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Kanji and non-homophonous furigana: Foreign language readings and character (stereo)types in manga
Discourse, Context & Media 32 (2019) 100323
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Kanji and non-homophonous furigana: Foreign language readings and character (stereo)types in manga Ryan C. Redmond University of California Davis, 1 Shields Ave, Davis, CA 95616, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 8 November 2018 Received in revised form 27 July 2019 Accepted 5 August 2019
Keywords: Manga Japanese Writing systems Stereotype injection
a b s t r a c t The present study seeks to investigate how one manga series Bleach, by Tite Kubo, uses a languagespecific process to employ loanwords as tools to invoke a stereotype injection, as well as index certain character traits without overt characterization through dialogue. I argue in this paper that the Japanese writing system offers a key mechanism for this indexing. The system traditionally encompasses three different character sets: kanji (characters originally borrowed from/based off of the Chinese writing system), hiragana (a moraic script used for native and functional words), and katakana (a moraic script used for foreign words, sound effects, etc.). These sets each have their own normatively specialized usages, and because of this, they have come to index certain social stereotypes. One aspect of Japanese writing which may also be associated with stereotypes that has been less studied is furigana. Traditionally written in hiragana or katakana, furigana are annotations serving a metalingual function, and are primarily used to give the pronunciations of unknown or obscure kanji that the reader might not recognize. A less-frequently employed secondary purpose is giving a non-standard reading to a kanji character or series of characters. What has not received direct attention yet is how furigana itself can be used to index certain social or cultural stereotypes. While past research has looked at furigana in manga, few of these have looked at systematic uses of non-Japanese furigana readings. Through analysis of the usage of Spanish-derived and German-derived furigana readings in Bleach, it was determined that the origin language of the furigana word often correlates with a certain character type, and functions as a way to inject stereotypes about characters into even small portions of their dialogue. Further, it was determined that many of the social stereotypes concerning these languages were present in word choice and kanji usage, yielding a cultural idea of characterological type without the need for overt characterization, which is helpful in dealing with Bleach’s large cast of named characters. Ó 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Writing has been one of the most significant contributions to human history, allowing us to communicate with others across both vast time and space. Like spoken language, it has never been a tool for simply conveying words, but is a complex system whereby the meaning and context of those words can be shaped by the choices of the author. This paper takes the stance that writing systems can be used for more than transcribing or visually representing the spoken word. In the case of the Japanese writing system (as will be discussed subsequently), authors can transcribe words derived from Indo-European languages using a Japanese script, while still conveying a certain meaning, allowing for a flexibility that is not seen with other writing systems. At the crux of the present research is how transcriptions from other languages E-mail address: [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2019.100323 2211-6958/Ó 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
may allow for a different meaning to be conveyed than if a native Japanese word were chosen. Through analysis of terms used in Bleach by Tite Kubo, a manga that circulates globally, I argue that this can be done intentionally to allow for a reader to make connections to metatextual information. Futher, this allows the author to cast characters in a certain light based on the word and the language from which the word was derived, without explicit dialogue/narration about the characters at-hand. This ties the present research into current discussions on globalization of media, as well as representations of other cultures/languages in the Japanese context. 2. Japanese writing system The Japanese writing system contains (primarily) three separate scripts: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana are moraic, and exist in a system whereby each character represents one mora
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(minimally, a vowel or consonant sound, maximally one consonant and one vowel sound together). This script is used primarily for writing native (or nativized) Japanese words, as well as grammatical and functional morphemes. Katakana, similarly to hiragana, is also a script whereby each character represents one mora. Unlike hiragana, however, this system is often a kind of catch-all for writing foreign words, onomatopoeia, exclamations, scientific words, etc. (Igarashi, 2007). Finally, kanji is a separate script where each character can contain both a phonetic as well as a semantic component. Originating as borrowings from the Chinese writing system some 1700 years ago (as Japan had no indigenous writing system), words and characters continued to be borrowed for hundreds of years across multiple dynasties and dialects (Rogers, 2005). This reason alone has led to it being regarded as ‘‘the most complex modern writing system, and the hardest to force into any taxonomic mold” (Sproat, 2000:128). Certain characters were borrowed from Chinese for both their semantic and phonetic values, while others were borrowed for either one or the other. Kanji characters (generally) maintain their original Chinese phonetic reading that are called on-readings. Readings ascribed for Japanese native word pronunciation are called kun-readings. The same kanji may potentially have multiple readings. Contemporary Japanese makes use of thousands of kanji, often as the uninflected stem of verbs/ adjectives, or entire nouns. Unlike hiragana and katakana, the phonological values of kanji are not always apparent, and no more than 25% of the general-usage kanji contain useful clues to the pronunciation of their Chinese-originating readings (Paradis et al., 1985), or as stated earlier, may not have Chinese-originating readings at all. While these three scripts are different in nature and use, it is not uncommon for a Japanese sentence to contain all three of these scripts, such as in the example below (KN: kanji, HR: hiragana, KT: katakana). 太郎はアニメを見る KN KN HR KT KT KT HR KN HR [Taro¯ wa anime o miru] Taro-TOP anime-DOJ watch Taro watches anime. TOP: topic marker, DOJ: direct object
In the above example, the first noun [Taro] is written in kanji, as it is a content word. The next [wa], is a topic-marker, acting as a postposition of sorts, and functions to topicalize the preceding noun. As mentioned previously, as this is a grammatical function word, it is conventionally written in hiragana. The next word [anime] is also a noun, however this word is borrowed from the English word ‘animation’, and as such is treated as a foreign word, and is conventionally transcribed in katakana. Following this is the direct object marker [o], which as with the previous grammatical marker, follows the noun, and marks it as the object of the sentence, and is written in hiragana. The final word in this sentence [miru] is actually written using two different systems. The first syllable of the word [miru], [mi], is the stem of the verb, and confers the semantic meaning of ‘to watch’, and as such it is written in kanji. However, the last syllable of the word, [ru], is the part of the verb that can be conjugated further given the proper context, and as such it is transcribed as a grammatical form in hiragana. 2.1. Sociolinguistics of script choice Because there exist multiple scripts in Japanese, and they all have the same phonetic versatility, there is some leeway for cre-
ativity/individual preference in the way one employs them. There are some general writing conventions which if broken, would leave the text much more difficult to parse, such as using hiragana for inflectional morphology and case particles. Furthermore, any creativity that exists is also limited by the genre and context in which the text is written. Given the proper context, some words could be written in any script and still be perfectly parsable, but each would pass on a certain flavor to the text. Robertson (2015:206) posits that a limited analogy for these scripts would be different fonts in English typography, ‘‘which can evoke certain feelings or images.” However, the analogy gets more complicated by the fact that fonts also exist in Japanese, and the impressions/emotions that Japanese speakers feel when reading these scripts come about regardless of the font in which the text is written. Researchers have compiled lists of adjectives that are sociolinguistically tied to these scripts (Smith and Schmidt, 1996; Robertson, 2015). Hiragana is regarded as soft, emotional, or feminine; katakana is modern or foreign; kanji is substantial, masculine, and formal. However, there is nothing inherent about these scripts that index these qualities, and most research on these links are based on native-speaker intuition. That being said, these are general ideas that have been qualitatively asserted by past researchers, and they are ones with which the average native speaker would likely agree. These notions surrounding certain scripts evoking certain feelings is pivotal to the present study, whereby I argue that katakana is strategically employed in the data to make one’s dialogue sound foreign, thus positioning the characters as being non-protagonists. 2.2. Furigana and kanji While Japanese scripts are often used for normal dialogic or narrative writing, there are also examples of their usage for auxiliary purposes, such as for rubi or furigana text. The term rubi comes from British typesetting conventions, and originally referred to a typeset with a height of 5.5 points (which was the common size for printers to use for interlinear annotations in printed documents). The term furigana is Japanese-specific, and refers to the practice of assigning katakana or hiragana to a kanji character. Here rubi and furigana refer to the same concept, and in this paper furigana will be employed as it is the more specific and common term used to refer to Japanese texts. The purpose of furigana text is often to gloss an unknown or unreadable kanji. Its usage is commonly higher in texts directed at younger children, who have not finished learning the general-usage kanji (Unser-Schutz, 2011). This is to be expected, as while the average Japanese child will learn approximately 1000 kanji by the time they finish elementary school, there are around 1000 more that are considered general-usage kanji. However, furigana usage is not limited to children’s texts, nor does their inclusion immediately classify a text as being aimed at children, as even some ‘‘lowbrow” newspapers have been known to contain these glosses for most kanji (Miller, 1994). In the case of Bleach, all kanji (even those that would be known by the time a child is able to understand the narrative) are glossed with furigana. Traditionally, readings for kanji written in furigana are given above (in the case of horizontal text) or beside (in the case of vertical text) the character, and consist of canonically-homophonous hiragana. However, in the case of popular written media, there are other ‘unconventional’ uses of furigana text, as shown in Fig. 1. In Fig. 1, the phrase given in kanji consists of two nouns, connected by the genitive particle no. If there were no furigana to guide one’s reading, this phrase could be read in a number of different ways, such as o¯kyo no senko¯. However, due to the presence of the semantic meaning of the characters (i.e. 王 meaning ‘king’, 虚meaning ‘hollow’, and 閃光 meaning a ‘flash of light’), any reading would still retain the meaning of ‘King Hollow’s Flash’. Due to the given phonetic guide provided in furigana above the kanji
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Fig. 1. Guran rei zero, an attack used in Bleach.
