Humor in Japanese

Practical Ideas & Resources

Resources in this section curated by: Risa Miura, Kaleb Stubbs

Apologizing in Japanese

PRACTICAL IDEAS AND RESOURCES

Resources in this section curated by: Masaki Eguchi, Yoshihisa Hirota

Academic Resources on Humor in Japanese

Resources in this section curated by: Risa Miura, Kaleb Stubbs

De Mente, B. L., & Botting, G. (2015). Etiquette Guide to Japan: Know the Rules that Make the Difference! (Third Edition) (Revised ed.). Tuttle Publishing.

Maintaining harmony or 和 (wa) is a key staple in Japanese culture. Friction or irritation is considered taboo. This surface harmony takes precedence over others considerations. The essential part of proper behavior is to avoid being ashamed and shaming others as a result of behaving in an unacceptable manner. Stemming from a tale of old Japanese mythology where a god failed to follow prescribed etiquette and shamed his fellow gods and goddesses and was banned from the heavens, direct criticism towards someone's wrongdoing can potentially lead to more serious consequences. Thus to avoid criticism, people often use third parties such as a higher ranking individual or vague, indirect language to address a problem. It is also common to use humor to remove some of the sting while making a point. 

Childhood training in Japanese etiquette was affected more through praise and example rather than threat of punishment. During infancy and childhood, praise is excessively given when acting appropriately (bowing correctly, using chopsticks properly, singing a song well, etc.) Once a person reaches teen years, expectations are higher and compliments become rare. However, praise can be overly used with foreign visitors who show an understanding of or skill related to Japanese culture (use of language, knowledge of proper etiquette). Even if someone is extremely good at something, an expert use of modesty is used to keep others from ostracizing them or being seen as arrogant. In this sense, sarcasm can be used to make that person stand out (overly praising them).

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Gustafsson, J. (2010). Puns in Japanese advertisements. [Bachelor’s thesis, Lund University] https://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=1621551&fileOId=1621563

The author of this thesis argues that "The most probable reason why Japanese discourse is so packed with puns would be its remarkable abundance of homonyms and paronyms, which [] is one of the most basic conditions for creating a pun (p.22)."

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Hayata, K. (2006). Statistical prosody: rhyming pattern selection in Japanese short poetry. Forma, 21(3), 259-273. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.620.2859&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Senryu was derived from waka, which consists of a word pattern of 5・7・5・7・7 , but senryu is limited to 5・7・5 words. “Although the syllabic structure of senryu coincides with that of HAIKU, this poetry is not bound by the stylistic requirements concerning the KIGO” (p.266) or a season word, and it became more popular among common folks and often included edgy sarcasm. Thus, senryu has now been enjoyed for a very long period of time. 

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Hudson, M. E., Matsumoto, Y., & Mori, J. (Eds.). (2018). Pragmatics of Japanese: Perspectives on grammar, interaction and culture (Vol. 285). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Honorifics must be used judiciously because they could be perceived as rude, distant, or insincere. Being careful about sentence endings is to consider the other’s feelings just like using honorifics. “By using expressions that are neither decisive nor assertive, you can make others feel that you are a calm and gentle person”.In contexts where the speakers are part of the same group (i.e., family or close friends), normally keigo would not be used and casual speech is even spoken to those older than you. However, when keigo is used in such situations, it creates somewhat of a sarcastic distance between the speaker and the listener. A similar phenomenon can be seen when someone is acting out of place or is being too arrogant. One might use honorifics to place that person on an imaginary pedestal as an attempt to embarrass them or make them stand out even more. This is why it is taboo to brag about one's own talents or accomplishments. In fact, the better someone is at something, it is more common and acceptable that the person uses a masterful technique of humbling themselves and keeping the harmony of the group.

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Kumayama, A. (2010). The interrelation of Japanese language and culture. Global Business Languages, 2(1), 6. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=gbl 

Often, American students encounter difficulty in learning the Japanese language. In addition to the grammatical differences that exist between Japanese and English, there are many cultural aspects of Japanese society that do not easily translate to American equivalents. In an effort to improve the learning process, many Western universities and business schools teaching Japanese as a second language have incorporated the study of language and culture together.

Kumayama mentions that "Since Japanese culture is high context in nature and American culture is relatively low context, it would be easy for an American student to misunderstand or miss some subtle contextual hints dropped by a native Japanese speaker (p.52)."

