Professional Documents
Culture Documents
SPECIAL SECTION
During the 1990s Japans economy, inflated by speculation, collapsed and a decades-long
recession began. Contributing to this special section that revisits the paradigm of language
and political economy, this essay discusses the new semiotic condition that has emerged in
postbubble Japanese society. Taking a cue from Gilles Deleuzes notion of control societies,
I will specifically focus on the fate of Japanese womens language, or a set of speech forms
exclusively associated with femaleness. This essay will ask what has happened to womens
language as the society shifts from disciplinary society (Foucault) to control society
(Deleuze).
Keywords: Japan, language and gender, language and political economy, indexicality,
control society, Deleuze, Foucault
Introduction
I conducted fieldwork from 1991 through 1993 in a corporate office in downtown
Tokyo, focusing on female managers everyday linguistic strategies and their reck-
oning with the prevailing cultural conception of womens language (Inoue 2006).
Womens language is a set of speech forms used, or said to be used, by Japanese
women and often thought to be rooted in traditional Japanese culture, prior to
contact with the West. It is also commonly said to be naturally or seamlessly associ-
ated with the proper demeanor of the Japanese woman, with features including
indirectness and circumlocution.1 It was inevitable that womens language would
1. See also Shibamoto-Smith (1985) and Okamoto and Shibamoto-Smith (2004). For a com-
prehensive history of the subject of Japanese womens language, see Nakamura (2014).
become a frenetic topic of talk about talk at the time of my fieldwork because of
the sweeping changes that were taking place regarding women in the workplace. In
1986, the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL) was enacted, which actu-
ally provided little legal remedy for gender discrimination in the workplace but
nonetheless brought significant public and social visibility to working women, for
better or for worse, and to their aspirations for professional careers.
The early 1990s was also the beginning of the end of what had been presumed to
be an epoch of continuous and reliable Japanese economic growth. This period was
thus a critical moment in the transformation of both Japanese political economy
and public culture. Across Japanese society, people had to grapple with how specu-
lation, as it was critically called in retrospect, had come to replace Fordist produc-
tive investment as a new source of superprofits and with how this shift had led to a
startling political-economic crisis.
This essay picks up where I left this research on womens language in the 1990s
and examines how discourses and representations of womens language have
changed radically alongside major shifts in Japans political economy.2 Since the
1990s, and prompted by Japans economic woes, state economic and social policy
has embraced full-blown neoliberalism and has enacted a variety of measures that,
in effect, govern not only the economy and the work place but also govern the self.
In the neoliberal rationality, market logics of competition and efficiency signifi-
cantly restructured not only economic institutions but also public culture and non-
economic institutions of all kinds. Margaret Thatchers (1987) oft-quoted remark,
there is no such a thing as society, resonates loudly with Japans economic, social,
educational, and welfare policies made since the 1990s. New or revised laws were
enacted to privatize public services (including health insurance, the postal service,
and social security) and public utilities. Other policies that individualize risk and
responsibility have transformed labor markets and labor policies, media practic-
es and structures (including the Internet), and have reverberated across Japanese
cultural practices, as I explore below. In essence, these relentlessly individualizing
projects have fundamentally altered the material, infrastructural, and cultural con-
ditions of possibility by which society and the social are imagined in Japan. Cit-
izensgendered in ways that specifically fit into long-term growth and speculative
bubbleshave been forced to readjust themselves to, and reinvent themselves for,
a profoundly new normal of casual and flexible-contract career tracks. Inevitably,
new forms of mediated public culture, and new creative imaginaries of the social
world of the unprecedented present have emerged, both reflecting and troubling
neoliberal common sense.
In this conjuncture, how has the relationship between language and politi-
cal economy shifted? How has the new condition of the socialone that appears
2. Gender and labor has continued to be my central research focus in Japan, and I am
currently working on the politics of inscription labor by stenographerswho are al-
most all femalein Japanese courts and parliament. While their work involves special-
ized skills, their hopes and aspirations, as well as their relationships, took form in the
context of the postbubble economy. The conceptual framework for my current project
is thus critically informed by the contrast between their situation and the political-
economic and cultural context of my informants in the early 1990s.
As a copy of a copy, womens language accrues its value by bringing into social
circulation diverse reflexive enactments under a specific historical condition. Asif
Agha (2003; also see Irvine 1990; Silverstein 2003) calls such social life of linguis-
tic valuation enregisterment, a process by which particular patterns of speaking
come to be socially recognized as characteristic of some social type. Enregister-
ment is a powerful normalizing force that culturally coordinates the affective and
the social through practices of typification that often imply fictitious origin nar-
ratives repeatedly and widely uttered or tacitly presumed. That is, enregisterment
always exceeds the social realities that are purportedly typified. Indeed, one could
argue that the process of enregisterment necessarily entails the formation of a his-
torically situated characterlogial figure (Agha 2007; Goffman 1974: Hastings and
Manning 2004; Johnstone forthcoming; Nozawa 2013). Here I will explore the spe-
cific historical and political-economic conditions in postbubble Japan of the early
1990s and after, in which the very nature of the figuration of such a semiotically
assembled character has been shifting with the emergence of new sites and new
modalities of the articulation between language and gender and of the indexical
order that governs such articulation.
