This paper tries to elucidate the trends from dialect geography to sociolinguistics implemented by the late Professor Munemasa Tokugawa through the scrutiny of his works. Munemasa Tokugawa is one of the founders of Japanese dialect geography who compiled The Linguistic Atlas of Japan. He provided solid grounding to the theory of this discipline in the early days of his academic research. His experiences of supervising the linguistic research of overseas students at Osaka University, together with his attention to sociolinguistic variation (other than regional variation) in Japanese, lead him to extend his research interests, and propelled him to conceive of a new discipline which is now called sociolinguistics. His sociolinguistics is characterized by its practical nature and its attention to solving sociolinguistic problems in the real world. In his later years, he was in the process of establishing "welfare linguistics" according to these principles, but this task was suspended by his sudden death in June 1999 and left to his followers.

View full abstract

Through the analysis of a party situation this paper presents a number of issues concerning intercultural interaction in Japan. The data, obtained from a video recording and follow-up interviews, were analysed using the Language Management Model, making it possible to focus on features of interaction management. Although there were several problems at the party, there were also many positively evaluated events. There is evidence to show that the Japanese participants did not always expect non-Japanese participants to conform to their norms and, in some cases, they even positively evaluated deviations from their norms. An examination of norms, and deviations from those norms confirms that, in contact situations, there is norm divergence even among participants from similar cultural backgrounds.

View full abstract

This paper examines the characteristics of the Japanese and Chinese languages in the conceptual meaning of kinship terms. It explains the difference in usage through examples. The Chinese language is seen to contain greater kinship and superiority generation than Japanese and is lexicalized. Therefore, compared with the Japanese language, the Chinese language not only used more loyalty in kinship terms, but also has a higher proportion of use of kinship terms extensively to confirm relationships.

View full abstract