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Maemura, Y. (2014). Humor and laughter in Japanese groups: The kuuki of negotiations. Humor, 27(1), 103-119. https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2013-0049 

The authors of this article studied examples of naturally-occurring humor and laughter taken from simulated Japanese negotiations. Task-oriented negotiations were held in group settings, and participants were assigned conflicting interests to observe the occurrence of laughter in conflict situations. In-depth analyses of several negotiations were done in an attempt to reveal how humor and laughter are used to affect the negotiation process, and to shed light on how Japanese negotiators perceive and manage conflict situations. The study revealed that Japanese conversations are governed by a concept known as kuuki, and various types of laughter can be explained through the appropriateness of an utterance in relation to the implicitly defined kuuki of a social situation.

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Moody, S. J. (2014). “Well, I’m a Gaijin”: Constructing identity through English and humor in the international workplace. Journal of Pragmatics, 60, 75–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.11.001 

Since globalization increases linguistic and cultural diversity in local business settings, workers from different backgrounds are faced with the challenge of negotiating a variety of social identities throughout daily workplace interaction. This study employed an interactional sociolinguistics approach to analyze discourse data from a two-day observation of an American in a Japanese company. English and humor are used by the intern and his coworkers to co-construct a gaijin ‘foreigner’ identity in a manner that yields positive interactional and social effects. This discursive manifestation of an outsider identity effectively facilitates interaction, providing a non-intrusive strategy for interruption and opportunities for language play, socialization, and laughter. Results shed light on how diverse backgrounds can be used as a strategy for communicating and building relationships across linguistic and social barriers.

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Neff, P., & Rucynski, J. (2017). Japanese perceptions of humor in the English language classroom. Humor, 30(3), 279-301. https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2016-0066 

Despite humor being an educational tool in language learning contexts, questions of appropriateness, cultural sensitivity, and student expectations cannot be ignored. This is especially the case in a culture such as Japan, where the time and place for humor is often dictated by the social norms of warai no ba, or “laughter places.” 

In order to better understand the role of humor from the Japanese language learner’s perspective, the researchers conducted a survey of 918 university students across Japan to elicit their views on the importance of humor for language learning and proficiency, as well as its significance in understanding cultural differences. Results indicated that most participants strongly favored inclusion of humor as part of the classroom experience but that cultural differences must be carefully considered by instructors. Furthermore, while variables such as gender and academic discipline did not have a significant effect on the results, the English proficiency of the participants did, with more proficient learners indicating a greater degree of comfort and cultural understanding from use of in-class humor than those with lesser ability.

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Nishimura, S., Nevgi, A., & Tella, S. (2008). Communication style and cultural features in high/low context communication cultures: A case study of Finland, Japan and India. Teoksessa A. Kallioniemi (toim.), Uudistuva ja kehittyvä ainedidaktiikka. Ainedidaktinen symposiumi, 8(2008), 783-796.

People from different countries communicate in ways that often lead to misunderstandings. The authors’ argument, based on Hall’s theory of high/low context cultures, is that these differences are related to different communication cultures. The authors show how Japan and Finland belong to high context (HC) cultures, while India is closer to a low context (LC) culture with certain high context cultural features. “In an HC culture, the listener is expected to be able to read ‘between the lines’, to understand the unsaid, thanks to his or her background knowledge” (p.785). 

The authors also contend that Finnish communication culture is changing towards a lower context culture. Hall’s theory is complemented with Hofstede’s (2008) individualism vs. collectivism dimension and with Lewis’s (1999, 2005) cultural categories of communication and Western vs. Eastern values. Examples from Finland, Japan and India are presented in the article.

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Oshima, Kimie. (2013). An examination for styles of Japanese humor: Japan’s funniest story project 2010 to 2011. Intercultural Communication Studies 22(2). 91–109.

The focus of this study was to explain why Japanese humor tends to be used for inner circles, by creating an online website that collected funny story submissions from all ages and gender in Japanese. The study lasted from April 2010 to March 2011, and people were able to submit their stories and vote for their favorite ones. It was discovered that Japanese humor doesn’t like the convention of “ready-made jokes”, jokes that talk about imaginary people, and instead want funny personal stories, “omoshiroihanashi”. The reason being that these funny stories are shared between people that have a close relationship and can be more casual with each other. Some of the most popular types of stories were about culture/society, and words/language misunderstandings (pun, word play, interlanguage miscommunication). 