The timeliness of Gals 1989 article thus cannot be overstated when one recog-
nizes the advent of technological development driven by post-Fordist globalization,
which began significantly to expand the sites and modes of linguistic practice and
of subject formation. For example, Mark Poster (1990: 15), whose book, The Mode
of Information, appeared at almost the same time as Gals article, examined how
new modes of communication enabled by computer technologies in the media,
electronic writing, surveillance, and databases radically transformed the subject of
communication, which is now dispersed and decentralized across social space. An-
ticipating the age of the Internet, Poster thus observed, The body then is no longer
an effective limit of the subjects position. Media discourse and mediated expres-
sive culture are thus not external either to political economy as mere superstructure
or to the subjecthood of the historical actor as mere representation.
It was Gilles Deleuze who discussed the emergence of a new mode of power in
the coming age of the Internet, again, around the same time as Gals article. De-
leuzes essay, Postscript on the Societies of Control (1992), portentously outlined
the contemporary world of global capitalism and networks enabled by computer
technologies. I take societies of control not as a specific form of power that causes
the effects I describe in this essay but as establishing a general horizon of change,
or a platform of potentiality, which alerts us to what to look for, or at what level to
look, in making sense of the culture change attending postbubble Japan.
Deleuzes society of control foregrounds new techniques enabled by digital tech-
nologies to produce the individual and the social, which have great affinity with, or
perhaps are instrumental in, neoliberal political economy. Such technologies also
give rise to a new architecture of knowledge that significantly departs from that
which operates in the disciplinary society as Michel Foucault (1977) described. The
idea of a new mode of knowledge production allows us to ask about a possible new
relationship between language and political economy. In order to make my argu-
ment, I will step back a little to the late 1980s, at the apex of Japans bubble culture
and economy, and highlight how what emerged in Japans political economy and
public culture in the early 1990s would have been unrecognizable a decade earlier.
my research, I heard rumors about the major restructuring of the company, which
would involve a drastic reconsolidation of its assets by selling its building in Tokyo
(at a very bad time to sell real estate) and the reorganization of divisions, merg-
ing some with other companies and closing others. All this entailed a significant
number of layoffs and early retirements. By the time I finished my fieldwork, all the
rumors had come to pass, and I essentially lost my village, my field site, to return
to for ethnographic follow-up.
The economic history just surveyed took place in the context of the EEOL of
1986. The law was less a driver of change than a reflection of a new place for women
in the era of steady economy growth. The labor market opened opportunities for
women,3 and the consumer market predictably jumped on the renewed regime of
women-as-consumers (but now with personal incomes) (Clammer 1997; Skov and
Moeran 1995). Working women filled the role as unsparing consumers and skilled
discerners of brands and other complexly symbolic values inscribed onto com-
modities. With the unprecedented growth, new consumption spaces now opened
up where women had not been seen before, such as golf and horseback riding, and
even beer joints of the kind frequented by male workers. The public recognition
and endorsement of young women smoking, drinking, and gambling was taken
as a legible sign of the rise of womens social statusor equality. The EEOL was
merely an articulation of this widely recognized and highly visible assemblage of
womens rising disposable income and expanded and reconfigured consumption.
In this context, a rather archaic term, oj-sama, resurfaced in mid-1980s.
Oj-sama originally referred to a lady or a princess, and was used as a term of
address for ones daughter in wealthy and upper-class families in the prewar period.
At that time, Japanese society was stratified largely by two parallel social relations
of production: capitalists vs. laborers, and landowners vs. landless peasants. Little
socio-economic mobility was possible, and a blunt discourse about naturalized
class relations was part of the public script. The front pieces of prewar womens
magazines were routinely filled with photographic portraits of nominal oj-sama,
or daughters of aristocrats, industrialists, politicians, and intellectuals and writers,
and college professors (see figure 1).
While the prewar meaning of oj-sama did not disappear, in the postwar period
it came to be used more as a general form to address a young woman, especially
on formal occasions such as weddings and even among customers in retail stores.
Much of the imagined original connotations of the term were retained: Oj-sama
is innocent and pure, dressed conservatively but always in the best of taste. She
grew up with care and advantages, without hardship. Her fair complexion is a sign
of her staying in the most inner corner of her grand house away from the windows
(i.e., from the mundane world). She might well be fluent in a couple of (European)
languages, well-versed in classical music, fine art, and literature, play the piano and
tennis, and display the disposition and bodily techniques associated with the habi-
tus of the (imaginary) upper class.
3. For cogent sociological analyses of gender politics in the workplace and in the labor
market during this period of high economic growth, see Brinton (1993) and Ogasawara
(1998).
Figure 1: Daughters of Dr. Miyake and their cats. Shufu no tomo 7 (4), April 1913.
From the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, the term oj-sama returned in the
media. In 1986, one of the major national newspapers, Asahi Shimbun, ran an ar-
ticle with oj-sama in its title, the first time since 1937. The 1986 article was titled,
Why oj-sama boom now? (Asahi Shimbun, February 5, 1986), and its subtitle
asserts: the status that money cant buy. The article discusses how young women
were pursuing different kinds of distinction now that they had acquired everything
that money could buy (see figure 2). If one knows the Japanese idiom, hakoiri
musume, literally meaning, a boxed daughter, a young woman carefully shel-
tered from the secular world to be raised as ojo-sama, he or she would recognize
Figure 2 as a mockery of those women competing to get inside the box, belatedly
Figure 2: Why ojo-sama boom now? Asahi Shimbun, February 5, 1986. Illustration by
the artist, Satoshi Tsunoda, used with permission.
