役職/
Position

Associate Professor at Institute of Japan Studies

研究分野/
Field

Japanese Linguistics

【日本語のページ】

The Japan Studies program is an opportunity to explore the individuality and universality of Japanese and other languages

Around the time I was applying for university, the government had launched a campaign to significantly boost the numbers of international students coming to Japan targeting to over 100,000 student, and Japan was experiencing a boom in Japanese language education as national universities established new Japanese language departments. In the midst of these developments, I thought it might be interesting for a Japanese person like me to study Japanese at a university for foreign studies, so I enrolled in the Japanese Department (currently the Japanese major) here at TUFS. On starting the course, I was surprised to find that as part of our studies we were also required to learn Thai and Korean respectively two classes a week as "study on contrastive linguistics". All I remember now are just simple phrases and the writing systems, but after that I also had the opportunity to study a range of languages, including German, Russian, Indonesian, and Chinese. Of course I wasn't even close to the level of renowned polyglot linguists such as Toshihiko Izutsu, Shōichi Kimura, and Rokurō Kōno, but I believe that by coming into contact with various other languages it is possible to understand the individuality and universality of the Japanese language. With the range of different language classes provided here at TUFS, and the many opportunities to interact with graduate students specializing in other languages and international students with different linguistic backgrounds, the graduate program in Japan Studies is a rich environment in which to explore Japanese relative to other languages.

My specialization is modern Japanese grammar, with a focus on modality--in other words, the grammatical expression of the speaker.'s attitude of the mind. For instance, in Japanese the verb may take on a number of forms, depending on the judgements a speaker makes or the evidences the speakers uses. Interrogative sentences are also constructed in a variety of ways depending on the language: there are languages which rely entirely on particles, such as Thai or Burmese, and languages which focus on intonation, such as Russian or Indonesian. While writing my doctoral thesis I developed an interest in the Okinawan language on discovering that the grammatical forms of sentence types in Okinawan differ greatly from Japanese (by which I mean Tokyo dialect; in fact the same can be said for the dialects of northeastern Japan and western Japan). A few years ago I was finally able to start studying this language, and have been working on a textbook of Okinawan for beginners, with the support of a government grant and other assistance.

I will be drawing on my experience in research and teaching in my lecture course offering an "Introduction to Okinawan" as a "Comparative Japanese Linguistics" element of the Japan Studies program. It will not be an outline of the Okinawan, but a foreign language class similar to the classes provided for beginners in Japanese language. As Okinawan is of the family language of Japanese and yet has different elements, the course will naturally give students specializing in the study of Japanese the opportunity to consider Japanese with contrasting another language. At the same time, as it will be taught using a method by which students gradually build up their knowledge of sentence patterns, it will also be an opportunity for students who wish to study Japanese language teaching to experience how Japanese language learners study Japanese. I hope that working with Okinawan will be a good opportunity for students to explore Japanese in relation to another language.