An interdisciplinary overview of silence in Japan

Abstract

Malinowski’s rather outdated and narrow understanding of silence as the mere negative absence of speech draws our attention to the fact that any proper examination of silence has to be culture-specific and must take into account specific speech communities’ attitudes to and tolerance towards silence. As will become clear later, in Japanese society, silence may be positively regarded and welcomed whereas the overt verbalsation of talk is often viewed with suspicion and is seen as having the potential to cause great loss of face. Of course, much depends on the form of silence under consideration. This chapter adopts a wide definition of silence ranging from the tendency towards minimal verbalisation by a speech community, to the silence characterised by withdrawal from speech by a group of participants within a social interaction, to an individual’s silence through non-participation in an interaction, to an individual’s turn-constituting silent speech act, and finally to the shorter silences of intra- and inter-turn pauses and hesitations. I should admit here that I am more interested in the former macro- silences described above than the latter short, linguistic silences that tend to be the domain of conversation analysis. Even so, no overview of the potential roots of Japanese silence would be complete without an attempt to outline the nature of these micro- silences and the role that they play.

To a natural man, another man’s silence is not a reassuring factor, but, on the contrary, something alarming and dangerous. The stranger who cannot speak the language is to all savage tribesmen a natural enemy. To the primitive mind, whether among savages or our own uneducated classes, taciturnity means not only unfriendliness but directly bad character. (Malinowski cited in Jaworski, 2000, p. 110)