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This study uses electropalatography to examine linguopalatal contact differences between Japanese geminate and singleton consonants of various lingual places and manners of articulation. The analysis of over 8,000 tokens of these consonants produced by five Japanese speakers in three sets of stimuli (varying by the word lexical status, contrastive focus, and position within an utterance) showed significantly stronger constrictions for geminates of all places and manners, except for alveolopalatal fricatives. The geminate-singleton differences were the largest for alveolar and alveolopalatal nasals, while being the smallest for alveolopalatal affricates and velar stops. Durational differences between geminates and singletons were quite robust and tended to positively correlate with linguopalatal contact differences for most geminate and singleton consonants. No clear contact or durational differences were observed across the datasets, suggesting that the realization of the contrast is affected minimally by lexical status and position in the utterance. The findings for Japanese geminates are further discussed in the context of articulatory studies of similar contrasts in other languages.
This paper presents a probabilistic model of loanword accentuation in Japanese, analysing a corpus of 3,017 English-based loanwords. Through corpus analysis and computational modelling, the study reveals that Japanese loanword accentuation involves two distinct types of faithfulness effects, alongside markedness effects. First, there is a significant influence of the stress patterns of English source words and the epenthetic status of loanword syllables. This challenges the common assumption that accents driven by faithfulness are merely sporadic exceptions, highlighting instead a probabilistic interplay between faithfulness and markedness. Second, this study uncovers faithfulness to Japanese speakers’ implicit knowledge of the English stress system. Rather than merely imitating the stress patterns of individual English words, Japanese speakers develop an internalised theory of the English stress system and mimic what they believe is the correct pronunciation according to their internalised theory.
This chapter proposes a novel approach to the development and assessment of English disaster and environmental risk information for people from diverse language and cultural backgrounds who require readable, more accessible translations, regardless of education level, and cultural or linguistic background.¬¬¬ To illustrate the development of machine learning classifiers for the purpose of the predictive assessment of the likelihood that an English text will be translated into an accessible language, we will use Japanese as an illustrative case study, given the language and cultural contrast between English and Japanese.
August 15 remains an important day in Korean and Japanese cultures for the two peoples, the former commemorating their liberation from colonial rule and the latter lamenting the end of the tragedy that had befallen their nation. On this day in 1945, the emperor declared his country's intention to accept the Allied forces' surrender terms. This date, however, is a myth of sorts as the Koreans were soon after forced into division and further subjugation at the hands of the United States and the Soviet Union, who divided postwar occupation responsibilities. For the Japanese, the emperor's unprecedented broadcast may have ended the bombing of Japanese cities, but it did not bring about a general return of Japanese soldiers from Pacific War battlefields. These days, however, the day is marked for concluding two tragic periods of their histories, but with very different sentiments. In this article the author traces his observations on how the Japanese and Koreans observe August 15 in contemporary times.
The proposed 2nd Anglo-Japanese civilian exchange, originally planned for October 1942, never eventuated partly due to differences in the interpretations of what constitutes a merchant seaman and views on whether the Hague Convention should apply. The failure of the exchange meant that over 3,000 Japanese and British civilian internees as well as another 2,000 or so Japanese and American civilian internees remained in internment camps until at least August 1945. At the heart of the negotiations were 331 Japanese pilots and pearl divers who had been employed in the pearling industry until the outbreak of war. The impasse would impact attempts at civilian exchange involving multiple powers throughout the Asia-Pacific War.
To evaluate the association between dietary fibre intake and obesity in Japanese outpatients with type 2 diabetes, as well as the demographic and dietary factors influencing this association.
Design:
Cross-sectional study with nationwide registry data on Japanese type 2 diabetes outpatients (2014–2019). Diet was self-reported via a FFQ. Obesity was defined as BMI ≥ 25 kg/m2.
Setting:
Clinics throughout Japan.
Participants:
1565 Japanese outpatients with type 2 diabetes (63·1 % men; age range 30–89 years).
Results:
Multivariate analysis revealed that a higher dietary fibre intake was associated with a lower risk of obesity in all participants (95 % CI = 0·439, 0·795, P trend = 0·002). Stratified analysis showed a significant inverse association between fibre intake and obesity in men and the older age groups (59–89 years), but not in women or the younger age group (30–58 years). In men, higher fibre intake was associated with healthier lifestyle behaviours, including increased physical activity (P < 0·001) and non-smoking (P < 0·001), with stronger associations compared with women. Vegetables, fruits and soyabeans/soya products were strongly correlated with fibre, while grains had a weak correlation. Folate was the micronutrient most strongly correlated with fibre.