though, we know to read this as guran rei zero, which will transliterate into Spanish as gran rey cero. We can then use the Spanish transliteration to create a translation into English, such as ‘grand king zero’. Such ‘unconventional’ cases where the kanji and the furigana reading are non-homophonous are relatively common in popular written texts, and will be explored further in this analysis. Furthermore, as shown in Fig. 1, this analysis will deal with languages besides Japanese and English, and translations from German will be marked parenthetically with (GER), and similarly with (SPN) for Spanish. In texts aimed at younger audiences (who would not have completed their kanji education) it is common for so-called ateji to be employed, which allows for ‘‘phonological representation of Japanese words using kanji” (Sato, 2018:314). In the classic case, ateji allows for ‘‘phonological representation of Japanese words using kanji” (Sato, 2018:314). These words typically have kanji that are ‘‘pronounced in accordance with a standard pronunciation but whose usual meanings are irrelevant to the meaning of the word” (Shibamoto Smith, 1996). The term ateji is also used to refer to words where the kanji were chosen only for their meaning and assigned non-standard readings; such cases are the focus of this paper. This would be the case for the example given previously in Fig. 1. With similar data, Lewis (2010) analyzed this type of ateji usage in manga (Japanese comics) by the artist group CLAMP. She describes five major categories of usage: Translative (T) Denotive (D) Contrastive (C) Abbreviation/Contrastive (A/C) Translative/Contrastive (T/C) Translative ateji generally consist of a foreign word transliterated into katakana, and provided as a reading for a kanji phrase. The example given above in Fig. 1 is also an example of this. Denotive ateji refers to those in which a pronoun or other referent (still in Japanese) is given as a reading for some other word or phrase. This allows authors to include nonspecific words like ‘this’ or ‘that’ in their dialogue, and then gloss their referents directly. For example, the word ‘this’ [kore] might appear in a dialogue, but to make sure the reader knows exactly to which item the character is referring, the gloss ‘book’ [hon] can be included. Through this process, smoother dialogue can be created ‘‘without the author worrying whether or not the reader follows all the references being made” (33). Contrastive ateji combine two different Japanese words that are not directly referential, as they would be for denotive ateji, allowing the ‘‘writer to signify a meaning between two [of] the words by playing off the differences and similarities between them and either broadening or narrowing the meanings of the words in question” (33). One such example of this could be the word ‘‘drink” [nomimono] being glossed as ‘‘beer” [bıru], which would gives a certain sense of playfulness on the part of the author, potentially displaying both what the character said, and what they actually are trying to say. Abbreviation/Contrastive ateji are those where a whole reading is given as a reading for some abbreviation, often written in the
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Latin alphabet (e.g. ‘goalkeeper’ for the abbreviation ‘GK’). Finally, Translative/Contrastive are subsets of Contrastive ateji, whereby a kanji character is ‘‘paired with an English (or other foreign language) reading that is obviously meant to contrast with the Japanese word written in kanji rather than simply act as a translation” (34). The most important factor for this category is that the translated word/reading is not likely to be a part of the everyday vocabulary for the media’s intended readership. Therefore, this method allows for a sense of ‘‘foreignness, unfamiliarity, and alienation” in the text, as with Translative ateji, as well as building a tension between the two words, as with Contrastive ateji. These various categories are summarized in Table 1. As mentioned in previous sections, ateji is very common in manga. The next section will briefly explain why the written practices in manga (and one manga in particular) deserve analysis.
3. What is manga? Manga, or Japanese comics, are a multi-billion-dollar international industry in Japan. While traditionally originating in physical media, the digital marketplace has also seen a recent uptake in sales (AJPEA, 2017). In comparison to American-made comics, which are primarily aimed at younger male audiences, manga are spread across countless genres, ranging from slice of life to fantasy, and from adventure to erotica. However, the best-selling manga remain those aimed at a younger male audience (sho¯nen) that are enjoyed by people of all genders and ages, because of its ease of reading and overarching narrative storylines (NTT, 2012). While some manga first arrive on bookshelves in bound volumes (tanko¯ bon), many of the most popular ones are run periodically in specific manga magazines (zasshi) before being collected in volumes. These magazines continue to rank among the highest selling publications in Japan, with sho¯nen manga magazines far out-selling those from other genres, including sho¯jo manga, which are aimed at younger girls (JMPA, 2018). One such sho¯nen manga is Bleach (ブリーチ). This series was written and illustrated by Tite Kubo, and first began serialization in kan Sho¯nen Jampu [Weekly 2001 in the sho¯nen manga magazine Shu Sho¯nen Jump]. The series ended 15 years later in 2016 after 686 serialized chapters. The popularity of the series became great enough in Japan for an anime (animated television series) adaptation to be created, which aired from October 2004 until March 2012, and spawned four feature-length animated films. A liveaction film was also produced in Japan, and released internationally in 2018. The manga garnered true international success, and has been translated and officially released in over 10 languages, with dozens more unofficial releases performed by fans. Bleach depicts the adventures of a human-turned-Shinigami named Ichigo Kurosaki, as he attempts to defend the world from evil spirits. While he has powers and abilities that set him apart from other humans in the series, he still functions as the main lens through which the readers view the series. As my analysis focuses on characterizations and their relationships to metatextual information possessed by the reader, I will briefly introduce the ‘races’ of the series (the term ‘race’ in this context referring to a classification of character type). Shinigami (death gods) are supernatural figures that are found in Japanese folklore. As the name implies, these beings are related to death, and because their task is to help souls cross to the other side, they have been often considered the Japanese counterpart of the Grim Reaper. While gods/spirits of death have appeared in Japanese folklore and religious traditions for centuries, the term and archaetype of shinigami is relatively new, gaining notoriety during the Meiji period (1862–1912), and thought by some to be influenced by European tradition, including Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Briggs, 2010; Curran, 2015). Nonetheless, shinigami
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Table 1 Summary of categories by Lewis (2010). Name
Translative
Denotive
Contrastive
Abbreviation/ Contrastive
Translative/Contrastive
Phonetic Component Semantic Component Example
Synonymous foreign word in katakana Synonymous Japanese word in kanji ヒーロー 英雄 hıro¯ eiyu hero hero
Japanese word with a referent Different Japanese word with a referent アレ パソコン are pasokon that computer
Non-synonymous Japanese word Non-synonymous Japanese word ビール 飲み物 bıru nomimono beer drink
Word b in hiragana or katakana Abbreviation for word b ゴールキーパー GK go¯rukıpa¯ GK goalkeeper GK (goalkeeper)
Non-synonymous foreign word Non-synonymous Japanese word in kanji スペル 暗号 superu ango¯ spell code
Ex. Phonetic Readings Ex. Translations
have become present in many pop depictions of traditional Japan, and are considered ‘‘Japanese” in creation by society-at-large. In Bleach, the Shinigami are tasked with bringing balance to the world by essentially exorcising corrupted souls and helping them cross over to the other world. While they often make visits to the human realm, the Shinigami primarily live in a feudalistic Japanesque society known as Seireitei (‘Court of Pure Souls’), populated with traditionally Japanese-in-appearance buildings that include sho¯ji ‘sliding paper doors’ leading into large main rooms, and with no sign of electricity in sight. The Shinigami themselves wear attire that seems to match with that of the Edo Period (1600–1868), with white shitagi ‘undergarment’ and black kosode ‘overgarment’ closed with an obi ‘belt’, hakama ‘pants’, alongside white tabi ‘socks’ and waraji ‘woven sandals’. To continue this stereotypical feudal Japanese warrior image, the Shinigami also carry swords known as 斬魄 刀 [zanpakuto¯] (JPN: beheading soul sword), which extend their supernatural powers. These powers have almost infinite variability, but they primarily include increased physical strength, the ability to control certain elements, or in extreme cases, telepathic or empathic abilities. While the Shinigami are the primary protagonists in this series, aside from normal humans who do not have any supernatural powers, there are also two other ‘races’ of beings who are of concern (again, the term ‘race’ refers to a classification of character type who are considered different species of beings, despite all appearing humanoid). The first of these are the Arrancar (SPN: to tear off). Arrancar are born from Hollows, or human souls that did not cross over after death, and therefore must be dealt with by Shinigami in order to bring balance back to the world. Due to their status, they cause trouble in both the spiritual and mortal world, and primarily distinguished by wearing partial masks on their faces. Hollows that are powerful enough, after having ‘torn off’ their masks, become Arrancar, gaining new powers and abilities, which often have symbolic links to animals or emotions in the way that they are realized. The Arrancar reside in a monarchical desert society called 虚圏 [wekomundo] (SPN: Hueco Mundo, Hollow World). The last character type, the Quincy, are human mediums who have the ability to detect spirits. Unlike the Shinigami, however, they feel that balance will be restored only by destroying Hollow, instead of playing a balancing act, and allowing them to cross over like the Shinigami do. For the first half of the series it was believed that this race was functionally extinct, and that the final two Quincy, living in the human world, were not going to continue the tradition. However, through the course of the series, it became apparent that there were other Quincy, living in a hidden empire called Wandenreich (GER: Walled Empire). The Quincy are primarily distinguished by their sterile white clothing, and their use of bows and arrows as their primary weapons. While each ‘race’ is generally unified by a single motivating factor (e.g. bringing balance to the world, fighting to exist, etc.), there are dozens of named characters
that belong to each category, and this can cause trouble for casual readers who are attempting to piece together the story. One common trend in sho¯nen manga, due in part because their narratives can span years or decades, is to have a large cast of named characters. Unser-Schutz (2015) found that when compared to sho¯jo manga, sho¯nen manga had, on average, far more characters in speaking roles (121 vs. 73). In Bleach, for instance, over 70 named Shinigami and over 40 named Arrancar appear. As very few of these characters are protagonists, and some might only appear in a few chapters, this veritable phonebook of characters and their abilities has the potential to become a very heavy burden on the part of the reader. For this reason, I argue that the author is making certain choices (in this case, linguistic) in order to give characterizations to different types of characters, which may help the reader keep track of the cast. I further argue that, especially in the context of Bleach, these differing characterizations can easily be read as Japanese-stylized characters vs. non-Japanese-stylized characters. As opposed to associating these traits with each character individually through dialogue, I propose that the Japanese writing system, with its multiple scripts with differing normative uses, is being used as a tool by the author to make these characterizations in a metatextual way.
4. Data & corpus-building The data for this present study came from attack names used in Bleach. Attack names are a common trope in sho¯nen manga, where fighting is omnipresent. As opposed to simply exchanging punches and kicks for pages on end, characters often undergo some arc where they attain a boon to help fight whatever evil that appears. This can be ‘‘magical power. . ., a special weapon. . ., or unique knowledge or insight into one’s own powers” (DrummondMathews 2010:71). In the case of Bleach, attacks encompass a wide range of supernatural happenings, such as laser beams emanating from appendages, swords turning into animals, etc. These attacks are usually invoked with a name, and a common attack can become a sort of catch phrase for the character who uses it. Attack names are generally easy to find in manga, as they often occur with special fonts, are separated out into text bubbles of their own, and then are immediately followed by some form of attack. Attack names were collected from dialogue sampled from the first 500 chapters of Bleach. Chapters generally ranged from 20 50 pages each. For each chapter, all attack names that were used along with details of how they were presented typographically (e.g. in kanji with katakana readings above) were first extracted and put into a corpus database. The attacks were then classified for the character type, or ‘race’ (i.e. Shinigami, Arrancar, or Quincy), and a basic description was given to describe the attack (e.g. a beam of light shoots out from the user’s hand). The furigana text was subsequently transcribed into the Latin alphabet, and the
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language from which the reading was derived was ascertained. Translations were then made into English as necessary. Finally, each furigana text was categorizated according to the criteria laid out by Lewis (2010) (See Table 1). Having the data in this format allows for easy comparisons and generalizations to be drawn about how attack names are being implemented by the author, and if there are any trends based on factors such as a character’s race, language of derived reading, etc. Alongside attack names, furigana readings also appeared to a lesser extent in place names (primarily as a means of attributing them to certain character type), and are mentioned in the analysis as necessary, but were not included in the corpus. 5. Typographical data & semantic connections As shown in Table 2, Shinigami attack names (n = 17) were given entirely with Japanese readings. However, the majority of Arrancar attack names (n = 32) were written with Spanish-derived readings, with only 2 outliers given in either a mixture of two languages, or not considered true words in any of the analyzed languages (i.e. made-up words). Finally, the majority of Quincy attack names (n = 18) were written with German-derived readings, with some other examples being seen in Japanese or English. The large number of foreign language-derived readings, especially among the Arrancar and Quincy characters, demonstrates that the canonical reading of the kanji are no longer being followed, and ateji are being employed. The data collected can be generally divided into three major categories: semantic addition, semantic connection, and no semantic connection, and will be explained in order subsequently. These categories fit under the larger umbrella of translative or contrastive/translative furigana, as demonstrated by Lewis (2010). Each attack name consists of kanji with semantic information and a furigana reading (often katakana or hiragana). Presenting the complextity in an easy-to-digest format is difficult, as it further requires transliteration into the Latin alphabet, and an English translation. For this reason, I attempt to follow whenever possible a standard whereby the kanji will be presented with parenthetical information about their semantic meaning, alongside the furigana, with transliterations in brackets, and parenthetical information about their English translations. Based on the data collected, one category commonly employed by the author of Bleach was that of semantic addition. Similar to the contrastive ateji described by Lewis (2010), in this category, the semantic content derived from the kanji and the readings given by the furigana are undoubtedly related, but there is an addition. This primarily consists of adding more semantic information in the Japanese characters than the Spanish-derived or Germanderived readings could provide in the same space. Although one kanji character and katakana character take up the same space, they cannot provide the same amount of phonetic information, because, a katakana character can maximally represent one consonant and one vowel sound, while a kanji character can easily be assigned multisyllabic readings (Table 1). For example, the attack name 豹王 (JPN: panther king) is given the reading パンテラ[pantera] (SPN: pantera, panther). In this example of semantic addition, the kanji characters include the semantic component ‘king’, whereas
Table 2 Percent of attack names by language and character type.
