Edited by Tommaso M. Milani
[Linguistic Landscape 4:3] 2018
► pp. 238–256
Cosmopolitan English, traditional Japanese
Reading language desire into the signage of Tokyo’s gay district
The Linguistic Landscape of Tokyo’s premier gay district, Shinjuku Ni-chōme, contains much English-language signage. Previously described in touristic literature as marking out spaces for foreign gay men, this article draws upon an ethnographic study of how signage produces queer space in Japan to argue that English instead constructs a sense of cosmopolitan worldliness. The ethnography also reveals that participants within Ni-chōme’s gay bar sub-culture contrast this cosmopolitan identity with a “traditional” identity indexed by Japanese-language signage. In exploring how Japanese men navigate Ni-chōme’s signage, this article deploys Piller and Takahashi’s (2006) notion of “language desire” to investigate the role of LL in influencing individual queer men’s sense(s) of self. This article thus broadens the focus of LL research to account for how engagement with an LL may impact identity construction, with an emphasis placed on how learning to “read” an LL influences the formation of sexual identities.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Previous LL research in the Japanese context
- 3.Methodology
- 4.Instances of English and Japanese across Ni-chōme’s LL
- 5.Reading English and Japanese in Ni-chōme as indexes for gay identity
- 6.Language desire and the formation of gay identity through engaging with an LL
- 7.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.18004.bau
References
References
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 january 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.