A series of featured articles titled, for example, From today, *You* can be an oj-
sama, too! (Non-no, January 1986), and The manners of oj-sama that nobody
has ever taught before (Young Lady, December 1985), was carried in womens
magazines and especially fashion magazines one after another, offering the reader
tips about etiquette, clothes (konsaba4), and accessories, and color-coordination
that would make her look like oj-sama. Figure 3 is an illustration attached to an
article titled, The ultimate tama no koshi: My Fair Lady syndrome. Tama no
koshi literally means, a palanquin set with jewels, an idiom referring to a woman
who successfully married up. The illustration shows the young womans spectacular
transformation into ojo-sama, with her mastery of the upper-class womans tight
lipped laughter, ho ho ho ho. She is flanked by her nonmiddle-class parents,
signaled by their nonstandard speech forms attached to their image, admiringly
4. For a thoughtful analysis of the fashion style landscape in urban Japanese society in the
1990s, see Laura Miller (2006). See also Gabriella Lukcs (2010) on the vital role of the
media representations of womanhood in the 1990s.
look up her. Her mother exclaims, Look, Daddy! and her father declares, Our
daughter is now a fine ojo-sama.
Figure 3: Ultimate tama no koshi (a palanquin set with jewels): My Fair Lady
syndrome. Shukan gendai 31 (3): 19497, Kdansha, July 1989. Illustration by the artist,
Seisuke kawa, used with permission.
Media incited the readers imagination of the habitus of the young woman from a
wealthy family: refined comportment, proper decorum, nobility (on the kind as-
sociated with character, not breeding), and feminine diction. Of course, women
understood that such dispositions would require, as Pierre Bourdieu would point
out, not just recognizing oneself as oj-sama but sustained time to work on ones
body in order to internalize the acquired tastes and thus to make them her second
nature: talents in fields of endeavor such as flower arrangement, the tea-ceremony,
calligraphy, the piano, proper bowing, walking, chopstick-handling, and speaking.
All these constitute cultural capital because they represent the habitus of the privi-
leged, and add up to the indexical presentation of, and reminder of, the whole past
of which it is the product (Bourdieu 1984: 56). In this case, what is at stake is the
whole past of the admired and privileged woman. The aura of oj-sama derives
from the normative narrative that it is a product of the irreversible and inimitable
historical duration of time, only through which one can acquire it; its claim is that
it cannot be simply bought but must be, like taste, practiced, cultivated, and lived in
to be real. It is the embodied trace of the multiple generations of the accumulation
of wealth and prestige that have been passed down to her. Nobility, gentility, and
grace, are, in a word, priceless, or at least being presented that way.
Bourdieus account of the habitus itself is a normative narrative in its insistence
that the acquisition of a habitus requires a lifetime, or at least a childhood. We need
to think beyond it. Precisely because ones habitus paradoxically erases its own his-
tory of difficult learning and acquisition on the part of the bearer, it naturalizes
itself as if its bearer were born or otherwise equipped; this is how the social repro-
duction of distinctionread inequalityworks. But as soon as the indexical
relationship is established between the figure of oj-sama and the commodities
associated with her, the commodities as sign replace oj-sama as the referent, and
this reverse-engineering is the semiotic strategysocial distinction through con-
sumptionof class mobility for women. In other words, the form of appearance
(Marx) of the habitus of elites becomes an iconized sign (specific forms of con-
sumption) that no longer necessitate any indexical ties to concrete life lived in a
family of wealth and distinction; an upper-class habitus appears in the consump-
tion of the commodities themselves. This is the origin of conspicuous consump-
tion. The habitus erasure of the history of its acquisition is thus deeply complicit
with, and is the function of, commodity fetishism, mobilized by those seeking class
distinction through sign value (Baudrillard 1981). Regardless of ones real past,
habitus can be a stated presentation of self without the concrete class background
to which it was indexically linked. The commodity system of signs cannot distin-
guish a fake oj-sama as long as the appropriate signs can be bought and paid for.
A Hermes handbag is indifferent to whether its owner purchased it with a one-time
payment on her credit card supplied by her wealthy father, or with a ten-year loan
at a pawnshop.
The return of oj-sama in the middle of Japans intoxicating bubble culture co-
incided with the intensive media coverage of Crown Prince Naruhitos search for
a wife in 1986 and 1987. Marrying into the Imperial Household is marrying into
the ultimate upper-class family. A handful of young women, including the one who
would become Princess Masako, became the targets of intense media speculation
as potential candidates, all of whom were descendants of renowned families whose
wealth and power had been accumulated prior to World War II, and for some,
even further back in history (Lebra 1993). Against the images of oj-sama-cum-
commodities, paparazzi photographs in magazines showed those young women
(surprisingly, given the florescence of public culture about oj-sama) dressed in
simple and unassuming attire, and rather nonglamorous fashions, as if they did not
have immense wealth. It gave people a rare glimpse of the existence of the upper
class, which would otherwise be invisible in postwar Japanese society where class
(kaiky) lost its valence, and the alternative term, social stratification (kais), im-
plied a promise of fluidity and (upward) mobility across the social hierarchy. Sud-
denly, old money put new money (or, better, new credit) in a more complex light
that undermined the faith in universal middleclass-ness. I recall a conversation
with one of my friends, who, responding to the media coverage of the princess
candidates, said, Wow, class indeed exists in Japan!