Japanese Spanish German English Mix/Unknown
Shinigami
Arrancar
Quincy
100% (17) 0% (0) 0% (0) 0% (0) 0% (0)
0% (0) 93.75% (30) 0% 0% 6.25% (2)
11.11% (2) 0% (0) 83.33% (15) 5.56% (1) 0%
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the Spanish-derived reading does not. This category accounted for 67% of attacks with foreign readings assigned to them. The second category is one of a connection at a semanticallytangential level, whereby there are obvious relationships between the meanings derived from the kanji and the foreign language reading, yet there is no direct translation between the two. Lewis (2010) describes this process as denotive, however, in the case of attack names with foreign-language derived readings, it is clearly translative as well. This category accounted for 24% of attacks with foreign readings assigned to them. One example of this usage was the attack name黒翼大魔 (JPN: black wing great demon) given the reading ムルシエラゴ [murushierago] (SPN: murciélago, bat). Bats are canonically known for being black, and have wings. One can see the connection between these two semantic entries, and assume that they are referring to the same concept, albeit with more descriptive detail included in the semantic kanji component, which as hypothesized earlier, is primarily due to special concerns related to economy of space. This category of connections at the semantically-tangential level also included pairings where the canonical kanji reading and the furigana did share some possible readings in common, such as with 神殺鎗 (JPN: god-killing spear) given the reading かみしにのやり[kamishini no yari] (JPN: god-dying spear), however there was not a one-to-one correspondence, such as here between the transitive verb ‘kill’ and the intransitive verb ‘die.’ The final category consists of pairs where there were no true discernable relationships between the meanings of the kanji and the meanings derived from the furigana readings. This grouping lines up with Lewis’s (2010) category of Translative/Contrastive ateji readings, however with the caveat that I am actively stretching the conceivable connections between two words. This category accounted for 9% of attacks with foreign readings assigned to them. One example of this usage was the attack name 聖噬 (JPN: holy bite) given the reading ハイゼン [haizen] (GER: heizen, heating). This attack has nothing to do with heating or biting, but appears to create a large blunt-force energy attack in the shape of a rectangular prism (for specific details, see Bleach chapter 185). As there is little semantic connection between the attack name and the Germanderived furigana reading, it is best categorized as Translative/ Contrastive. Through analysis of the usage of Spanish- and German-derived furigana readings in Bleach, it was determined that the origin language of the furigana word often correlates with a certain character race/type, or in short, that the languages are chosen for a reason when giving readings to Japanese kanji. As the author Tite Kubo mentions in an interview (Chitamachii, 2013), each language has a different sound to it, which allows it to confer a slightly different nuance to the meaning, and this can contribute cultural information, or even evoke historical sentiments. One question that remains to be answered is whether or not the average Japanese reader can tell the difference between Spanish and German words when realized in the Japanese orthographic (and subsequently, the phonological) system, which would allow for one to make more definitive conclusions about how these languages are perceived by the average Japanese speaker. Furthermore, this anlysis has not examined whether or not the Spanish or German words were grammatically correct, or even situationally appropriate. Many of the terms that appeared in the data would not likely be used by a native speaker of the language (e.g. arrancar is a verb in Spanish, the nominal form of which would be arrancador, etc.), and some are entirely agrammatical, mismatched in gender, number, etc. (e.g. cero oscuras in Spanish, which would correctly be written as cero oscuro), while others demonstrate problems in transcription/pronunciation (e.g. the German word for ‘heating’ would be properly phonetically transcribed as haitsen, not heizen). It also remains to be seen how these issues affect
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readers who are fluent speakers of these languages, as many appear unaltered in their respective German and Spanish official translations. Finally, in addition to the dozens of official and unofficial translations of the manga, Bleach has also become a truly multimodal experience, as there exists anime, dozens of video games, multiple stage musicals, audio dramas, etc. In these animated, live action, or audio-only contexts where furigana are not present, there are possibly other strategies that are used by creators to place characters into easy-to-understand archetypal roles, and how these strategies differ from the ones analyzed here is fodder for future research. 6. Language choice as a place for stereotype injection Bleach is not unique in the manipulation of Japanese scripts; there are thousands of manga that make creative uses of furigana text. One question that may come to mind after seeing this data is why this practice of appending foreign language-derived readings to Japanese kanji words would exist. What do the readers of Bleach gain from the author having done this? To answer this question, it becomes important to look at why German and Spanish were overwhelmingly the most common choices for foreign language readings in these texts. In Japan, English is currently the most commonly-studied foreign language in schools, and is standardized into the national curriculum. This is often at the expense of other languages, with many being of the opinion that ‘‘[a]s far as education policy in the area of foreign language education in Japan is concerned, the only foreign language that really exists is English” (Sugitani and Tomita, 2012). The second most commonly studied language at the high school level is Mandarin. While German and Spanish are studied by some Japanese native speakers, they are further down the list of commonly-studied foreign languages, being the 4th and 5th most-studied languages respectively at the high school level, not including English (Monbukagakusho, 2016). This further raises the question as to why a Japanese author would use words originating from German, Spanish, or really any foreign language in their works. Kubo, the author of Bleach, has been invited to speak at events around the world, as his work is enjoyed on a global scale. He was asked about the inclusion of different languages in a public interview at the Leipzig Book Fair in Germany in March 2013 (Chitamachii, 2013): Interviewer: ‘‘Bleach is full of different languages. Quincy use the German language, the Arrancar name everything in Spanish. . . Why?” Kubo: ‘‘As for the Arrancar, I think Spanish sounds very passionate and a little erotic, and it matches their wild lifestyle. German sounds cold, harsh, and methodic, which is something that matches the straight-forward manner of the Quincy. I would like to use French at some point because it sounds very elegant, but I can’t figure out a good way to include it in the story.” Kubo mentions here certain preconceived notions he has about how languages descriptively sound to him, and states that he has chosen the languages in concordanance with these, and would do so again in the future, if the opportunity presented itself. Further, he likely assumes Japanese readers share these same ideas about how languages sound. As mentioned previously, Shinigami attack names were mostly provided with Japanese readings, which were often ones that a reader could correctly guess having known the canonical readings of the kanji characters. The adjectives used to describe the Quincy and Arrancar, ‘harsh’ and ‘passionate’ respectively, are chosen because they are qualities that differentiate them from the Shinigami, the character with whom the intended reader will most likely identify.
