While Japan is often said to be homogenous in population, recent years have seen an increase in foreign residents, making it interesting to consider if the same patterns of adaptation of names found in other countries could be observed. A survey amongst foreign residents of Japan showed that while adaptation of names in their pronunciation was common, it was generally uncommon to use Japanese personal names. However, people of Asian heritage used them more commonly. It is suggested that the binary positioning of Japanese identities may make it difficult for some foreigners to take Japanese names, with additional factors such as racial expectations for foreigners possibly influencing some groups’ ability to take Japanese names.

his paper examines gendered speech in a corpus of 10 popular manga (Japanese comics) series, with attention to realism and genre based differences. While traditionally described as a highly gendered language, Japanese recently has appeared to be becoming less so. Manga are often given as one influential factor for these changes, particularly regarding girls’ use of masculine first-person pronouns; however, previous research has been contradictory, and the importance of gendered-genres leads one to anticipate differences in characters’ speech. In response, I looked at two markers of Japanese gendered speech – personal pronouns and sentence-final particles – finding that while personal pronoun usage was generally normative, all genders used a variety of gendered sentence-final particles. While genre-based variations such as more stereotypical speech in manga for boys may reflect narrative differences, I suggest that the data show that manga reflect previously established changes, as with sentence-final particles, thus appearing consistent with reports that mass-media are not a clear source of linguistic change. However, their perception as low texts may be influential in their association with negative changes, even when such claims are not supported empirically, as with personal pronouns. In this way, popular media’s role in changing gendered language is shown to be more complex than commonly assumed.

The manner in which manga can reflect and influence readers' gender perceptions has been a frequently researched issue. This article is an attempt to consider those questions through language, a traditionally less-examined element, in order to shed new light on how male and female characters are used in manga. To do so, I use a linguistic corpus of ten popular shōjo-manga and shōnen-manga to look at (1) how much of the text found in speech bubbles was spoken by male and female characters; and (2) how many characters were seen. With regards to approximately 80% of all text, the corpus shows that shōnen-manga are extremely skewed towards male characters, compared to shōjo-manga, which is more balanced between female and male characters. While many more characters appear in shōnen-manga, the majority are male. Furthermore, only two female characters in all of the shōnen-manga series account for more than 10% of text, whereas all the shōjo-manga have male characters accounting for over 12%.In examining why this might be, I suggest that the focus on interpersonal relationshipsincluding both friendship and romance -in shōjo-manga may lead to a smaller cast of characters and better balance between male and female characters. However, with authors usually writing for their own gender, I also maintain that it is related to differences in the roles of women and men in Japanese society. These distributions also have an impact on characterization itself, particularly in regards to the use of gendered speech patterns. With insight from Kinsui's yakuwari-go, or role-playing language (2003), I specifically argue that the results predict that shōnen-manga will use more stereotypical speech, particularly in depicting female characters. In offering supporting evidence for this hypothesis, I suggest that this may affect how readers engage with the characters, thus creating different types of reading experiences within the genres. Through this discussion, it will become clear that linguistic data can shed light into how characters are manipulated in manga on a variety of levels, thus appealing to its potential as a legitimate and unique approach to manga research.

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