The return of oj-sama also coincided with the time when the EEOL was en-
acted in 1986. Was it accidental? It appears as though the figure of ojo-sama had to
be brought into public to counter the kind of womanhoodthat of the indepen-
dent working womanthat the law represents, even if it has no teeth to bring about
social change. Recall figure 2, where young women are represented as competing
to get inside the box (the domestic), while the law was supposed to bring them out
of the box. The law, in fact, confronts women with the ultimate choice. As the law
invites women into the labor market and into making it through work, the figure
of ojo-sama invites women back into the marriage market, and into making it
through conspicuous consumption.
And it was not just young women who experienced anxiety, but also their fami-
lies. A short column dated April 24, 1986, in Asahi Shimbun asked, Why desire oj-
sama?, and its answer is most telling about the clash between the two discourses
of womanhood in the midst of Japans bubble economy. The columns male writer
recounts his informal meeting with a labor union leader at the unions study group on
the EEOL, which had just gone into effect and about which union members felt it was
necessary to educate themselves. The union leader confided that his daughter was
preparing for an entrance exam for a private junior high school. He went on, It is not
necessarily like the recent, faddish oj-sama, but I want my daughter to grow up like
oj-sama, and I would like to send her to oj-sama school, although I am recently
thinking that I should reconsider. Oj-sama school refers to a female-only school
putatively for the daughters of wealthy families because of the pricey tuition. Gradu-
ates from such oj-sama schools are said to constitute a reservoir of future wives and
mothers for elite men, a supposedly viable strategy, if one can afford it, to marry up
or to reproduce ones class position. Although not with a clear conscience, still, the
labor union leader confesses his desire for his daughter to take what he sees as the
shortest path to join the class against which his union is outwardly organizing; this
is something that he would not dare to admit in a formal address to his comrades.
Yet, the real social distinction of ojo-sama was not only, or perhaps not so much,
about how one could appear like ojo-sama but about how to know whether one is
ojo-sama. Knowing the real indexical cues and clues of ojo-sama, without being
ensnared by its sign-cum-commodities, was itself a social distinction, a sign that
ones daughter is ojo-sama. And of course insider knowledge is immediately turned
into sign-cum-commodities for those who are not insiders, once the media offer it
to the reader as (self-help) information. How, then, would a distinctively authen-
tic oj-sama decipher the index of ojo-sama as a genuine display of social distinc-
tion? There have always been gauche pretenders, even before World War II, but
the real thing is always distinctfor those who know what to look for because
they live itfrom those who try to buy their way in. The ultimate signs are highly
local: The name of the (womens) school, from which not only oneself graduated
but also ones mother and grandmother, the location of ones residence (the kind
of old and upper-class neighborhood in which it would be impossible to become
established within a single generation), the name of the hospital where one was
born, and whether ones primary physician has served the family for multiple gen-
erations, and so on.
But the return of oj-sama was not ultimately about new money desperately
seeking the aura of old money. In postwar democratized Japan, where the existence
of class inequality is largely repressed, ojo-sama, the gendered figure of the prewar
class of luxury, resurfaced not in its original form of upper-class habitus but as a
sign to be deciphered through buyingbuying commodities and their symbolic
values. Whether or not one can really be an authentic copy of ojo-sama mattered
much less. What did matter, and continues to matter, is the allure of ojo-sama both
in the economy of fashion as well as in the marriage market, which are indeed real.
This is the discursive playing field in which one can fake ojo-sama without irony,
without the gap between enunciation and its meaning.
The depth of the malaise is reflected in the fact that in the early 2000s, the
1990s were (optimistically, in retrospect) called the lost decade. Now, the period
of 1990 to 2010 is called the two lost decades. The contraction of the economy
and the shadow it has cast over the social and cultural has been intensely chroni-
cled by scholars.6 If postmodern can be understood as a historical category, then
Japans postmodernity commenced when economic restructuring induced by cri-
ses dealt the final blow to Fordism and birthed neoliberal globalization and Japans
active participation in the new accumulation strategy, with all the human costs
entailed. This new political economic reality brought a kind of popular cynicism
and disenchantment to teleologies and grand narratives that previously functioned
to provide people with the symbolic world of meaning-making in their lives. The
only grand narrative left now is hypertrophic patriarchal nationalism, which con-
tinues to inflate by siphoning off peoples resentment and despair, and of course,
the neoliberal focus on the self.7
This new cultural condition, and condition of the individuals relationship to
society and the world was also built up by the rise of the Internet. The government
publication, White Paper on National Livelihood (Japan 2000) designated 1995
as the first year of the Internet (intanetto gannen) in Japan and it detailed how
the Internet had been changing ways in which people connected with each other.