This use of language choice to index linguistic ideologies and convey a stereotype is at the heart of Haarmann’s (1989) framework of ‘stereotype injection’. By adding a ‘touch’ of a foreign language (even a single word) to a piece media, one can ‘‘evoke the intended stereotype in the consumer’s mind” (10). Although Haarmann (1989:234) maintains that ‘‘the stereotype functions of foreign languages in the mass media almost exclusively imply positive features”, I argue that a similar trend is working in this data to imply features that are not positive, including in this case, something as simple as ‘not Japanese’. Past researchers have commented on the strange otherness and almost magical power of katakana words (Sakagami, 2000). These words cannot exist in a vacuum, however, and benefit from having a certain amount of semantic context given to them. In this vein, the kanji characters also appear, in order to give a sense of what the words mean, as most Japanese people do not speak Spanish or German. It is important to note here that while katakana has been used to convey that speech is non-native or disfluent in manga (Robertson, 2015), this is not the case with the present data, as the majority of the speech employed by all characters is given in the canonical/conventional script. Foreign words (and likewise katakana and foreign language furigana) are relatively rare in comparison to the sheer amount of ‘normal’ Japanese dialogue. Blair (1997), in an overview of foreign language usage in Japanese commercials, opines that ‘‘[t]he texts and expressions used in these commercials are not intended to be understood by the ordinary Japanese, and aren’t. Although individual lexical items might be understood, the major portion of the text is simply used to create an image and attach prestige value to the products being advertised”. While commercials like the ones that Blair analyzed are aimed at a different market, given the low rate of Spanish and German intelligibility among Japanese speakers, I believe that this same phenomenon is occurring in this manga as well, whereby an image is being attached to these characters by employing foreign language derived readings. Scripts evoke certain traits and feelings (see Section 2.1), and given the data that has been presented, the furigana in Bleach are certainly playing a part in ascribing certain traits to these characters. The use of katakana to transcribe readings of non-Japanese origin in furigana urges the reader to view these things as ‘other’. While katakana is ascribed a small number of positive attributes (e.g. ‘fresh’) in a list of associations that had been ascribed to the Japanese scripts by past researchers (Robertson, 2015), I posit that the negative attributes given (e.g. ‘jarring’, ‘inorganic’, ‘marked’), were not only more numerous, but are the most relevant to the present analysis. The primary characters with foreign attack names are villains who wear non-traditional Japanese clothing. Such characters are not grouped together with the Shinigami, who are mostly given (‘Japanese’, ‘unmarked’) hiragana furigana, and are positioned as the Japanese-esque characters. In this vein, the intended readership is being led to sympathize with these protagonists over the characters with more foreign flair, with whom they share less in common. However, having access to certain tokens of cultural knowledge would allow readers to access extra traits about these characters, more than simply ‘jarring’, ‘marked’, etc. 6.1. Cultural knowledge & othering It is also possible that kanji are working in conjunction with the foreign language-derived readings in order to strengthen the connections to other cultures in readers who have the knowledge to understand the historical/social contexts surrounding German and Spanish. Since unconventional, non-Japanese-derived readings were given for many kanji in this analysis, it must be assumed that the kanji were chosen for their semantic meaning. This process of maintaining the kanji while allowing for a foreign language-
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derived reading allows for ‘‘translanguaging through furigana within translation without risking intelligibility” (Sato, 2018:239) in Japanese fiction. This importance of the semantic content of the kanji is further reinforced by the fact that certain kanji often re-appear with certain characters/character races, in a way that is clearly nonrandom. One example of this is the recurring kanji 聖 [sei] (JPN: holy, pure, sacred), which occurred in 53% of all German-derived attack names. To place this kanji in a wider context, most Japanese speakers would be familiar with it as a character that appears in conjunction with Christianity (particularly Catholicism), holiness, or purity. As such, it appears in Japanese words such as聖絶 [seizetsu] ‘a ban; a biblical destruction’, 聖別 [seibetsu] ‘consecration, sanctification’, and 神聖ローマ帝国 [shinsei ro¯ma teikoku] ‘Holy Roman Empire; First Reich’. Given its frequency in the corpus, it is highly likely that this choice was deliberate on the part of the author. Aside from the historical connection between Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, one other connection that appears between German history and this kanji is the attempts by the Nazi German leaders to acquire items from Christian mythology, such as the shroud of Turin,トリノ聖骸布 [torin seigaifu], or the Lance of Longinus, 聖槍 [seiso¯], two items whose names in Japanese also contain this kanji. Another connection to German history becomes apparent in Bleach when it is revealed that the ruler of Wandenreich killed all Quincy who were not pure-blooded, deeming them impure, with the intention of creating a stronger race. This is an apparent allusion to Nazi genocidal policies leading up to and during World War II. Through attributing German-derived readings to attack names, and employing specific kanji with certain historical/religious associations, it is possible for an author to immediately place these characters in the role of ‘racial purists,’ allowing readers to draw connections to eugenics and genocide, without having to overtly mention Nazism. However, these connections only become possible if the reader has these historical notions readily available in their mind. Furthermore, these notions are not equally viewed across all societies. Although the Holocaust is known about from a historical standpoint in Japan, ‘‘such knowledge lacks the emotional aspect of national trauma that characterizes its presence in Western societies” (Jaworowicz-Zimny, 2018:10-11). While allusions to the Third Reich and Nazi-adjacent characters are not uncommon in Japanese manga and anime, because such references lack a certain emotional impact, they may be no more haunting than the ‘‘villain in a favourite anime” (Jaworowicz-Zimny, 2018:11). However, wartime depictions that hit closer to home (such as of the Japanese Emperial Army or Navy) are ‘‘characterized by emotional connections and positive identification that are missing from [those of the] Nazi” (11). At any rate, even though the story of the Quincy (i.e. a thinly-veiled allusion to race politics in Nazi Germany) might evoke an emotional sentiment in English-speaking readers, this is not necessarily the case with the original intended audience, i.e. monolingual Japanese youths. No matter the emotional response, however, the author chose German due to it sounding ‘cold, harsh, and methodic’ (in his opinion), and these descriptors are reflected in the behavior of the characters. In terms of the kanji assigned Spanish-derived furigana readings, the most common kanji were those referencing animals, such as 獣 [kemono] (JPN: beast) or 狼 [o¯kami] (JPN: wolf). In a similar way to how the Quincy were characterized, the use of these kanji allowed for the author to immediately characterize the characters as ‘‘wild”, which is one adjective Kubo used to describe the characters in the interview referenced earlier. Furthermore, Haarmann’s (1984) analysis of foreign words used in Japanese commercials on television also found Spanish words to be connected to ‘‘masculine charm” or ‘‘wild tenderness” (1 0 6). These linguistic features combine with certain visual cues, such as the masks of the Arrancar often having animalistic features on them (e.g. fangs, ears, wings,
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etc.), to create a large-scale characterization across an entire fictional race, stating that these characters are passionate, bestial, and wholly different from both the Shinigami and the Quincy. No matter the characterization, however, the foreign language readings (and the kanji they are ascribed to as well) function as a method of marking the antagonist characters as ‘other’. This process of ‘othering’ refers to the concept of ‘‘representing an individual or a social group to render them distant, alien or deviant” (Coupland, 1999:5). In other words, those who are given foreign language readings (the antagonists) are put in direct contrast to the protagonists, who are to be seen as Japanese both in their traditional cultural and linguistic practices. Russell (1991), in his description of Black representations in Japan, states that Japanese media often works towards preserving ‘‘alienness by ascribing to it certain standardized traits which mark it as Other but which also serve the reflexive function of allowing Japanese to meditate on their racial and cultural identity in the face of challenges by Western modernity, cultural authority, and power” (Russell 1991:4). In other words, the antagonistic characters being positioned as foreign allows for the intended reader to position the protagonists as non-foreign (e.g. Japanese), and thus empathize with them over the characters who employ more foreign language-derived readings. To expand upon Blair (1997), it is not only non-Japanese words and text that are ‘‘not intended to be understood by the ordinary Japanese”, but these non-Japanese characters and their motivations as well. Especially for those foreign others who are ‘‘the distant other, the other who only appears to us within the media” (Silverstone, 1994:110), these mediated appearances serve a very important role, not only in shaping the ideologies and concepts and social definitions of foreignness, but also the definition of ‘Japaneseness’, as defined in opposition to the foreign other. 6.2. Global media and language ideologies This insertion of pseudo-foreign language features into one’s native language is by no means unique to Japanese. ‘Mock Spanish’ (Hill, 1993; 1998; 2005) refers to the appropriation of certain (assumed) linguistic features of Spanish by monolingual mostly Anglo individuals over a large number of linguistic domains (e.g. pronunciation changes, affixation, semantic shifts, etc). While the adoption of Mock Spanish is usually done to demonstrate ‘desirable qualities’ of the speaker (e.g. sense of humor, easy-going attitude towards life, etc.), its functionality depends entirely on the speaker and hearer having shared knowledge of the understanding of the racial stereotypes that co-occur with the language variety they are appropriating. In order for Mock Spanish to mean something at all, speakers and listeners ‘‘require access to very negative racializing representations of Chicanos and Latinos as stupid. . . lazy. . . disorderly” (Hill 1998: 683). This cultural knowledge is then reinforced through the implementation of the linguistic features in question. However, scripted and constructed speech has also been pointed to as a very fruitful site to see language stereotyping at work. Hill’s framework was later employed to similarly study ‘Mock Ebonics’ in textual form to a very similar effect (Ronkin and Karn, 1999). In that study, constructed dialogue of Mock Ebonics were assigned to imaginary characters/users, who were then vilified for such use. It was shown that through a specific system of linguistic strategies, the users were actively perpetuating the ‘‘imperfection and inferiority of Ebonics and its users” (3 6 0). In these cases, the socially powerful language variety is reflexively put in a position of power by imitating/mocking the use of ‘inferior’ linguistic features. Furthermore, because ideologies regarding language use and cultural inferiority/superiority exist in a complex system, there are cases whereby the language speakers would be viewed very differently based on the language whose linguistic features they
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choose to adopt. For example, Park (2004) demonstrated through a close analysis of Korean television programs that entertainers would employ purposefully poor English in order to demonstrate a negative competency, thus subordinating themselves in a selfdeprecative manner. However, Hye Lee (2017:225) showed that on similar Korean television programs, entertainers would employ a sort of ‘Mock Chinese’ as a means of ‘‘rationalizing, legitimatizing, and naturalizing the dominance of Korean over the Chinese language and Chinese national group in Korea.” Whether or not the appropriation of the features of another language exalts or denegrades your own language/culture depends on the linguistic ideologies and cultural knowledge present that mediate the connections between these languages. However, whether positive or negative, all of these processes of linguistic appropriation are reflexively positioning the speaker’s culture in a certain light by appropriating aspects of a different language/culture, making these processes very similar to what we witnessed in Bleach. Given that mock languaging often involves employing inaccurate language features not actually employed by the target group, we find similarities in Bleach, given that many of the Spanish or German words were not grammatically correct, or even situationally appropriate. Many of the terms that appeared in the data would not likely be used by a native speaker of the language (e.g. arrancar is a verb in Spanish, the nominal form of which would be arrancador, etc.), and some are entirely agrammatical, mismatched in gender, number, etc. (e.g. cero oscuras in Spanish, which would correctly be written as cero oscuro), while others demonstrate problems in transcription/pronunciation (e.g. the German word for ‘heating’ would be properly phonetically transcribed as haitsen, not heizen). 7. Conclusion The present study sought to investigate how one manga series Bleach, by Tite Kubo, uses loanwords as tools to invoke a ‘stereotype injection’ (Haarmann 1989), as well as index certain character traits without overt characterization through dialogue. Through analysis of the usage of Spanish-derived and German-derived furigana readings in Bleach, it was determined that the origin language of the furigana word often correlates with a certain character type, and functions as a way to inject stereotypes about characters into even small portions of their dialogue. Further, it was determined that many of the social stereotypes concerning these languages were present in word choice and kanji usage, yielding a cultural idea of characterological type without the need for overt characterization. This serves a great purpose in a series such as Bleach, which has a multitude of named characters, as protagonists/antagonists can be characterized with broad strokes by using foreign language-derived readings. Further comparisons were made between the foreign language-derived readings in Bleach and the uses of ‘mock languaging’ analyzed by previous scholars. Through these comparisons we have gleaned that, while Japanese has a typographical toolset to assist with easily making words seem foreign/non-Japanese, it is certainly not the only method of othering available cross-linguistically. Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declared that there is no conflict of interest Acknowledgements I would like to thank Claire Maree and Janet Shibamoto-Smith for their very supportive feedback on this project, and the Anime
& Manga Studies Symposium where this research was first workshopped. References AJPEA, 2017. 2016 nen no komikku (kami + denshi) shijo wo happyo shimashita. [Announcement of 2016 comic (paper + digital) market)].. Blair, R.J., 1997. The role of English and other foreign languages in Japanese society. Faculty J. Aichi Gakuin Junior College 5, 74–86. Briggs, C.V., 2010. Encyclopedia of the Unseen World: The Ultimate Guide to Apparitions, Death Bed Visions, Mediums, Shadow People, Wandering Spirits, and Much. Weiser Books, Much More. Chitamahii, 2013. Tite Kubo in Germany 2013. . Coupland, N., 1999. ‘‘Other” representation. In: Verschueren, J., Östman, J.-O., Blommaert, J., Bulcaen, C. (Eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 1–24. Curran, B., 2015. Death note: multilingual Manga and multidimensional translation. In: Multiple Translation Communities in Contemporary Japan. Routledge, pp. 13–30. Drummond-Mathews, A., 2010. What boys will be: a study of shonen manga. In: Manga. An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives. Continuum, pp. 62– 76. Haarmann, H., 1984. The role of ethnocultural stereotypes and foreign languages in Japanese commercials. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 1984 (50), 101–122. Haarmann, H., 1989. Symbolic Values of Foreign Language Use: From the Japanese Case to a General Sociolinguistic Perspective, vol. 51. Walter de Gruyter. Hill, J.H., 1993. Hasta La Vista, baby: anglo Spanish in the American Southwest. Critique Anthropol. 13, 145–176. Hill, J.H., 1998. Language, race, and white public space. American anthropologist 100 (3), 680–689. Hill, J.H., 2005. Intertextuality as source and evidence for indirect indexical meanings. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 15 (1), 113–124. Igarashi, Y., 2007. The changing role of katakana in the Japanese writing system Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Victoria. Jaworowicz-Zimny, A., 2018. Nazi COSPLAY in Japan. J. War Cult. Stud., 1–16 kouhyo¯ [Printed Japan Magazine Publishers Association [JMPA], 2018. Insatsu busu Circulation Announcement].
