that would supposedly help her better adjust to life in Japan (“It is important to wash before getting in the bath” “Japanese people take their shoes off inside” etc…).

As I have argued elsewhere (Jackson 2009, pp. 43-44), discourses of interlingual relationships are also noticeably racialized. Japanese-hakujin (white, Caucasian) unions seem to imply a presumed social status (i.e. English-speaking, romantic) not associated with relationships with non-whites. In contrast, non-white foreigners in interlingual relationships are often portrayed as economically poor opportunists who exchange reproductive, sexual and domestic labour with Japanese partners in order to alleviate their own economic hardships (Piper, 1997, Kojima, 2001).

The book mentioned at the start of this blog is somewhat different from the dominant discourse of Japanese men-foreign women in that it insists that Japanese men have to improve themselves if they are to ‘get’ western women. And one way to ‘get’ western women, the book suggests, is through language (“reading verbal clues in English”). Here’s the deal: non-western women in relationships with Japanese men are expected to learn Japanese, while Japanese men who want a western partner will need to utilize English in supposedly skillful and complex ways. Go figure!

I’m glad the publisher doesn’t want me to spend $25 on Nihon no otoko wa motenai because I can do without this concoction of essentialism, sexism, and racism all tied up with English language teaching. I’ll be happy to ‘endorse’ this book in English and Japanese: Don’t buy this book! この本を購入しないでください！

References:

Appleby, R. J. (2009a). Charisma Man: Discourses of desire and western men in Japan. Discourses and Cultural Practices Conference. University of Sydney, July.

Appleby, R. J. (2009b). Reflections on ‘Charisma Man’. The Teaching-Learning Dialogue: An Active Mirror. 35^th Annual international Conference of Japan Association of Language Teaching. Shizuoka, Japan. November.

Bailey, K. (2007). Akogare, ideology, and the ‘Charisma Man’ mythology: Reflections on ethnographic research in English language schools in Japan. Gender, Place & Culture 14(5), pp. 585-608.

Ieda, S. (1991). Ieroo Kyabuu: Narita wo tobitatta onnatachi. Tokyo: Kodansha.

Jackson, L. (2010). Bilingual child-rearing in linguistic intermarriage: Negotiating language, power, and identities between English-speaking fathers and Japanese-speaking mothers in Japan. Unpublished PhD thesis, The University of Queensland.

Jones, G. & Shen, H. (2008). International marriage in East and South-East Asia: trends and research emphases. Citizenship Studies 12(1), 9-25.

Kojima, Y. (2001). In the business of cultural reproduction: Theoretical implications of the mail-order bride phenomenon. Women’s Studies International Forum, 24(2), 199-210.

Piller, Ingrid & Takahashi, Kimie (2006). A passion for English: desire and the language market Aneta Pavlenko. Ed. Bilingual minds: Emotional experience, expression, and representation (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 59-83

Piper, N. (1997). International marriage in Japan: ‘Race’ and ‘gender’ perspectives. Gender, Place, and Culture, 4(3), 321-338.

Piper, N. (2003). Wife or worker? Marriage and cross-border migration in contemporary Japan. International Journal of Population Geography, 9(6), 457-469.

Suzuki, N. (2005). Tripartite desires: Filipina-Japanese marriages and fantasies of transnational traversal. In N. Constable (Ed.), Cross-border marriages: Gender and mobility in transnational Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.