Indeed, in its speed and the density of connection that it makes possible, the emer-
gence of the Internet perfectly illustrates David Harveys description (1990: 284
307) of time-space compressionthe condition of postmodernity as a response
to the limits of Fordism. The new modes of sociality and community facilitated by
the Internet are, at the same time, new modes of control and government.
In many ways, Internet sociality, with its focus on consumption, has clear paral-
lels with Deleuzes (1992) idea of societies of control and their subjects. According
to Deleuze, policies and practices of free trade, deregulation, and privatization, and
their encroachment into the social, firmly ground a distinctive mode of govern-
mentality, a distinct rationality of subjection in which people are no longer molded
as in Foucaults (1977) disciplinary society that confines and disciplines people
in the sites such as hospitals, prisons, factories, and schools. Rather, in societies
of control, the process of subjection does not end in such institutions, and, in-
stead, people are continuously checked (aka controlled) (Deleuze 1992; see also
Galloway 2006) and modulated with the help of digital and algorithmic technolo-
gies. Foucault often suggested that governing could involve a strategy without a
strategist, but it is Deleuzes control society in which new zones of constrained
freedom (or space for creativity) are most clearly opened up in ways beyond the
direct control of the programmers.
6. For further critical reflection and discussions on postrecessionary Japanese society, see
Allison (2013); Arai (2016); Ishida and Slater (2009); Miyazaki (2013); Satsuka (2015);
and Yoda and Harootunian (2006).
7. For the government and some segments of civil society, nationalism was the spiritual
remedy for the recession. The urgency of national unity was sought by the reactivation
of geopolitical tensions in East Asia, resistance to official admission of war responsi-
bilities, the depoliticized recognition of ethnic minorities as cultural difference, and
(neo)liberalisms backlash against feminism (Ueno 2006).
And let no reader think that Deleuzes thesis on societies of control has had
no impact on Japanese contemporary social thought. It has long inspired Japanese
intellectuals (Asada 1984; Azuma 2007; Chiba 2013; Hamano 2008; Sakai 2001, to
name a few) to understand how Japans seismic socio-economic, technological, and
cultural transformation since the early 1990s have resulted in the emergence of the
mode of power and control that Deleuze had so precisely predicted. And it is an
all too familiar condition in contemporary global political economythe econo-
mization of everything (Brown 2015)that dovetailed with the new technologies
of network and networking and underpinned a historically and culturally specific
articulation of the social and the economic. It is here we can locate new concep-
tions of language and of its mediation. In the following section, I will discuss one
such site of articulation by focusing on the shifting cultural location of womens
language in Japans postbubble neoliberal political economy and culture.
8. Although my argument is not based on quantitative data, some recent studies on lin-
guistic ideologies of gender difference in Japanese language could as well be interpreted
this must not to be interpreted to mean that somehow the reign of the indexicality
of language and its ability to mark distinction has been diminishing, or that the
population of womenin a demographic sensewho speak womens language
has been decreasing. Nor is it to be taken as any indication that sexism has eased.
What I want to ask is how the modality of power to govern the articulation between
language and gender has been shifting in the postbubble Japanese political and
economic context? Or how has the material and discursive condition that itself
makes the indexical relationship between language and gender possible been shift-
ing? In television dramas, play scripts, and manga and anime, the salient forms
associated with womens language, especially the utterance-ending forms (dawa,
noyo, kashira, for example), continue to be assigned to the speech of female
characters as generic. In other words, the linguistic forms in the media-reported
speech of women continue to use the traditional forms of womens language.
But the metapragmatic realmwhich is autonomous from the level of enunciated
speechhas changed along with the larger changes in Japan. What is at stake here
is not so much about how the meaning of womens language has changed, as
about how its epistemological condition of the mode of enregisterment might be
changing. Where has womens language (understood as an assemblage of language
ideologies, or talk about talk) gone? And where has ojo-sama gone?
The decades-long recession wilted the motivation and self-discipline to fake
ojo-sama. But, oj-sama has not disappeared, instead she is ironized; she is now
pathos. That is, whereas an inauthentic performance of oj-sama would have been
shameful in the 1980s and 1990s, the current ironic figure of ojo-sama plays up
its inauthenticity performatively, and resists what she says by how she says it. In
the 1990s and after, the character of ojo-sama came to be featured especially in
the comedy genres of manga, anime, novels, and TV dramas, where she was often
the embodiment of so-called tsundere, a developmental disposition that implies
a young female character is aloof and standoffish in public (in most cases) toward
someone with whom she is in love but in private she is sweet and affectionate with
him, or she gradually becomes so in private as she warms up (see figure 4 for an
image of an ironized oj-sama). As Paul de Man (1996: 182) argues, irony, in which
the signifier, in its total arbitrariness, has no adherence to the signified, undoes
the reflexive and the dialectical model ... what irony disrupts is precisely that dia-
lectic and that reflexivity, the tropes. The emergence of the ironized ojo-sama and
her ironized womens language thus complicates the normative feedback loop
between pragmatics and metapragmatics, as irony frustrates the linguistic ideol-
ogy that informs the indexical relationship between them and thus interrupts the
to validate the direction that this essay is pointing to. Kuniki Satakes (2005) compre-
hensive analysis on the postwar shift in the number of newspaper articles on linguistic
norms of female and male speech, based on the data base compiled by the National
Institute for Japanese Language, shows that it spiked to 224 articles in the 1980s from
138 articles in the 1970s, which sharply decline almost by half with 114 articles in the
1990s. Using the same database by the National Institute of Japanese Language, Shoko
Masuda (2012) also looks at the shift in the number of articles on language corrup-
tion [kotoba no midare], which is often about womens language use, and notes its
decline in the 1990s.