Conclusion:
Higher fibre intake was associated with lower obesity risk, particularly in men and older age groups. These findings emphasise the need for targeted public health initiatives promoting the intake of diverse fibre-rich foods to effectively manage obesity. Further research is needed to understand sex- and age-specific factors in the fibre–obesity relationship in diverse populations.
Japanese patients often describe their pain with ideophones (sound-symbolic, imitative words), such as biribiri ‘having a continuous electric shock’. However, some manuals for healthcare workers recommend avoiding using these words in their interactions with patients, assuming that they are too subjective. We examined how reliable pain ideophones are in comparison with pain metaphors, such as denki-ga hashiru-yoona itami ‘pain like an electric current running through one’s body’. In Experiment 1, Japanese speakers rated visually presented pain ideophones and metaphors on 15 semantic-differential scales (e.g., strong–weak, momentary–continuous). It was found that the ratings of ideophones and metaphors equally varied between participants. In Experiment 2, Japanese speakers did the same rating task for a selected set of pain ideophones and metaphors presented auditorily in sentence frames. The results show that ideophones were rated more consistently than metaphors across participants, and this was true for various prosodic/morphological variants of ideophones (e.g., biriiit-to ‘having a sudden, great electric shock’, biribirit-to ‘having a momentary repetitive electric shock’). These findings indicate that ideophones can be more reliable than metaphors in health communication, especially when placed in proper context.
The current study examined the comprehension and production of classifiers, case marking, and morphological passive structures among 414 child Japanese heritage speakers (mean age = 10.01 years; range = 4.02 – 18.18). Focusing on individual differences, we extracted latent experiential factors via the Q-BEx questionnaire (De Cat, Kašćelan, Prévost, Serratrice, Tuller, Unsworth, & The Q.-Be Consortium, 2022), which were then used to predict knowledge and use of these grammatical structures. The findings reveal that: (i) experiential factors such as heritage language (HL) engagement at home and within the community modulate grammatical performance differentially from childhood through adolescence, and (ii) HL proficiency, immersion experiences, and literacy systematically predict HL grammatical outcomes. These results indicate that particular language background factors hold differential significance at distinct developmental stages and that higher proficiency, richer immersion experiences, and literacy engagement in the HL are crucial for the development of core grammatical structures.
Collectivism symbolizes Japanese culture for many people in the world including Japanese themselves. The “collectivistic Japanese” are alleged to have the following characteristics: They feel at ease only in a group; they merge into their group and thus lack individuality and autonomy; they are indistinguishable from one another; they conform to their group and cooperate with the group members even at the sacrifice of their own individual interests; their obedience to their group leads to the hierarchical authoritarian society. However, these characterizations are mostly based on casual observations and personal experiences instead of systematic acadmic investigation. In psychology, nevertheless, two influential studies generalized the contrast between Western culture and Japanese culture in collectivism and individualism to the contrast between Western culture and all the other cultures.
Although it is widely believed that Japanese people are typical collectivists compared to individualistic Westerners, this view is not supported by empirical research. Employing 'Japanese collectivism' as a case example, this book explores how the dichotomous view of cultures was established and investigates how cultural stereotypes exacerbate emotional conflicts between human groups. Drawing on empirical findings, it theoretically analyses the properties of cultural stereotype to reveal the hazards associated with stereotyping nations or ethnicities. Students and researchers from numerous disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science, and economics, will gain fresh insights from this reconceptualization of culture.
Many have expressed concerns regarding the replicability of scientific research. However, little of this ongoing discussion has focused on research examining the production of vowels and consonants or the many important choices that researchers must make in pre-analysis phases of speech production research. The literature reviewed here indicates that not all speech production studies have been replicated, and that how speech is elicited may affect the results that are obtained. Many different elicitation techniques are in current use, but none represents a gold standard. The new Characteristic Speech Production (CSP) technique presented here aims to augment replicability by obviating the need for participants to accommodate their speech to that of others or adopt a particular speaking style as they give meaningful answers to meaningful questions. Given the novelty of the CSP technique, the chapter provides a protocol that is designed to test its efficacy. If the CSP technique can be shown to yield speech samples that are more representative of individuals’ speech than a standard list-reading technique, a change in how speech is elicited for production research will be warranted.