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Kanji and non-homophonous furigana: Foreign language readings and character (stereo)types in manga Ryan C. Redmond University of California Davis, 1 Shields Ave, Davis, CA 95616, USA
a r t i c l e
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Article history: Received 8 November 2018 Received in revised form 27 July 2019 Accepted 5 August 2019
Keywords: Manga Japanese Writing systems Stereotype injection
a b s t r a c t The present study seeks to investigate how one manga series Bleach, by Tite Kubo, uses a languagespecific process to employ loanwords as tools to invoke a stereotype injection, as well as index certain character traits without overt characterization through dialogue. I argue in this paper that the Japanese writing system offers a key mechanism for this indexing. The system traditionally encompasses three different character sets: kanji (characters originally borrowed from/based off of the Chinese writing system), hiragana (a moraic script used for native and functional words), and katakana (a moraic script used for foreign words, sound effects, etc.). These sets each have their own normatively specialized usages, and because of this, they have come to index certain social stereotypes. One aspect of Japanese writing which may also be associated with stereotypes that has been less studied is furigana. Traditionally written in hiragana or katakana, furigana are annotations serving a metalingual function, and are primarily used to give the pronunciations of unknown or obscure kanji that the reader might not recognize. A less-frequently employed secondary purpose is giving a non-standard reading to a kanji character or series of characters. What has not received direct attention yet is how furigana itself can be used to index certain social or cultural stereotypes. While past research has looked at furigana in manga, few of these have looked at systematic uses of non-Japanese furigana readings. Through analysis of the usage of Spanish-derived and German-derived furigana readings in Bleach, it was determined that the origin language of the furigana word often correlates with a certain character type, and functions as a way to inject stereotypes about characters into even small portions of their dialogue. Further, it was determined that many of the social stereotypes concerning these languages were present in word choice and kanji usage, yielding a cultural idea of characterological type without the need for overt characterization, which is helpful in dealing with Bleach’s large cast of named characters. Ó 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Writing has been one of the most significant contributions to human history, allowing us to communicate with others across both vast time and space. Like spoken language, it has never been a tool for simply conveying words, but is a complex system whereby the meaning and context of those words can be shaped by the choices of the author. This paper takes the stance that writing systems can be used for more than transcribing or visually representing the spoken word. In the case of the Japanese writing system (as will be discussed subsequently), authors can transcribe words derived from Indo-European languages using a Japanese script, while still conveying a certain meaning, allowing for a flexibility that is not seen with other writing systems. At the crux of the present research is how transcriptions from other languages E-mail address: [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2019.100323 2211-6958/Ó 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
may allow for a different meaning to be conveyed than if a native Japanese word were chosen. Through analysis of terms used in Bleach by Tite Kubo, a manga that circulates globally, I argue that this can be done intentionally to allow for a reader to make connections to metatextual information. Futher, this allows the author to cast characters in a certain light based on the word and the language from which the word was derived, without explicit dialogue/narration about the characters at-hand. This ties the present research into current discussions on globalization of media, as well as representations of other cultures/languages in the Japanese context. 2. Japanese writing system The Japanese writing system contains (primarily) three separate scripts: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana are moraic, and exist in a system whereby each character represents one mora
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(minimally, a vowel or consonant sound, maximally one consonant and one vowel sound together). This script is used primarily for writing native (or nativized) Japanese words, as well as grammatical and functional morphemes. Katakana, similarly to hiragana, is also a script whereby each character represents one mora. Unlike hiragana, however, this system is often a kind of catch-all for writing foreign words, onomatopoeia, exclamations, scientific words, etc. (Igarashi, 2007). Finally, kanji is a separate script where each character can contain both a phonetic as well as a semantic component. Originating as borrowings from the Chinese writing system some 1700 years ago (as Japan had no indigenous writing system), words and characters continued to be borrowed for hundreds of years across multiple dynasties and dialects (Rogers, 2005). This reason alone has led to it being regarded as ‘‘the most complex modern writing system, and the hardest to force into any taxonomic mold” (Sproat, 2000:128). Certain characters were borrowed from Chinese for both their semantic and phonetic values, while others were borrowed for either one or the other. Kanji characters (generally) maintain their original Chinese phonetic reading that are called on-readings. Readings ascribed for Japanese native word pronunciation are called kun-readings. The same kanji may potentially have multiple readings. Contemporary Japanese makes use of thousands of kanji, often as the uninflected stem of verbs/ adjectives, or entire nouns. Unlike hiragana and katakana, the phonological values of kanji are not always apparent, and no more than 25% of the general-usage kanji contain useful clues to the pronunciation of their Chinese-originating readings (Paradis et al., 1985), or as stated earlier, may not have Chinese-originating readings at all. While these three scripts are different in nature and use, it is not uncommon for a Japanese sentence to contain all three of these scripts, such as in the example below (KN: kanji, HR: hiragana, KT: katakana). 太郎はアニメを見る KN KN HR KT KT KT HR KN HR [Taro¯ wa anime o miru] Taro-TOP anime-DOJ watch Taro watches anime. TOP: topic marker, DOJ: direct object
In the above example, the first noun [Taro] is written in kanji, as it is a content word. The next [wa], is a topic-marker, acting as a postposition of sorts, and functions to topicalize the preceding noun. As mentioned previously, as this is a grammatical function word, it is conventionally written in hiragana. The next word [anime] is also a noun, however this word is borrowed from the English word ‘animation’, and as such is treated as a foreign word, and is conventionally transcribed in katakana. Following this is the direct object marker [o], which as with the previous grammatical marker, follows the noun, and marks it as the object of the sentence, and is written in hiragana. The final word in this sentence [miru] is actually written using two different systems. The first syllable of the word [miru], [mi], is the stem of the verb, and confers the semantic meaning of ‘to watch’, and as such it is written in kanji. However, the last syllable of the word, [ru], is the part of the verb that can be conjugated further given the proper context, and as such it is transcribed as a grammatical form in hiragana. 2.1. Sociolinguistics of script choice Because there exist multiple scripts in Japanese, and they all have the same phonetic versatility, there is some leeway for cre-
ativity/individual preference in the way one employs them. There are some general writing conventions which if broken, would leave the text much more difficult to parse, such as using hiragana for inflectional morphology and case particles. Furthermore, any creativity that exists is also limited by the genre and context in which the text is written. Given the proper context, some words could be written in any script and still be perfectly parsable, but each would pass on a certain flavor to the text. Robertson (2015:206) posits that a limited analogy for these scripts would be different fonts in English typography, ‘‘which can evoke certain feelings or images.” However, the analogy gets more complicated by the fact that fonts also exist in Japanese, and the impressions/emotions that Japanese speakers feel when reading these scripts come about regardless of the font in which the text is written. Researchers have compiled lists of adjectives that are sociolinguistically tied to these scripts (Smith and Schmidt, 1996; Robertson, 2015). Hiragana is regarded as soft, emotional, or feminine; katakana is modern or foreign; kanji is substantial, masculine, and formal. However, there is nothing inherent about these scripts that index these qualities, and most research on these links are based on native-speaker intuition. That being said, these are general ideas that have been qualitatively asserted by past researchers, and they are ones with which the average native speaker would likely agree. These notions surrounding certain scripts evoking certain feelings is pivotal to the present study, whereby I argue that katakana is strategically employed in the data to make one’s dialogue sound foreign, thus positioning the characters as being non-protagonists. 2.2. Furigana and kanji While Japanese scripts are often used for normal dialogic or narrative writing, there are also examples of their usage for auxiliary purposes, such as for rubi or furigana text. The term rubi comes from British typesetting conventions, and originally referred to a typeset with a height of 5.5 points (which was the common size for printers to use for interlinear annotations in printed documents). The term furigana is Japanese-specific, and refers to the practice of assigning katakana or hiragana to a kanji character. Here rubi and furigana refer to the same concept, and in this paper furigana will be employed as it is the more specific and common term used to refer to Japanese texts. The purpose of furigana text is often to gloss an unknown or unreadable kanji. Its usage is commonly higher in texts directed at younger children, who have not finished learning the general-usage kanji (Unser-Schutz, 2011). This is to be expected, as while the average Japanese child will learn approximately 1000 kanji by the time they finish elementary school, there are around 1000 more that are considered general-usage kanji. However, furigana usage is not limited to children’s texts, nor does their inclusion immediately classify a text as being aimed at children, as even some ‘‘lowbrow” newspapers have been known to contain these glosses for most kanji (Miller, 1994). In the case of Bleach, all kanji (even those that would be known by the time a child is able to understand the narrative) are glossed with furigana. Traditionally, readings for kanji written in furigana are given above (in the case of horizontal text) or beside (in the case of vertical text) the character, and consist of canonically-homophonous hiragana. However, in the case of popular written media, there are other ‘unconventional’ uses of furigana text, as shown in Fig. 1. In Fig. 1, the phrase given in kanji consists of two nouns, connected by the genitive particle no. If there were no furigana to guide one’s reading, this phrase could be read in a number of different ways, such as o¯kyo no senko¯. However, due to the presence of the semantic meaning of the characters (i.e. 王 meaning ‘king’, 虚meaning ‘hollow’, and 閃光 meaning a ‘flash of light’), any reading would still retain the meaning of ‘King Hollow’s Flash’. Due to the given phonetic guide provided in furigana above the kanji
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Fig. 1. Guran rei zero, an attack used in Bleach.