Figure 4: Ironized oj-sama. Hoo ho ho ho [oj-sama laughter]. Can you catch up with
this beauty of mine? Hoo ho ho ho. Shiratori Reiko de gozaimasu [I am Shiratori Reiko].
Vol. 1, page 69, Kdansha, 1987. Illustration by the artist, Yumiko Suzuki.
are no longer exactly disciplinary. Deleuze sees the correspondence between a par-
ticular historical period and its corresponding technologies, and observes, Types
of machines are easily matched with each type of society. The old societies of sov-
ereignty made use of simple machineslevers, pulley, clocks; but the recent dis-
ciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy ... ; the
societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers (1992: 6).
So the transition from discipline to control corresponds with that from thermody-
namics to cybernetic machines.
Disciplinary society, in Foucaults well-known analysis, operates on spaces of
bodily enclosure such as in the prison, hospital, factory, school, and family home,
in which people are disciplined and at the same time individuated into subjects. A
society of control operates on dividuation rather than individuation, dividing sub-
jects internally into computational parameters. While the language of disciplinary
society was analogical, that of the society of control is digital or numeric. Deleuze
(1992: 4) thus writes, [disciplinary enclosures] are molds, distinct castings, but
controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change
from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point
to point. A dividual is thus a product of real-time modulation and continuous, au-
tomatic adjustment based on ongoing manipulation of data in which the dividual
is caught up. In other words, it is no longer a matter of fixed law, rules, or standards
externally molding and disciplining an individual. Rather, the algorithm replaces
stable norms. A society of control molecularizes the individual, just as some geneti-
cists understand DNA to molecuralize organism, or just as amazon.com knows you
and offers you what you did not even realize you wanted based on your ever-chang-
ing purchasing record. Parametric flexibility thus goes hand in hand with global
capitalism, which seeks an optimal logistics of labor, capital, and the market on an
even global level. It is also extremely compatible with todays Western liberalism
and multiculturalism, as a society of control is indifferent to ideology and a dividual
is free in so far as its biometric and other modulated information is in an array of
databases; indeed, difference translates to additional, usable data.
If Deleuzes society of control allows us to understand nondialectics as a new mo-
dality of power, we can learn from Hiroki Azuma (2009) its modality of knowledge
and worldview in the structure of the database. Azuma (2009) posits the database
as a historically distinctive epistemological condition of Japanese postmodernity
in the 1990s, and the otaku, the quintessential database subject, as its consumer.10
Otaku refers to those who indulge in forms of subculture strongly linked to an-
ime, video games, computers, science fiction, special-effects films, anime figurines,
and so on (Azuma 2009: 3). Yet, Azuma recognizes the otaku not so much as
a demographic group but as the prototype of Japans postmodern subject for the
way they consume subcultural products. He argues that the small narratives the
otaku generates around the character in her or his secondary creation in anime,
manga, and computer games no longer aspire to be the allegory of, or the path
toward, grand narratives. The latter have lost their centralizing authority and force,
both because of disruptive postbubble history I mentioned above, and because of
10. See also Thomas Lamarre (2004) and Marc Yamada (2013) for an instructive introduc-
tion to the concept of the database in Japanese postmodern culture.
nor signs of the extent to which Neon Genesis Evangelion influenced their authors.
Rather, he argues, it marks the new databased production and consumption of
the character, in which moe elements extracted from a character (Ayanami Rei),
such as quiet personality, blue hair, white skin, mysterious power, and registered
in the database, from which otaku-consumers-producers read up (yomikomu)
selective elements to create their own characters. Such secondary creations (niji
ssaku), as simulacrum further produce simulacra as their moe elements, are fed
into the database. In this process, at the level of the database, the original charac-
ters (Ayanami Reis) narrative or indexical tie to the original work (Neon Genesis
Evangelion) fails to ensure its identity. Identity would require a (humble) grand
narrative that centers it and provides it with a meaningful (fictional) social net-
work. Rather, the character Ayanami Rei gets molecularized as a bundle of moe
elements and a set of data, just like Deleuzes control society disjoints individuals
into bits of information for big data and algorithmically constructs their fleeting
and momentary identities that are constantly shifting as the database collects more
data and is put to new uses.
The database consumption thus modularized womens language as a moe element,
often as the speech for ojo-sama, as a kyara. Her reported speech co-occurs with
other modular elements such as drilled-like blond curled hair (kinpatsu doriru),11
the highhanded distinctive laughter (ho ho ho), and a flipped hand half covering
her mouth, as well as her gothic-style fashion (Gagn 2008). My point is to identify
a new level, the paradigmatic formation of womens language in the new database
epistemological opening, juxtaposed along with other interchangeable variations,
and recombined as a moe element with other moe elements, where what matters is
the simulated difference among the variations.12 Since these fleeting images are not ca-
pable of being fed back into grand narratives, they have neither history nor politics.