This is important for our curation, because it showcases how humor can be vastly different from one language to the other. Not only in content but how humor is co-constructed and in what context it is created. That humor can be inappropriate used in different context and therefore, it is necessary to explicitly address these differences with pragmatics instruction.

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Shinohara, K., & Kawahara, S. (2010). Syllable intrusion in Japanese puns, dajare. In Proceedings of the 10th meeting of Japan Cognitive Linguistic Association. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kazuko-Shinohara-2/publication/343319135_Syllable_intrusion_in_Japanese_puns_dajare/links/5f22e8b792851cd302c8cdfb/Syllable-intrusion-in-Japanese-puns-dajare.pdf 

The authors state that "In composing puns (dajare), Japanese speakers create expressions using identical or similar sounding words/phrases. The correspondence between the two elements in Japanese puns can be perfect or imperfect." Oftentimes in Japanese humor, the use of homonyms acts as the base of a punch line where the sounds of the words may be the same, but the writing of the words differ and ultimately contain different meanings. This leads to words and phrases having double meanings which, in turn, can hold a comedic coincidence with a witty play on words. In addition, by spelling the words using a different writing system (using katakana instead of hiragana or kanji), one can change the tone of the words which reflects a different energy and adds a comedic effect.

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Taguchi, N. (Ed.). (2009). Pragmatic competence (Vol. 5). Walter de Gruyter.

In the disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA), the study of pragmatic competence has been driven by several fundamental questions: What does it mean to become pragmatically competent in a second language (L2)? How can we examine pragmatic competence to make inference of its development among L2 learners? In what ways do research findings inform teaching and assessment of pragmatic competence?

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Takada, H. (1993). Pragmatics in second language acquisition in the case of learning Japanese. [Bachelor’s thesis, University of Montana]. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9141&context=etd

The purpose of this study was to test the second language acquisition of some forms of cross-cultural pragmatics. A questionnaire adopted from a study by Blum-Kulka (1982) was used to examine pragmatic mistakes or differences made by first, second, and third year students of Japanese. The learners were native English speakers. Results showed that interlanguage and language transfer were perceived on several of the questionnaire scenarios. For the second question, the length of studying Japanese had a slight impact, but most differences were observed in first year students. Second and third year students did not differ appreciably. The author presents three theories that may explain the pragmatic mistakes or differences made by the participants.

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Takekuro, M. (2006). Conversational jokes in Japanese and English. In J.M. Davis (Ed.), Understanding humor in Japan, (pp. 85-98). Wayne State University Press. 

For anyone interested in Japan, Japanese culture, and humor studies, Understanding Humor in Japan is an important teaching tool. It provides accessible, illustrative examples of humor in both Japanese and English with explanations of their meaning and cultural significance. Scholarly yet readable, these essays offer intelligent discussion on various topics, one of which is a chapter by Makiko Takekuro on conversational jokes.

It is often said that Japanese people lack a sense of humor. In order to find out what makes people say this, the author compares conversational jokes in English and Japanese, hoping to uncover some fundamental differences in communicative strategies between the two languages.

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Uchiyama, H., Seki, A., Kageyama, H., Saito, D. N., Koeda, T., Ohno, K., & Sadato, N. (2006). Neural substrates of sarcasm: A functional magnetic-resonance imaging study. Brain research, 1124(1), 100-110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2006.09.088.

Understanding sarcasm requires a complex process that involves recognizing the beliefs of the speaker. There is a clear association between deficits in mentalizing, which is the ability to understand other people's behavior in terms of their mental state, and the understanding of sarcasm in individuals with autistic spectrum disorders. This suggests that mentalizing is important in pragmatic non-literal language comprehension. To highlight the neural substrates of sarcasm, volunteers underwent functional magnetic-resonance imaging. The research findings indicate that the detection of sarcasm recruits the medial prefrontal cortex, which is part of the mentalizing system, as well as the neural substrates involved in reading sentences. 

The authors explain that irony is characterized by opposition between the literal meaning of the sentence and the speaker's meaning. Sarcasm is used to communicate implicit criticism about the listener or the situation on occasions provoking a negative effect and is accompanied by disapproval, contempt, and scorn. It can increase the perceived politeness of the criticism and decrease the perceived threat and aggressiveness of the criticism or create a humorous atmosphere.