though, we know to read this as guran rei zero, which will transliterate into Spanish as gran rey cero. We can then use the Spanish transliteration to create a translation into English, such as ‘grand king zero’. Such ‘unconventional’ cases where the kanji and the furigana reading are non-homophonous are relatively common in popular written texts, and will be explored further in this analysis. Furthermore, as shown in Fig. 1, this analysis will deal with languages besides Japanese and English, and translations from German will be marked parenthetically with (GER), and similarly with (SPN) for Spanish. In texts aimed at younger audiences (who would not have completed their kanji education) it is common for so-called ateji to be employed, which allows for ‘‘phonological representation of Japanese words using kanji” (Sato, 2018:314). In the classic case, ateji allows for ‘‘phonological representation of Japanese words using kanji” (Sato, 2018:314). These words typically have kanji that are ‘‘pronounced in accordance with a standard pronunciation but whose usual meanings are irrelevant to the meaning of the word” (Shibamoto Smith, 1996). The term ateji is also used to refer to words where the kanji were chosen only for their meaning and assigned non-standard readings; such cases are the focus of this paper. This would be the case for the example given previously in Fig. 1. With similar data, Lewis (2010) analyzed this type of ateji usage in manga (Japanese comics) by the artist group CLAMP. She describes five major categories of usage: Translative (T) Denotive (D) Contrastive (C) Abbreviation/Contrastive (A/C) Translative/Contrastive (T/C) Translative ateji generally consist of a foreign word transliterated into katakana, and provided as a reading for a kanji phrase. The example given above in Fig. 1 is also an example of this. Denotive ateji refers to those in which a pronoun or other referent (still in Japanese) is given as a reading for some other word or phrase. This allows authors to include nonspecific words like ‘this’ or ‘that’ in their dialogue, and then gloss their referents directly. For example, the word ‘this’ [kore] might appear in a dialogue, but to make sure the reader knows exactly to which item the character is referring, the gloss ‘book’ [hon] can be included. Through this process, smoother dialogue can be created ‘‘without the author worrying whether or not the reader follows all the references being made” (33). Contrastive ateji combine two different Japanese words that are not directly referential, as they would be for denotive ateji, allowing the ‘‘writer to signify a meaning between two [of] the words by playing off the differences and similarities between them and either broadening or narrowing the meanings of the words in question” (33). One such example of this could be the word ‘‘drink” [nomimono] being glossed as ‘‘beer” [bıru], which would gives a certain sense of playfulness on the part of the author, potentially displaying both what the character said, and what they actually are trying to say. Abbreviation/Contrastive ateji are those where a whole reading is given as a reading for some abbreviation, often written in the
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Latin alphabet (e.g. ‘goalkeeper’ for the abbreviation ‘GK’). Finally, Translative/Contrastive are subsets of Contrastive ateji, whereby a kanji character is ‘‘paired with an English (or other foreign language) reading that is obviously meant to contrast with the Japanese word written in kanji rather than simply act as a translation” (34). The most important factor for this category is that the translated word/reading is not likely to be a part of the everyday vocabulary for the media’s intended readership. Therefore, this method allows for a sense of ‘‘foreignness, unfamiliarity, and alienation” in the text, as with Translative ateji, as well as building a tension between the two words, as with Contrastive ateji. These various categories are summarized in Table 1. As mentioned in previous sections, ateji is very common in manga. The next section will briefly explain why the written practices in manga (and one manga in particular) deserve analysis.
3. What is manga? Manga, or Japanese comics, are a multi-billion-dollar international industry in Japan. While traditionally originating in physical media, the digital marketplace has also seen a recent uptake in sales (AJPEA, 2017). In comparison to American-made comics, which are primarily aimed at younger male audiences, manga are spread across countless genres, ranging from slice of life to fantasy, and from adventure to erotica. However, the best-selling manga remain those aimed at a younger male audience (sho¯nen) that are enjoyed by people of all genders and ages, because of its ease of reading and overarching narrative storylines (NTT, 2012). While some manga first arrive on bookshelves in bound volumes (tanko¯ bon), many of the most popular ones are run periodically in specific manga magazines (zasshi) before being collected in volumes. These magazines continue to rank among the highest selling publications in Japan, with sho¯nen manga magazines far out-selling those from other genres, including sho¯jo manga, which are aimed at younger girls (JMPA, 2018). One such sho¯nen manga is Bleach (ブリーチ). This series was written and illustrated by Tite Kubo, and first began serialization in kan Sho¯nen Jampu [Weekly 2001 in the sho¯nen manga magazine Shu Sho¯nen Jump]. The series ended 15 years later in 2016 after 686 serialized chapters. The popularity of the series became great enough in Japan for an anime (animated television series) adaptation to be created, which aired from October 2004 until March 2012, and spawned four feature-length animated films. A liveaction film was also produced in Japan, and released internationally in 2018. The manga garnered true international success, and has been translated and officially released in over 10 languages, with dozens more unofficial releases performed by fans. Bleach depicts the adventures of a human-turned-Shinigami named Ichigo Kurosaki, as he attempts to defend the world from evil spirits. While he has powers and abilities that set him apart from other humans in the series, he still functions as the main lens through which the readers view the series. As my analysis focuses on characterizations and their relationships to metatextual information possessed by the reader, I will briefly introduce the ‘races’ of the series (the term ‘race’ in this context referring to a classification of character type). Shinigami (death gods) are supernatural figures that are found in Japanese folklore. As the name implies, these beings are related to death, and because their task is to help souls cross to the other side, they have been often considered the Japanese counterpart of the Grim Reaper. While gods/spirits of death have appeared in Japanese folklore and religious traditions for centuries, the term and archaetype of shinigami is relatively new, gaining notoriety during the Meiji period (1862–1912), and thought by some to be influenced by European tradition, including Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Briggs, 2010; Curran, 2015). Nonetheless, shinigami
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Table 1 Summary of categories by Lewis (2010). Name
Translative
Denotive
Contrastive
Abbreviation/ Contrastive
Translative/Contrastive
Phonetic Component Semantic Component Example
Synonymous foreign word in katakana Synonymous Japanese word in kanji ヒーロー 英雄 hıro¯ eiyu hero hero
Japanese word with a referent Different Japanese word with a referent アレ パソコン are pasokon that computer
Non-synonymous Japanese word Non-synonymous Japanese word ビール 飲み物 bıru nomimono beer drink
Word b in hiragana or katakana Abbreviation for word b ゴールキーパー GK go¯rukıpa¯ GK goalkeeper GK (goalkeeper)
Non-synonymous foreign word Non-synonymous Japanese word in kanji スペル 暗号 superu ango¯ spell code
Ex. Phonetic Readings Ex. Translations
have become present in many pop depictions of traditional Japan, and are considered ‘‘Japanese” in creation by society-at-large. In Bleach, the Shinigami are tasked with bringing balance to the world by essentially exorcising corrupted souls and helping them cross over to the other world. While they often make visits to the human realm, the Shinigami primarily live in a feudalistic Japanesque society known as Seireitei (‘Court of Pure Souls’), populated with traditionally Japanese-in-appearance buildings that include sho¯ji ‘sliding paper doors’ leading into large main rooms, and with no sign of electricity in sight. The Shinigami themselves wear attire that seems to match with that of the Edo Period (1600–1868), with white shitagi ‘undergarment’ and black kosode ‘overgarment’ closed with an obi ‘belt’, hakama ‘pants’, alongside white tabi ‘socks’ and waraji ‘woven sandals’. To continue this stereotypical feudal Japanese warrior image, the Shinigami also carry swords known as 斬魄 刀 [zanpakuto¯] (JPN: beheading soul sword), which extend their supernatural powers. These powers have almost infinite variability, but they primarily include increased physical strength, the ability to control certain elements, or in extreme cases, telepathic or empathic abilities. While the Shinigami are the primary protagonists in this series, aside from normal humans who do not have any supernatural powers, there are also two other ‘races’ of beings who are of concern (again, the term ‘race’ refers to a classification of character type who are considered different species of beings, despite all appearing humanoid). The first of these are the Arrancar (SPN: to tear off). Arrancar are born from Hollows, or human souls that did not cross over after death, and therefore must be dealt with by Shinigami in order to bring balance back to the world. Due to their status, they cause trouble in both the spiritual and mortal world, and primarily distinguished by wearing partial masks on their faces. Hollows that are powerful enough, after having ‘torn off’ their masks, become Arrancar, gaining new powers and abilities, which often have symbolic links to animals or emotions in the way that they are realized. The Arrancar reside in a monarchical desert society called 虚圏 [wekomundo] (SPN: Hueco Mundo, Hollow World). The last character type, the Quincy, are human mediums who have the ability to detect spirits. Unlike the Shinigami, however, they feel that balance will be restored only by destroying Hollow, instead of playing a balancing act, and allowing them to cross over like the Shinigami do. For the first half of the series it was believed that this race was functionally extinct, and that the final two Quincy, living in the human world, were not going to continue the tradition. However, through the course of the series, it became apparent that there were other Quincy, living in a hidden empire called Wandenreich (GER: Walled Empire). The Quincy are primarily distinguished by their sterile white clothing, and their use of bows and arrows as their primary weapons. While each ‘race’ is generally unified by a single motivating factor (e.g. bringing balance to the world, fighting to exist, etc.), there are dozens of named characters
that belong to each category, and this can cause trouble for casual readers who are attempting to piece together the story. One common trend in sho¯nen manga, due in part because their narratives can span years or decades, is to have a large cast of named characters. Unser-Schutz (2015) found that when compared to sho¯jo manga, sho¯nen manga had, on average, far more characters in speaking roles (121 vs. 73). In Bleach, for instance, over 70 named Shinigami and over 40 named Arrancar appear. As very few of these characters are protagonists, and some might only appear in a few chapters, this veritable phonebook of characters and their abilities has the potential to become a very heavy burden on the part of the reader. For this reason, I argue that the author is making certain choices (in this case, linguistic) in order to give characterizations to different types of characters, which may help the reader keep track of the cast. I further argue that, especially in the context of Bleach, these differing characterizations can easily be read as Japanese-stylized characters vs. non-Japanese-stylized characters. As opposed to associating these traits with each character individually through dialogue, I propose that the Japanese writing system, with its multiple scripts with differing normative uses, is being used as a tool by the author to make these characterizations in a metatextual way.
