Keigo in Modern Japan: Polite Language from Meiji to the Present

Patricia Wetzel offers in this volume a comprehensive examination of a frequently discussed yet much misunderstood aspect of the Japanese language. Keigo, or "polite language," is often viewed as a quaint accessory to Japanese grammar and a relic of Japan's feudal past. Nothing, Wetzel contends, could be further from the truth. It is true that Japan has a long history of differentiating linguistic form on the basis of social status, psychological detachment, emotional reserve, and a host of other context-dependent factors. But, as is made clear in this unique and broadly framed study, modern keigo consciousness and keigo grammar emerged out of Japan's encounter with Western intellectual trends in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Keigo in Modern Japan presents a finely nuanced linguistic and political review of keigo available nowhere else in English.

The first chapter outlines the ways in which keigo has been problematized in Western linguistics through the application of structuralist analysis and its offshoots. But keigo's presence in the English-language literature does not begin to compare with the place it occupies in the Japanese linguistic canon. Wetzel describes the historical roots and growth of keigo and the popularity of how-to manuals, which, she contends, are less about overt instruction than reinforcing what people already believe. Keigo is perhaps the only spoken language phenomenon that can compete with script for a place in ideological arguments over what constitutes correct and acceptable Japanese. It captured the imagination of Japanese scholars and laypeople as its mastery became first a barometer of social status and then a measure of cultural identity. Wetzel argues that these functions took center stage as keigo was put to use in the service of modernization and democratization, eventually becoming a matter of "common sense." But keigo is more than a gauge of status, and a close look at the linguistic landscape of Japan makes this explicit. Demonstrating how thoroughly social and interpersonal cues find their way into the fabric of Japanese, Wetzel astutely observes that there is no linguistic place in Japan that is not keigo.