No study has validated questionnaires for assessing easily calculable diet quality scores in Japan. The Brief-type self-administered Diet History Questionnaire (BDHQ) is widely used to assess dietary intake in Japan, while the Meal-based Diet History Questionnaire (MDHQ) assesses dietary intake for each meal (breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks) and overall dietary intake. This study examined the relative validity of the BDHQ and MDHQ for assessing three diet quality scores in Japanese adults. A total of 111 women and 111 men aged 30–76 years completed the web MDHQ and BDHQ, followed by 4-non-consective-day weighed dietary records. The diet quality scores examined included the Diet Quality Score for Japanese (DQSJ), Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) score and Alternate Mediterranean Diet (AMED) score. The means of the three scores for overall diet from the BDHQ were not significantly different from those from the dietary records in both sexes, whereas those from the MDHQ were higher than those from the dietary records, except for the DASH and AMED in women. Pearson’s correlation coefficients between both questionnaires and dietary records were 0·57–0·63 for DQSJ, 0·49–0·57 for DASH and 0·31–0·49 for AMED across both sexes and both questionnaires. For each meal, Pearson’s correlation coefficients between the MDHQ and dietary records ranged from 0·01 (DASH for snacks in women) to 0·55 (DQSJ for breakfast in men), with a median of 0·35. This study showed that the ability of the BDHQ and MDHQ to rank individuals was good for DQSJ and DASH and acceptable for AMED.
Greenberg’s Universal 42 states that all languages have pronominal categories involving at least three persons and two numbers. However, this characterization fails to capture the properties of pronouns in Japanese, which are not bundles of person, number and gender features (so-called phi-features); rather, they contain sociolinguistic information about the interlocutors. We propose that these properties are structurally determined. Following Ritter and Wiltschko, we assume that the highest layer of structure in nominals is interactional structure. As for phi-features, we adopt the standard assumption that they are represented internal to the determiner phrase (DP). We propose that the distinctive properties of Japanese pronouns follow from the hypothesis that they spell out elements of the interactional structure and not the DP. We show that the lack of phi-features in Japanese pronouns correlates with other properties of this language’s grammar. Support for this analysis comes from languages where pronouns with phi-features can optionally be used to encode formality (e.g. German and French). We propose that in these languages, formal pronouns originate within the DP but are interpreted in the interactional structure. Finally, we suggest that this analysis may extend to imposters and vocatives in that they may also be interpreted in the interactional structure.
Red meat and processed meat intake has been linked to increased risk of type 2 diabetes; however, evidence from Asia is limited and inconsistent. We prospectively examined the association of intake of total meat and its subtype with type 2 diabetes in a Japanese working population. Participants were 2709 workers aged 18–78 years who reported no history of diabetes when they responded to a health survey for the first time between 2012 and 2019. Dietary intake was assessed using a validated self-administered diet history questionnaire. The incidence of type 2 diabetes was assessed via annual health checkups from baseline through March 2023. Type 2 diabetes was defined as fasting blood glucose ≥ 126 mg/dl, casual blood glucose ≥ 200 mg/dl, HbA1c ≥ 6·5 %, self-report of diabetes or current use of anti-diabetic drugs. Hazard ratios according to tertile of meat intake were estimated using Cox proportional hazards regression. During 16 119 person-years of follow-up, 135 (5·0 %) workers developed type 2 diabetes. Intakes of total meat, red meat, processed meat and poultry were not associated with risk of type 2 diabetes. After adjustment for covariates, hazard ratios for the highest v. lowest tertile of meat intake were 1·01 (95 % CI 0·63, 1·62) for total meat, 1·02 (95 % CI 0·66, 1·58) for red meat, 0·99 (95 % CI 0·65, 1·49) for processed meat and 1·13 (95 % CI 0·71, 1·80) for poultry. Our findings suggest that meat intake is not associated with the risk of type 2 diabetes among Japanese workers.
Although small fish are an important source of micronutrients, the relationship between their intake and mortality remains unclear. This study aimed to clarify the association between intake of small fish and all-cause and cause-specific mortality.
Design:
We used the data from a cohort study in Japan. The frequency of the intake of small fish was assessed using a validated FFQ. The hazard ratio (HR) and 95 % confidence interval (CI) for all-cause and cause-specific mortality according to the frequency of the intake of small fish by sex were estimated using a Cox proportional hazard model with adjustments for covariates.
Setting:
The Japan Multi-Institutional Collaborative Cohort Study.
Participants:
A total of 80 802 participants (34 555 males and 46 247 females), aged 35–69 years.
Results:
During a mean follow-up of 9·0 years, we identified 2482 deaths including 1495 cancer-related deaths. The intake of small fish was statistically significantly and inversely associated with the risk of all-cause and cancer mortality in females. The multivariable-adjusted HR (95 % CI) in females for all-cause mortality according to the intake were 0·68 (0·55, 0·85) for intakes 1–3 times/month, 0·72 (0·57, 0·90) for 1–2 times/week and 0·69 (0·54, 0·88) for ≥ 3 times/week, compared with the rare intake. The corresponding HR (95 % CI) in females for cancer mortality were 0·72 (0·54, 0·96), 0·71 (0·53, 0·96) and 0·64 (0·46, 0·89), respectively. No statistically significant association was observed in males.
