Reinforced Codes and Boundaries: Japanese Speakers' Remedial Episode Avoidance in Problematic Situations With “Americans”

Abstract

In this study, I describe Japanese speakers' experiences, described in in-depth interviews, of not engaging in a remedial episode to deal with problematic situations with native English speakers. I contrast such experiences with a case in which a participant did engage in a remedial episode, learned a new code element, and negotiated contrasting codes. I show that when the participants did not engage in a remedial episode, their views of the code elements and the boundaries were reinforced, and their stereotypes about the other group persisted. I describe a vicious circle in which the participants were caught. They did not engage in a remedial episode because of their lack of confidence in their ability to speak English, distant relationships with others, and perceptions of themselves and Americans as belonging to different groups. Their not doing so, in turn, resulted in confirming these 3 factors. The study contributes to the research on negative events in intercultural communication by describing the interactional dynamics of how participants' views of boundaries and stereotypes can be reinforced.

Notes

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Convention of the International Communication Association, San Diego, CA, in May 2003. I thank Kristine Fitch for many valuable comments. I am also grateful to Gerry Philipsen and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments for revision. Any errors that remain are my responsibility.

In the unstructured schedule interview or nonschedule standardized interview, “… certain types of information are desired from all respondents but the particular phrasing of questions and their order are redefined to fit the characteristics of each respondent” (Denzin, 1989, p. 105).

I transcribed the data word for word because transcription details, such as overlaps and length of gap, were not necessary for this analysis.

All the participants' names were changed to protect their privacy.

Note, however, that it was the participants' perception of their ability to communicate, not necessarily their objective fluency in English, that seems to have affected their decisions not to confront others. For instance, we do not know whether those who engaged in remedial episodes (e.g., Hitomi in Excerpt 1) were more fluent in English than were those who did not (e.g., Yoko and Hiroko in Excerpts 2 and 3).

The situation that Hiroko described in this excerpt is similar to the dilemma described in Buttny (1999) between “the imagined ideal” (e.g., the African American students wanting to form friendships with Whites) and “the everyday reality” (e.g., their being unable to do so). The difference is that Hiroko, as well as other participants in this study, mentioned language as the reason for the difficulty, whereas the participants in Buttny's (1999) study gave race as the reason.

The participants' difficulty resembles the dilemma faced by potential learners of knowledge about discourse conventions, described by Gumperz (1982) as follows: “They must establish long lasting, intensive personal relationships in order to learn, yet their very lack of the necessary strategies for setting up conditions that make possible learning makes it difficult for them to achieve this”(p. 209).

Moreover, the participants' use of the term Americans in their talk itself may have not only reflected but discursively reconstructed and reinforced the national boundary that they perceived (Buttny, 1999; Moerman, 1993). It is, however, beyond the scope of this study to examine the discursive constructions of national categories.

Griefat and Katriel (1989), for instance, described the cultural code of the Arabic folk term musayara in Israel. Musayara is associated with an other-oriented attitude with the effort to maintain harmony by trying to avoid topics of potential discord or remarks that are considered confrontational.

For different means, see, for example, the study of “Teamsterville” in Philipsen (1975). Also, see Basso (1970) for situations in which silence is considered appropriate in the culture of the Western Apache.