The Listening Subject of Japanese Modernity and His Auditory Double: Citing, Sighting, and Siting the Modern Japanese Woman

Abstract

From approximately 1887 through World War 1, a surge of commentaries were written and circulated in the Japanese print media about the "strange" and "unpleasant" (mimizawarina) sounds issuing from the mouths of schoolgirls. Male intellectuals of various affiliations located the source of their dismay in verbending forms such as texo, noxo, dawa that occurred at the end of schoolgirl utterances. 1 They called such speech forms "schoolgirl speech" (jogakuseikotoba). It was jarring to their ears; it sounded vulgar and low class; its prosodic features were described as "fast," "contracting," and "bouncing with a rising intonation": and it was condemned as "sugary and shallow." Using the newly available modern textual space of "reported speech" (Voloshinov 1973), male intellectuals cited what they scornfully referred to as "teyo-dawa speech" (texoduwii kotoba) in an effort to convince parents and educators to discourage it as a corrupt form of speaking. The irony here is that main of the speech forms then identified as schoolgirl speech are today associated with "women s language," or the "feminine" speech style, indexing the figure of the generic urban middle-class woman. 2 The contemporary discourse of Japanese women's language erases this historical emergence from social memory to construct women's language as an essential and timeless part of culture and tradition. Public opinion, responding to a perceived social change toward gender equit\ recurrently deplores what once again is described as linguistic corruption and the cultural loss of an authentic women's language.As a demographic category. 3 the term schoolgirl referred to girls and young women of the elite classes who attended the women's secondary schools that had been instituted as part of the early Meiji modernization project inspired by Western liberal Enlightenment thought. By the late 19th century, women's secondary education had been incorporated into the state s mandatory education system, and schoolgirls became the immediate and direct target of the state s constitution of the (gendered) national subject b> educating them Cultural Anthropology 18(2): 156 193. into "good wives and wise mothers" for modernizing Japan and, thereby, transforming them into "modern Japanese women." Although they constituted less than 0.1 percent of the female school-age population in the middle Meiji, schoolgirls and their (apparently cacophonous) voices were incessantly cited, just as their (apparently ubiquitous) presence was continuously sighted as an ambivalent icon of modernizing Japan. 4 What is significant is that male intellectuals were not just distracted by schoolgirl speech but that they positioned themselves in the act of overhearing. Consider the scene of a modern Japanese male intellectual flaneur walking on the increasingly urban streets of Tokyo, pausing to eavesdrop on the conversation of schoolgirls. What possesses him as an urban ethnographer/observer to stop and listen to their unspeakably "strange" voice, which he identifies, not as inarticulate noi...

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