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Wells, M. (1997). Japanese Humour (St Antony’s Series) (1997th ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.

This is not a book of jokes. It is about how people make rules about humor: what humor is, what it is not, what it should and should not be, when it should and should not be used, what type of humor is permissible and what type forbidden, what is good and bad about humor, and what should be considered funny and what should not. The book offers a framework for a general understanding of why and how societies make rules about the use of humor, and how those rules affect patterns of communication and the development of humor and comedy.

ACADEMIC RESOURCES ON APOLOGIZING IN JAPANESE

Resources in this section curated by: Masaki Eguchi, Yoshihisa Hirota

Barnlund, & Yoshioka, M. (1990). Apologies: Japanese and American styles. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 14(2), 193–206. https://doi.org/10.1016/0147-1767(90)90005-H 

Questionnaire study (120 Japanese, 120 American)

• In both countries, saying directly “I am very sorry” was the most popular form of apology.
• Second popular: Japanese preferred to do something for the other person. (compensation)
• American preferred to explain the situation

The analysis revealed statistically no reliable difference in forms of apology chosen by males or females in either Japan or America. With respect to mismanagement of time and incompetent execution of an assignment, each country apologized differently. 

The person violates the norms surrounding the scheduling of events; 

• Japanese preferred to say directly “I am very sorry”
• Americans preferred to explain the situation.

Failure to execute an assignment

• Japanese: compensation
• American: compensation ＋ other forms of apologies

Associate

• Cultural differences appeared in apologies employed with superiors and subordinates, with closest friends, and with strangers. (There was no data on the article.)

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Ide, R. (1998). "Sorry for your kindness": Japanese interactional ritual in public discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 29(5), 509–529. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(98)80006-4 

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Ishihara, N., and Cohen, A. D. (2004) Strategies for learning speech acts in Japanese. Minneapolis, MN: Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, University of Minnesota.

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Lee, H. E., Park, H. S., Imai, T., & Dolan, D. (2012). Cultural Differences Between Japan and the United States in Uses of “Apology” and “Thank You” in Favor Asking Messages. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 31(3), 263–289.

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Sandu, R. (2012). Su(m)imasen and gomen nasai : Linguistic devices marking Japanese apology expressions and emotivity. Language and Dialogue, 2(3), 339-362.

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Sugimoto, N. (1998). "Sorry we apologize so much": Linguistic Factors Affecting Japanese and U.S. American Styles of Apology. Intercultural Communication Studies VIII-1.

This paper tries to find why many observers of Japan-U.S. communication believe that Japanese people are more apologetic than are U.S. Americans in terms of five language related factors.

The elusive sumimasen

• Ex. When people drop a pen and someone picks it up, American people tend to say “Thanks”, and Japanese say sumimasen.

• picking up the pen
  • American: the other’s voluntary act of kindness
  • Japan: this inconveniences the other by putting him or her in a position of having no choice but to pick up the pen.

• sumimasen: associated with apology far more strongly than with Thanks, but it means both
• Japanese take advantage of this elusiveness.

Arigato (Thanks) sounds as if the speaker considers himself / herself as deserving of the favor because it lacks the lowering function.

• Arigato is reserved for situations involving those very close to the speaker

Cultural perceptions of language

Style of apology

• Japanese tend to castigate themselves: emphasizing negative aspects of the situation, promising to repair the damage / not to repeat the same offense.
• For Americans, the excessive self-humiliation is taken as a sign of the speaker’s low self-esteem, and could even embarrass the apology recipient. (In America, castigating themselves is not encouraged.)
• In Japan, a message can but may not and need not always reflect reality.
• American people try to point out bright sides of the situation in their apologies. They believe that it makes the other feel better. →In Japan putting out positive aspects sounds attempting to escape responsibility.
• Japanese people exaggerate negative consequences of the offense without the fear that the other would feel worse. (the other person’s point view →Japanese people’s virtue)

Tolerance to repetition: American people strongly discourage repetition of the same words, while Japanese people are more receptive of such repetitions.

In L2 conversation: Every time they face the situation where they typically say sumimasen in Japanese, they say “I’m sorry”.

Use of Accounts: U.S. American apology usually includes accounts.

For Japanese it sounds “I’m sorry, but…” which leads them to believe Americans never apologize, or Americans don’t know how to apologize.