Sociolinguist and teacher at the Kyoto Education University high school, Mr. Kazuo Sakuya was invited to give a lecture entitled "Dialects in court." The lecture was held on a weekday for students in particular. More than 30 people attended.
As part of his lessons, Mr. Sakuya brought students on field trips to the court and through the interactions taking place, he realized that the Kansai dialect was used effectively and strategically. He then sat in for hearings, took records, interviewed judges, public prosecutors and lawyers and wrote his PhD dissertation based on the voluminous amounts of material he has recorded. An essay he wrote based on his dissertation won an award of excellence in the "Legal Education Prize Winning Essays" organized by the Ministry of Justice. Mr. Sakuya based his lecture on actual court records. The Kansai dialect is portrayed in movies and dramas as "unsophisticated and scary." In reality, the public prosecutors use it to run down the defendants and witnesses. It is, however, something that speaks to the hearts of people present in the court room, and also has an effect of relieving tension. In particular, in juvenile courts, in order to talk gently to the wrongdoer and above all, from a wish for the youth to rehabilitate, the Kansai dialect is used in the final "admonition." Now that the jury system has started, these "strategic functions" show us how besides the Kansai dialect, dialects as well can have different meanings.
What was memorable was the observation from Mr. Sakuya that even non-Kansai natives utilize these functions. Under the simple bipolar opposition of "Standard Language versus Dialects," Kansai dialect, just a dialect, can be seen to have power and sometimes "force" people living there to use it, similar to "Standard Language." In the lecture, some examples were carefully explained. These examples pointed out the dangers of banding the varieties of Japanese under the heading "dialects."
The court room, which is controlled by the Court Act, the only law in Japan that has "language specification," is also a place for us to think about "What is Japanese?" With the abolition of stenography and a change to voice recognition devices, only "Standard Language" is used in court, pointed out Mr. Sakuya. It is easy to understand the importance of providing a court translator to people who do not understand Japanese. We also learned from the lecture that from the viewpoint of guaranteeing each person's "mother tongue", what is more realistic than "Standard Language," which is nothing more than our imagination, is the life language "Dialect," and that it is dangerous to equate "Japanese" with "Standard Language." Many opinions from the floor touched on the need for people related to language to have an awareness of the problem in terms of the fairness of the trial.
(Tatsuro Maeda)
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