Introduction to Special Issue on Writing-Restricted Variation in Japanese

Abstract

This special issue is a cross-disciplinary examination into the social concerns and motivations behind writing-restricted variation (that is, script, punctuation, emoji, and other features that are ‘lost’ if a text is read aloud) in contemporary written Japanese. By necessity, generalist introductions to written Japanese tend to describe its simultaneous use of multiple scripts as a complex but ultimately regular peculiarity. However, once we dive into the reality of contemporary written Japanese, it becomes clear that descriptions of Japanese writing norms as static rules are problematic. A quick trip to a local store is all that is required to encounter loan words like kōhī (coffee) or bīru (beer), normatively the exclusive domain of katakana, written in hiragana or kanji (Kunert, 2020; Robertson, 2021). Scanning billboards, shop names, manga dialogue, or television teroppu (‘sub-titles’) will similarly lead to encounters with wordplay employing formally ‘incorrect’ uses of kanji, or instances of native vocabulary written in katakana or the Roman alphabet (Maree, 2015; Robertson, 2017; Tranter, 2008). Even in ‘formal’ texts one can easily find common terms like isu (chair) or megane (glasses) written in distinct scripts across a single document (Joyce, Hodošček & Nishina, 2012), and attention to newer digital spaces will quickly bring about encounters with additional forms of writing-restricted variation like emoji (digital artefacts like ) and kaomoji (vertically oriented emoticons like (^_^) and . Indeed, as the articles in this special issue show, in contemporary Japan it is hard to read a novel, send a text message, play a video game, or even visit a shrine without seeing writing that contains contrasting, creative, or formally nonstandard ways of representing Japanese. Certainly, the study of writing-restricted variation in Japanese is not new. Research on variant script use dates back to the 1950s