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Position

Professor at Institute of Japan Studies

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Field

Pragmatics / Discourse Analysis / Japanese Language Education

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Learn and discuss with others from around the world

Develop skills to communicate from Japan to the world

At TUFS, I have been teaching Japanese to international students for about ten years at the Japanese Language Center for International Students (JLCTUFS). I am engaged in the study of pragmatics and Japanese language teaching. The conversations and the texts of native Japanese speakers and Japanese learners serve as my data.

An international student once came up to me and said, "Although I have studied Japanese up through the advanced level, I do not know what words to use with Japanese people I meet for the first time or how I should speak to them." This is what got me started on studying politeness strategy (language behavior that takes others into consideration) for promoting smooth communications. At that time, my research theme was the strategies and intentions that exist when one shifts from speaking in the "desu-masu" style to the "da" style and vice versa. Currently I am studying opinion statements. I asked university students from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia to write opinion essays regarding the same topic, and I am analyzing the differences and similarities in the structure and flow of sentences, how arguments are made, and so on. In addition, in hopes of making even a small contribution to accumulating and making progress on research regarding Japanese language teaching, I have turned the data I collected into corpus data and have made it public.

I will be teaching a course on "Academic Japanese" in the first year of the Master's Program in Japan Studies. It is essential to have communication skills to be able to communicate clearly to people who have different backgrounds and to people who are not specialized in the same field, if we are to reframe Japan from a global perspective. "Japanese Education" deals not only with words, but also with comprehensive and academic dimensions relating to society, culture, and psychology. Thus, not to go back to my aforementioned research on opinion statements, but I hope students will learn aspects that will form the foundation of their research. They include research perspectives, subjects, and methods that will sharpen their academic writing skills, composition skills, and communication skills needed to write papers and reports. More specifically, I intend to begin the course by having students read papers in their field of study, and then have them analyze the approaches and content. I will then guide students to be able to examine on their own questions such as whether the viewpoint is consistent and whether the theme is not overly broad.

I myself still carry out joint research with my Taiwanese and Korean friends whom I met in graduate school, and they give me great motivation. "Global human resourses" from around the world come to TUFS. Therefore, I hope you will conduct not only desk research, but also deepen your studies through communicating with a diverse range of people to actively develop your study.