The image simply sticks to the surface of the characterlike hair or eye colorand is
neither to be internalized nor concerned very much with subjectivity. Or rather, sub-
jectivity emerges in new, modular forms. I mean here but the imagined subjectivity
of the kyara, and the ongoing, emergent subjectivity of her or his creator and viewers.
Modularity afforded by the database is not simply a form of popular culture
consumption; there is an historical conjuncture at issue here. As Aihwa Ong (2006)
notes, modularization centrally characterizes political-economic neoliberalism
and globalization. Some Japanese scholars observe that children are becoming
kyara in their everyday peer communication, although this is also the case with
adults. Takayoshi Doi (2009), for example, described how children develop their
own identities through their kyara communication with peers in paraface-to-
face situations via social media, or on keitai (the cellphone), in which they give
each other legible social attributes and perform themthe teaser, the joker, and so
on. Unlike older forms of identity, kyara attributes are instantly changeable, like
clothes. One can voluntarily modify her or his kyara or take on a totally new kyara.
And yet in the actual power dynamics of the peer relationship, some children are
forced to perform a kyara, just so as not to be outcast from their circles. Again, we
see the power of the apparatus at work in the database world of the present.
Recent Japanese sociolinguistic studies also focus on the robust enregisterment
of kyara-like language use in popular culture, which Satoshi Kinsui (2007) calls
yakuwari-go, role-based language, hyperregisters assigned to fictional characters.
Stereotypical utterance-ending forms appear in manga and anime that are assigned
not only to the characters of women and men but also those of elderly people, peas-
ants, scientists, feudal lords, and samurai, et cetera. Well-known anime characters
are also distinguished by their signature utterance-ending forms, to the extent that
hearing a particular ending form immediately reminds one of the specific anime
character. The fact that Japanese scholars have recently noticed this, and are focus-
ing attention on it, is an additional indication that a new form of subject-making
(entangled with the linguistic) is in play in Japan.
Previous Japanese studies of fictional characters and their language use were
based on the premise that speech styles assigned to such characters more or less
reflected the reality of the world and language. New scholarship on yakuwari-go
is premised on the assumption that no real elderly man, for example, would speak
like his counterpart in the manga, or that very few women may actually speak
womens language. In other words, scholars have decidedly moved beyond the re-
alist (indexical) understanding of the relationship between fiction and reality, and
instead recognize fictional language as autonomous, itself playing roles within the
fictional world. This new body of scholarship reminds us that sociolinguistic stud-
ies of characters could potentially be vulnerable to, and complicit with, the politics
of simulation that underwrites database epistemology as a new form of individual,
personal freedom. It cancels out the dialectics of power relations and history in
the production and consumption of fictional language.
Indeed, the flattening of the landscape of power relations and the collapsing of
historytwo of the central consequences of the database epistemologyare par-
ticularly pronounced in scholars discussion of regional dialects and their becom-
ing-kyara. Yukari Tanaka (2011) observes that there has been much less stigma
attached to regional dialects, and that nondialect speakers (for example, in Tokyo)
are freely deploying dialect forms in their email as well as in face-to-face commu-
nication. Just like cosplay, in which fans dress up like their favorite characters from
manga, anime, films, and novels, Tanaka argues, nondialect speakers use dialect
forms to create their own kyara and change it by trying different regional dialects.
Tanaka also notes that students in her classes who came to Tokyo from regional
areas for college feel more positive about their dialects and less stigmatized when
they realize their nondialect-speaker peers are liberally using dialect forms.
We can perhaps call such arguments sociolinguistic neoliberal multicultural-
ism, in which linguistic difference whether in fiction or reality is imaginatively
Conclusion
In this essay, I have discussed that neoliberal Japan has witnessed the arrival of a De-
leuzean society of control, in which database epistemology and consumption have
the potential to undermine the prevailing metapragmatic framing of speech forms
and their indexical relationship with social identities. Let me go back to my initial
observation about the seeming disappearance of critical public commentaries on
womens language. If we subscribe to Deleuzes societies of control thesis and its con-
ception of the dividuated subject and the collapse of dialectial knowledge, what new
modes of the linkage between language and identity on the one hand, and language
and ideology, on the other hand, might emerge? What would be the relationship
between language and the modular self? The decline of the public disciplinary dis-
course of womens language unmoors womens language from historical narratives
(whichever versions one might like), and undermines the registers second order of
indexicality. In consequence, womens language, as a socially recognized set of speech
forms, no longer necessarily indexes ideal femininity (e.g., ojo-sama) as a category.
Here, we could entertain the theoretical possibility of regression, the indexicality of
womens language falling back from the second order of indexicality in the domain
of the social (gender, class, and other potential social meanings), to the first order of
indexicality, the domain of affect, or, to be more precise, that of the virtual.
This essay wants to insist on the continuing interrogation of the relationship be-
tween language and political economy, understood as a moving target. It also insists
on the importance of paying attention to the epistemological condition beyond un-
derstanding meanings produced by linguistic practice, which sets the historically
specific terms in which language can shape and be shaped by political economy.