4. Data & corpus-building The data for this present study came from attack names used in Bleach. Attack names are a common trope in sho¯nen manga, where fighting is omnipresent. As opposed to simply exchanging punches and kicks for pages on end, characters often undergo some arc where they attain a boon to help fight whatever evil that appears. This can be ‘‘magical power. . ., a special weapon. . ., or unique knowledge or insight into one’s own powers” (DrummondMathews 2010:71). In the case of Bleach, attacks encompass a wide range of supernatural happenings, such as laser beams emanating from appendages, swords turning into animals, etc. These attacks are usually invoked with a name, and a common attack can become a sort of catch phrase for the character who uses it. Attack names are generally easy to find in manga, as they often occur with special fonts, are separated out into text bubbles of their own, and then are immediately followed by some form of attack. Attack names were collected from dialogue sampled from the first 500 chapters of Bleach. Chapters generally ranged from 20 50 pages each. For each chapter, all attack names that were used along with details of how they were presented typographically (e.g. in kanji with katakana readings above) were first extracted and put into a corpus database. The attacks were then classified for the character type, or ‘race’ (i.e. Shinigami, Arrancar, or Quincy), and a basic description was given to describe the attack (e.g. a beam of light shoots out from the user’s hand). The furigana text was subsequently transcribed into the Latin alphabet, and the
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language from which the reading was derived was ascertained. Translations were then made into English as necessary. Finally, each furigana text was categorizated according to the criteria laid out by Lewis (2010) (See Table 1). Having the data in this format allows for easy comparisons and generalizations to be drawn about how attack names are being implemented by the author, and if there are any trends based on factors such as a character’s race, language of derived reading, etc. Alongside attack names, furigana readings also appeared to a lesser extent in place names (primarily as a means of attributing them to certain character type), and are mentioned in the analysis as necessary, but were not included in the corpus. 5. Typographical data & semantic connections As shown in Table 2, Shinigami attack names (n = 17) were given entirely with Japanese readings. However, the majority of Arrancar attack names (n = 32) were written with Spanish-derived readings, with only 2 outliers given in either a mixture of two languages, or not considered true words in any of the analyzed languages (i.e. made-up words). Finally, the majority of Quincy attack names (n = 18) were written with German-derived readings, with some other examples being seen in Japanese or English. The large number of foreign language-derived readings, especially among the Arrancar and Quincy characters, demonstrates that the canonical reading of the kanji are no longer being followed, and ateji are being employed. The data collected can be generally divided into three major categories: semantic addition, semantic connection, and no semantic connection, and will be explained in order subsequently. These categories fit under the larger umbrella of translative or contrastive/translative furigana, as demonstrated by Lewis (2010). Each attack name consists of kanji with semantic information and a furigana reading (often katakana or hiragana). Presenting the complextity in an easy-to-digest format is difficult, as it further requires transliteration into the Latin alphabet, and an English translation. For this reason, I attempt to follow whenever possible a standard whereby the kanji will be presented with parenthetical information about their semantic meaning, alongside the furigana, with transliterations in brackets, and parenthetical information about their English translations. Based on the data collected, one category commonly employed by the author of Bleach was that of semantic addition. Similar to the contrastive ateji described by Lewis (2010), in this category, the semantic content derived from the kanji and the readings given by the furigana are undoubtedly related, but there is an addition. This primarily consists of adding more semantic information in the Japanese characters than the Spanish-derived or Germanderived readings could provide in the same space. Although one kanji character and katakana character take up the same space, they cannot provide the same amount of phonetic information, because, a katakana character can maximally represent one consonant and one vowel sound, while a kanji character can easily be assigned multisyllabic readings (Table 1). For example, the attack name 豹王 (JPN: panther king) is given the reading パンテラ[pantera] (SPN: pantera, panther). In this example of semantic addition, the kanji characters include the semantic component ‘king’, whereas
Table 2 Percent of attack names by language and character type.
Japanese Spanish German English Mix/Unknown
Shinigami
Arrancar
Quincy
100% (17) 0% (0) 0% (0) 0% (0) 0% (0)
0% (0) 93.75% (30) 0% 0% 6.25% (2)
11.11% (2) 0% (0) 83.33% (15) 5.56% (1) 0%
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the Spanish-derived reading does not. This category accounted for 67% of attacks with foreign readings assigned to them. The second category is one of a connection at a semanticallytangential level, whereby there are obvious relationships between the meanings derived from the kanji and the foreign language reading, yet there is no direct translation between the two. Lewis (2010) describes this process as denotive, however, in the case of attack names with foreign-language derived readings, it is clearly translative as well. This category accounted for 24% of attacks with foreign readings assigned to them. One example of this usage was the attack name黒翼大魔 (JPN: black wing great demon) given the reading ムルシエラゴ [murushierago] (SPN: murciélago, bat). Bats are canonically known for being black, and have wings. One can see the connection between these two semantic entries, and assume that they are referring to the same concept, albeit with more descriptive detail included in the semantic kanji component, which as hypothesized earlier, is primarily due to special concerns related to economy of space. This category of connections at the semantically-tangential level also included pairings where the canonical kanji reading and the furigana did share some possible readings in common, such as with 神殺鎗 (JPN: god-killing spear) given the reading かみしにのやり[kamishini no yari] (JPN: god-dying spear), however there was not a one-to-one correspondence, such as here between the transitive verb ‘kill’ and the intransitive verb ‘die.’ The final category consists of pairs where there were no true discernable relationships between the meanings of the kanji and the meanings derived from the furigana readings. This grouping lines up with Lewis’s (2010) category of Translative/Contrastive ateji readings, however with the caveat that I am actively stretching the conceivable connections between two words. This category accounted for 9% of attacks with foreign readings assigned to them. One example of this usage was the attack name 聖噬 (JPN: holy bite) given the reading ハイゼン [haizen] (GER: heizen, heating). This attack has nothing to do with heating or biting, but appears to create a large blunt-force energy attack in the shape of a rectangular prism (for specific details, see Bleach chapter 185). As there is little semantic connection between the attack name and the Germanderived furigana reading, it is best categorized as Translative/ Contrastive. Through analysis of the usage of Spanish- and German-derived furigana readings in Bleach, it was determined that the origin language of the furigana word often correlates with a certain character race/type, or in short, that the languages are chosen for a reason when giving readings to Japanese kanji. As the author Tite Kubo mentions in an interview (Chitamachii, 2013), each language has a different sound to it, which allows it to confer a slightly different nuance to the meaning, and this can contribute cultural information, or even evoke historical sentiments. One question that remains to be answered is whether or not the average Japanese reader can tell the difference between Spanish and German words when realized in the Japanese orthographic (and subsequently, the phonological) system, which would allow for one to make more definitive conclusions about how these languages are perceived by the average Japanese speaker. Furthermore, this anlysis has not examined whether or not the Spanish or German words were grammatically correct, or even situationally appropriate. Many of the terms that appeared in the data would not likely be used by a native speaker of the language (e.g. arrancar is a verb in Spanish, the nominal form of which would be arrancador, etc.), and some are entirely agrammatical, mismatched in gender, number, etc. (e.g. cero oscuras in Spanish, which would correctly be written as cero oscuro), while others demonstrate problems in transcription/pronunciation (e.g. the German word for ‘heating’ would be properly phonetically transcribed as haitsen, not heizen). It also remains to be seen how these issues affect
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readers who are fluent speakers of these languages, as many appear unaltered in their respective German and Spanish official translations. Finally, in addition to the dozens of official and unofficial translations of the manga, Bleach has also become a truly multimodal experience, as there exists anime, dozens of video games, multiple stage musicals, audio dramas, etc. In these animated, live action, or audio-only contexts where furigana are not present, there are possibly other strategies that are used by creators to place characters into easy-to-understand archetypal roles, and how these strategies differ from the ones analyzed here is fodder for future research. 6. Language choice as a place for stereotype injection Bleach is not unique in the manipulation of Japanese scripts; there are thousands of manga that make creative uses of furigana text. One question that may come to mind after seeing this data is why this practice of appending foreign language-derived readings to Japanese kanji words would exist. What do the readers of Bleach gain from the author having done this? To answer this question, it becomes important to look at why German and Spanish were overwhelmingly the most common choices for foreign language readings in these texts. In Japan, English is currently the most commonly-studied foreign language in schools, and is standardized into the national curriculum. This is often at the expense of other languages, with many being of the opinion that ‘‘[a]s far as education policy in the area of foreign language education in Japan is concerned, the only foreign language that really exists is English” (Sugitani and Tomita, 2012). The second most commonly studied language at the high school level is Mandarin. While German and Spanish are studied by some Japanese native speakers, they are further down the list of commonly-studied foreign languages, being the 4th and 5th most-studied languages respectively at the high school level, not including English (Monbukagakusho, 2016). This further raises the question as to why a Japanese author would use words originating from German, Spanish, or really any foreign language in their works. Kubo, the author of Bleach, has been invited to speak at events around the world, as his work is enjoyed on a global scale. He was asked about the inclusion of different languages in a public interview at the Leipzig Book Fair in Germany in March 2013 (Chitamachii, 2013): Interviewer: ‘‘Bleach is full of different languages. Quincy use the German language, the Arrancar name everything in Spanish. . . Why?” Kubo: ‘‘As for the Arrancar, I think Spanish sounds very passionate and a little erotic, and it matches their wild lifestyle. German sounds cold, harsh, and methodic, which is something that matches the straight-forward manner of the Quincy. I would like to use French at some point because it sounds very elegant, but I can’t figure out a good way to include it in the story.” Kubo mentions here certain preconceived notions he has about how languages descriptively sound to him, and states that he has chosen the languages in concordanance with these, and would do so again in the future, if the opportunity presented itself. Further, he likely assumes Japanese readers share these same ideas about how languages sound. As mentioned previously, Shinigami attack names were mostly provided with Japanese readings, which were often ones that a reader could correctly guess having known the canonical readings of the kanji characters. The adjectives used to describe the Quincy and Arrancar, ‘harsh’ and ‘passionate’ respectively, are chosen because they are qualities that differentiate them from the Shinigami, the character with whom the intended reader will most likely identify.