Conclusions:
Intake of small fish may reduce the risk of all-cause and cancer mortality in Japanese females.
It has been proposed that there are cognitive biases in language learning that favour certain patterns over others. This study examines the effects of such bias factors on the learning of the phonology of proper nouns. I take up the phenomenon of compound voicing in Japanese surnames. The results of two judgment experiments show that, while Japanese speakers replicate various kinds of statistical regularities in existing names, they tend to extend only phonologically motivated patterns to novel names. This suggests that phonological naturalness plays a role even in the learning of a highly faithful category of words, namely proper nouns, and provides evidence for the relevance of learning biases in synchronic grammar.
In mainland China, Reform and Opening up in the last few decades has opened a floodgate of foreign infusion. Foreign businesses such as KFC, Starbucks, Walmart, McDonalds, and Carrefour are seen everywhere. There have also been many loanwords. Some of the loanwords have become so much a part of the Chinese lexicon that their foreign origin may not even be clear to all. Apart from the social and cultural implications, the influx of things foreign presents quite a challenge to Chinese with its non-phonetic script. Various accommodation strategies have been used to represent foreign words with Chinese characters, including meaning translation, phonetic transliteration, or a combination of both, resulting in varying degrees of semantic and phonetic approximation. Incidentally, the fact that the Rebus (phonetic loan) Principle is extensively used for phonetic transliterations, whereby Chinese characters are used only for their sounds without regard to their meanings, gives the lie to the persistent ideographic myth concerning Chinese characters.
This study examined the acquisition of numeral classifiers in 120 monolingual Japanese children. Previous research has argued that the complex semantic system underlying classifiers is late acquired. Thus, we set out to determine the age at which Japanese children are able to extend the semantic properties of classifiers to novel items/situations. Participants completed a comprehension task with a mouse-tracking extension and a production task with nonce and familiar items. While the comprehension results showed ceiling effects on familiar and nonce items, age significantly modulated a difference in accuracy between familiar and nonce items in the production task. The findings suggest that the acquisition of the underlying semantic system is acquired much earlier than previously argued. Previously attested issues with Japanese classifier production in young(er) children are more likely to reflect accessing difficulties than indexing the underlying grammatical competence of the classifier system.
Using Conceptual Metaphor Theory, I propose a study of aesthetic emotional expressions in Japanese. With this aim, I have created a medium-sized corpus (c100,000 running words) of travellers’ reviews in Japanese published on TripAdvisor between 2012 and 2022. The corpus consists of 1,100 reviews, grouped into three subsections, corresponding to three of the most visited landmarks in Japan (namely, Mount Fuji, Fushimi Inari-Taisha Shrine, and the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome). The reviews chosen for this research include at least one reference, either literal or figurative, to the users’ aesthetic evaluation of their visit. My list of aesthetic emotions consists of four large categories: emotions of pleasure (e.g., attraction, fluency), emotions of contemplation (e.g., interest, intrigue), emotions of amazement (e.g., awe, wonder), and emotions of respect (e.g., admiration, adoration). For each aesthetic emotion, I have identified a series of source domains, which I analyse in detail in my discussion. As my data shows, many of our aesthetic expressions are rooted in the psychological and behavioural changes triggered by these emotions and, therefore, should be considered embodied. More importantly, through the analysis of the conceptual mappings involved in these linguistic expressions, it can be affirmed that aesthetic reactions are sensitive to cultural influences and, thus, they are not necessarily universal.
This is a chapter in which Chinese politeness is compared with politeness in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. With their respective morphological systems of honorification, Japanese and Korean languages are structurally different from Chinese, an isolating language that has hardly any inflectional morphology. These linguistic differences, however, do not prevent the three linguacultures to demonstrate a remarkable degree of similarity in terms of politeness at a deeper level of analysis. The three linguacultures, for instance, seem to be similarly hierarchical in social structure, although they differ in the relative weight a particular factor on a hierarchy has in a given context. The architectural features of language, Chen argues, are not as determinant in politeness as scholars have believed. A culture value such as self-denigration, which often presents itself in terms of politeness, is expressed regardless of how the language is structured linguistically. Vietnamese, on the other hand, is typologically close to Chinese, its culture shares much with Chinese culture, but it was under the French rule for several decades (1985-1954). And yet, B&L-E is shown to be capable of capturing the similarities and differences between it and Chinese in terms of politeness.