The global reach of neoliberalism and its accelerated encroachment upon the so-
cial and the cultural has warped and eclipsed the vocabulary of freedom, agency,
and resistance, which has lent people ways of framing their discourse that (only)
seem to rise above systems of domination and inequality. The Deleuzian society of
control urges us to deeply doubt the distinction between freedom and control,
as Foucault meant to do with his concept of subjection. Complexity that confronts
us lies not just on the level of meaning-making, but at the level of epistemological
grounding and its history.
Acknowledgments
I sincerely thank Michael Lambek and Andy Graan for their careful readings
of my essay and their insightful suggestions to make it better. I also thank Ilana
Gershon and Paul Manning for their critical feedback on this essay. This essay is
for Sue Gal.
References
Agha, Asif. 2003. The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication 23 (34):
23173.
. 2007. Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Allison, Anne. 2013. Precarious Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Arai, Andrea. 2016. The strange child: Education and the psychology of patriotism in reces-
sionary Japan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Asada, Akira. 1984. Tsron: sukizo kizzu no bken [On escape: Adventures of the Schizo
Kids]. Tokyo: Chikumashob.
Azuma, Hiroki. 2007. Joho kankyo ronshu [Collected Essays on the Information Environ-
ment]. Tokyo: Kodansha.
. 2009. Otaku: Japans database animals. Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota
Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. For a critique of the political economy of the sign. St. Louis, MO:
Telos Press Publishing.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Brinton, Mary C. 1993. Women and the economic miracle: Gender and work in postwar Ja-
pan. Berkeley: University of California Press
Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the demos: Neoliberalisms stealth revolution. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Chiba, Masaya. 2013. Ugokisugitewa ikenai: jiru duruzu to seisei henka no tetsugaku [il ne
faut pas trop bouger (Do not move too much): Gilles Deleuze and the philosophy of
becoming]. Tokyo: Kawadeshoboshinsha.
Clammer, J. R. 1997. Contemporary urban Japan: A sociology of consumption. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers.
de Man, Paul. 1996. The Concept of irony. In Aesthetic ideology, edited by Andrzej Warm-
inski, 16384. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri. Translated by
Martin Joughin. Futur Anterieur 1. http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze3.
htm.
. 1992. Postscript on the societies of control. October 59: 37.
. 1994. Difference and repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Doi, Takayoshi. 2009. Kyara-ka suru/sareru kodomotachi: Haijogata shakai niokeru aratana
ningenz [Characterizing and characterized children: The vision of the human in the
society of exclusion]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage.
. 1980. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 19721977. New
York: Pantheon.
Gagn, Issac. 2008. Urban princesses: Performance and womens language in Japans goth-
ic/Lolita subculture. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18 (1): 13050.
Gal, Susan. 1989. Language and political economy. Annual Review Of Anthropology
18:34567.
Galbraith, Patrick W. 2009. Moe and the potential of fantasy in post-millennial Japan.
Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies. http://www.japanesestudies.org.
uk/articles/2009/Galbraith.html.
Galloway, Alexander R. 2006. Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hamano, Satoshi. 2008. kitekuch no seitaikei: jh kanky wa ikani sekkei saretekitaka
[The ecology of architecture: How the information environment has been designed].
Tokyo: NTT Shuppan.
Harvey, David. 1990. The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural
change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Hastings, Adi, and Paul Manning. 2004. Introduction: acts of alterity. Language and Com-
munication 24 (4): 291311.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 2012. How we think: Digital media and contemporary technogenesis.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Inoue, Miyako. 2006. Vicarious language: Gender and linguistic modernity in Japan. Berke-
ley: University of California Press.
. Forthcoming. The antics of the virtual: The otherness in the self in the Japanese ex-
pression, nanchatte, In The tones of others: Quotes, mimicry and impersonation in vocal
performance, edited by Estelle Amy de la Breteque and Alexandra Pillen. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Ishida, Hiroshi, and David H. Slater, eds. 2009. Social class in contemporary Japan: struc-
tures, sorting and strategies. New York: Routledge.
Irvine, Judith. 1990. Registering affect: Heteroglossia in the linguistic expression of emo-
tion. In Language and the politics of emotion, edited by Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-
Lughod, 12161. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Japan. 2000. White paper on national livelihood. Tokyo: Keizai Kikakucho.
. 2001. Ksei Rdsh. Rodo keizai hakusho. Tokyo: Nihon Rd Kenky Kik.
. 2010. Kodomo wakamono hakusho [Children and Youth White Paper]. Tokyo:
Chuwa Insatsu.
. 2014. Labor force survey of Japan. Tokyo: Bureau of Statistics, Office of the Prime
Minister.
Johnstone, Barbara. Forthcoming. Characterological figures and expressive style in the
enregisterment of linguistic variety. In A sense of place: Studies in language and region,
proceedings since the late 19th century, and of the stenographic typewriter intro-
duced to the Japanese court for the trial record after WWII. It asks what it means
to be faithful to others by copying their speech, and how the politico-semiotic
rationality of stenographic fidelity can be understood as a technology of liberal
governance.
Miyako Inoue
Department of Anthropology
Stanford University
Stanford, CA
94305
USA
minoue@stanford.edu