This use of language choice to index linguistic ideologies and convey a stereotype is at the heart of Haarmann’s (1989) framework of ‘stereotype injection’. By adding a ‘touch’ of a foreign language (even a single word) to a piece media, one can ‘‘evoke the intended stereotype in the consumer’s mind” (10). Although Haarmann (1989:234) maintains that ‘‘the stereotype functions of foreign languages in the mass media almost exclusively imply positive features”, I argue that a similar trend is working in this data to imply features that are not positive, including in this case, something as simple as ‘not Japanese’. Past researchers have commented on the strange otherness and almost magical power of katakana words (Sakagami, 2000). These words cannot exist in a vacuum, however, and benefit from having a certain amount of semantic context given to them. In this vein, the kanji characters also appear, in order to give a sense of what the words mean, as most Japanese people do not speak Spanish or German. It is important to note here that while katakana has been used to convey that speech is non-native or disfluent in manga (Robertson, 2015), this is not the case with the present data, as the majority of the speech employed by all characters is given in the canonical/conventional script. Foreign words (and likewise katakana and foreign language furigana) are relatively rare in comparison to the sheer amount of ‘normal’ Japanese dialogue. Blair (1997), in an overview of foreign language usage in Japanese commercials, opines that ‘‘[t]he texts and expressions used in these commercials are not intended to be understood by the ordinary Japanese, and aren’t. Although individual lexical items might be understood, the major portion of the text is simply used to create an image and attach prestige value to the products being advertised”. While commercials like the ones that Blair analyzed are aimed at a different market, given the low rate of Spanish and German intelligibility among Japanese speakers, I believe that this same phenomenon is occurring in this manga as well, whereby an image is being attached to these characters by employing foreign language derived readings. Scripts evoke certain traits and feelings (see Section 2.1), and given the data that has been presented, the furigana in Bleach are certainly playing a part in ascribing certain traits to these characters. The use of katakana to transcribe readings of non-Japanese origin in furigana urges the reader to view these things as ‘other’. While katakana is ascribed a small number of positive attributes (e.g. ‘fresh’) in a list of associations that had been ascribed to the Japanese scripts by past researchers (Robertson, 2015), I posit that the negative attributes given (e.g. ‘jarring’, ‘inorganic’, ‘marked’), were not only more numerous, but are the most relevant to the present analysis. The primary characters with foreign attack names are villains who wear non-traditional Japanese clothing. Such characters are not grouped together with the Shinigami, who are mostly given (‘Japanese’, ‘unmarked’) hiragana furigana, and are positioned as the Japanese-esque characters. In this vein, the intended readership is being led to sympathize with these protagonists over the characters with more foreign flair, with whom they share less in common. However, having access to certain tokens of cultural knowledge would allow readers to access extra traits about these characters, more than simply ‘jarring’, ‘marked’, etc. 6.1. Cultural knowledge & othering It is also possible that kanji are working in conjunction with the foreign language-derived readings in order to strengthen the connections to other cultures in readers who have the knowledge to understand the historical/social contexts surrounding German and Spanish. Since unconventional, non-Japanese-derived readings were given for many kanji in this analysis, it must be assumed that the kanji were chosen for their semantic meaning. This process of maintaining the kanji while allowing for a foreign language-
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derived reading allows for ‘‘translanguaging through furigana within translation without risking intelligibility” (Sato, 2018:239) in Japanese fiction. This importance of the semantic content of the kanji is further reinforced by the fact that certain kanji often re-appear with certain characters/character races, in a way that is clearly nonrandom. One example of this is the recurring kanji 聖 [sei] (JPN: holy, pure, sacred), which occurred in 53% of all German-derived attack names. To place this kanji in a wider context, most Japanese speakers would be familiar with it as a character that appears in conjunction with Christianity (particularly Catholicism), holiness, or purity. As such, it appears in Japanese words such as聖絶 [seizetsu] ‘a ban; a biblical destruction’, 聖別 [seibetsu] ‘consecration, sanctification’, and 神聖ローマ帝国 [shinsei ro¯ma teikoku] ‘Holy Roman Empire; First Reich’. Given its frequency in the corpus, it is highly likely that this choice was deliberate on the part of the author. Aside from the historical connection between Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, one other connection that appears between German history and this kanji is the attempts by the Nazi German leaders to acquire items from Christian mythology, such as the shroud of Turin,トリノ聖骸布 [torin seigaifu], or the Lance of Longinus, 聖槍 [seiso¯], two items whose names in Japanese also contain this kanji. Another connection to German history becomes apparent in Bleach when it is revealed that the ruler of Wandenreich killed all Quincy who were not pure-blooded, deeming them impure, with the intention of creating a stronger race. This is an apparent allusion to Nazi genocidal policies leading up to and during World War II. Through attributing German-derived readings to attack names, and employing specific kanji with certain historical/religious associations, it is possible for an author to immediately place these characters in the role of ‘racial purists,’ allowing readers to draw connections to eugenics and genocide, without having to overtly mention Nazism. However, these connections only become possible if the reader has these historical notions readily available in their mind. Furthermore, these notions are not equally viewed across all societies. Although the Holocaust is known about from a historical standpoint in Japan, ‘‘such knowledge lacks the emotional aspect of national trauma that characterizes its presence in Western societies” (Jaworowicz-Zimny, 2018:10-11). While allusions to the Third Reich and Nazi-adjacent characters are not uncommon in Japanese manga and anime, because such references lack a certain emotional impact, they may be no more haunting than the ‘‘villain in a favourite anime” (Jaworowicz-Zimny, 2018:11). However, wartime depictions that hit closer to home (such as of the Japanese Emperial Army or Navy) are ‘‘characterized by emotional connections and positive identification that are missing from [those of the] Nazi” (11). At any rate, even though the story of the Quincy (i.e. a thinly-veiled allusion to race politics in Nazi Germany) might evoke an emotional sentiment in English-speaking readers, this is not necessarily the case with the original intended audience, i.e. monolingual Japanese youths. No matter the emotional response, however, the author chose German due to it sounding ‘cold, harsh, and methodic’ (in his opinion), and these descriptors are reflected in the behavior of the characters. In terms of the kanji assigned Spanish-derived furigana readings, the most common kanji were those referencing animals, such as 獣 [kemono] (JPN: beast) or 狼 [o¯kami] (JPN: wolf). In a similar way to how the Quincy were characterized, the use of these kanji allowed for the author to immediately characterize the characters as ‘‘wild”, which is one adjective Kubo used to describe the characters in the interview referenced earlier. Furthermore, Haarmann’s (1984) analysis of foreign words used in Japanese commercials on television also found Spanish words to be connected to ‘‘masculine charm” or ‘‘wild tenderness” (1 0 6). These linguistic features combine with certain visual cues, such as the masks of the Arrancar often having animalistic features on them (e.g. fangs, ears, wings,
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etc.), to create a large-scale characterization across an entire fictional race, stating that these characters are passionate, bestial, and wholly different from both the Shinigami and the Quincy. No matter the characterization, however, the foreign language readings (and the kanji they are ascribed to as well) function as a method of marking the antagonist characters as ‘other’. This process of ‘othering’ refers to the concept of ‘‘representing an individual or a social group to render them distant, alien or deviant” (Coupland, 1999:5). In other words, those who are given foreign language readings (the antagonists) are put in direct contrast to the protagonists, who are to be seen as Japanese both in their traditional cultural and linguistic practices. Russell (1991), in his description of Black representations in Japan, states that Japanese media often works towards preserving ‘‘alienness by ascribing to it certain standardized traits which mark it as Other but which also serve the reflexive function of allowing Japanese to meditate on their racial and cultural identity in the face of challenges by Western modernity, cultural authority, and power” (Russell 1991:4). In other words, the antagonistic characters being positioned as foreign allows for the intended reader to position the protagonists as non-foreign (e.g. Japanese), and thus empathize with them over the characters who employ more foreign language-derived readings. To expand upon Blair (1997), it is not only non-Japanese words and text that are ‘‘not intended to be understood by the ordinary Japanese”, but these non-Japanese characters and their motivations as well. Especially for those foreign others who are ‘‘the distant other, the other who only appears to us within the media” (Silverstone, 1994:110), these mediated appearances serve a very important role, not only in shaping the ideologies and concepts and social definitions of foreignness, but also the definition of ‘Japaneseness’, as defined in opposition to the foreign other. 6.2. Global media and language ideologies This insertion of pseudo-foreign language features into one’s native language is by no means unique to Japanese. ‘Mock Spanish’ (Hill, 1993; 1998; 2005) refers to the appropriation of certain (assumed) linguistic features of Spanish by monolingual mostly Anglo individuals over a large number of linguistic domains (e.g. pronunciation changes, affixation, semantic shifts, etc). While the adoption of Mock Spanish is usually done to demonstrate ‘desirable qualities’ of the speaker (e.g. sense of humor, easy-going attitude towards life, etc.), its functionality depends entirely on the speaker and hearer having shared knowledge of the understanding of the racial stereotypes that co-occur with the language variety they are appropriating. In order for Mock Spanish to mean something at all, speakers and listeners ‘‘require access to very negative racializing representations of Chicanos and Latinos as stupid. . . lazy. . . disorderly” (Hill 1998: 683). This cultural knowledge is then reinforced through the implementation of the linguistic features in question. However, scripted and constructed speech has also been pointed to as a very fruitful site to see language stereotyping at work. Hill’s framework was later employed to similarly study ‘Mock Ebonics’ in textual form to a very similar effect (Ronkin and Karn, 1999). In that study, constructed dialogue of Mock Ebonics were assigned to imaginary characters/users, who were then vilified for such use. It was shown that through a specific system of linguistic strategies, the users were actively perpetuating the ‘‘imperfection and inferiority of Ebonics and its users” (3 6 0). In these cases, the socially powerful language variety is reflexively put in a position of power by imitating/mocking the use of ‘inferior’ linguistic features. Furthermore, because ideologies regarding language use and cultural inferiority/superiority exist in a complex system, there are cases whereby the language speakers would be viewed very differently based on the language whose linguistic features they
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choose to adopt. For example, Park (2004) demonstrated through a close analysis of Korean television programs that entertainers would employ purposefully poor English in order to demonstrate a negative competency, thus subordinating themselves in a selfdeprecative manner. However, Hye Lee (2017:225) showed that on similar Korean television programs, entertainers would employ a sort of ‘Mock Chinese’ as a means of ‘‘rationalizing, legitimatizing, and naturalizing the dominance of Korean over the Chinese language and Chinese national group in Korea.” Whether or not the appropriation of the features of another language exalts or denegrades your own language/culture depends on the linguistic ideologies and cultural knowledge present that mediate the connections between these languages. However, whether positive or negative, all of these processes of linguistic appropriation are reflexively positioning the speaker’s culture in a certain light by appropriating aspects of a different language/culture, making these processes very similar to what we witnessed in Bleach. Given that mock languaging often involves employing inaccurate language features not actually employed by the target group, we find similarities in Bleach, given that many of the Spanish or German words were not grammatically correct, or even situationally appropriate. Many of the terms that appeared in the data would not likely be used by a native speaker of the language (e.g. arrancar is a verb in Spanish, the nominal form of which would be arrancador, etc.), and some are entirely agrammatical, mismatched in gender, number, etc. (e.g. cero oscuras in Spanish, which would correctly be written as cero oscuro), while others demonstrate problems in transcription/pronunciation (e.g. the German word for ‘heating’ would be properly phonetically transcribed as haitsen, not heizen). 7. Conclusion The present study sought to investigate how one manga series Bleach, by Tite Kubo, uses loanwords as tools to invoke a ‘stereotype injection’ (Haarmann 1989), as well as index certain character traits without overt characterization through dialogue. Through analysis of the usage of Spanish-derived and German-derived furigana readings in Bleach, it was determined that the origin language of the furigana word often correlates with a certain character type, and functions as a way to inject stereotypes about characters into even small portions of their dialogue. Further, it was determined that many of the social stereotypes concerning these languages were present in word choice and kanji usage, yielding a cultural idea of characterological type without the need for overt characterization. This serves a great purpose in a series such as Bleach, which has a multitude of named characters, as protagonists/antagonists can be characterized with broad strokes by using foreign language-derived readings. Further comparisons were made between the foreign language-derived readings in Bleach and the uses of ‘mock languaging’ analyzed by previous scholars. Through these comparisons we have gleaned that, while Japanese has a typographical toolset to assist with easily making words seem foreign/non-Japanese, it is certainly not the only method of othering available cross-linguistically. Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declared that there is no conflict of interest Acknowledgements I would like to thank Claire Maree and Janet Shibamoto-Smith for their very supportive feedback on this project, and the Anime
& Manga Studies Symposium where this research was first workshopped. References AJPEA, 2017. 2016 nen no komikku (kami + denshi) shijo wo happyo shimashita. [Announcement of 2016 comic (paper + digital) market)].