Love and Language in Massan: The Turbulent Romance of Toshio and Hana

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes courtship between secondary characters Toshio and Hana in the televised NHK drama Massan. When viewed through the lens of sociolinguistics, their romance is fraught with linguistic and pragmatic problems. Toshio and Hana speak different non-prestigious dialects, and also spend much of their interaction arguing. However, they eventually marry. Their path to marriage and the contents of their speech are also interesting from the perspective of cultural linguistics because they reflect competing cultural models for successful (happī endo) romances derived from the analysis of romance fiction. One type of romance reflects Japanese ideals of social contextualization, while the other is based on translations from English, reflecting cultural importation.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank my fellow special-issue authors and especially our organizer, Satoko Suzuki, for cheerful camaraderie and patient support through this project. My paper has benefited from multiple editorial revisions. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

¹ I note that dialect speech uttered by characters in dramas may not reflect what actual dialectal speakers find as preferred usages vis-a-vis gender and age. Further discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of the current analysis.

² Ellie used a loan word: rabu (love); Kumatora interprets it to mean that Hana and Toshio had a sexual relationship.

³ The rokeTV blog (2015) described the scene as ‘Toshio’s love at first sight’.

⁴ The following punctuation marks are used in the transcription: . a pause preceded by falling intonation (。in Japanese),a pause preceded by sustained intonation (、in Japanese) ! a pause preceded by an emphasized utterance ? a pause preceded by rising intonation.

⁵ The Hiroshima-dialect polite copula degansu corresponds to the Standard Japanese gozaimasu.

⁶ And though, as with so many other parts of this story, we cannot easily frame this criticism in historical context; Toshio’s words here remind us that women at that time were being similarly criticized in public (Inoue, 2006: 56–74).

⁷ As mentioned above, Hana manages the household where everyone lives. While everybody benefits from her substantial labor, Kumatora in particular has relied on her, as his wife died a long time ago. Ellie is framed as an underdeveloped apprentice of Hana, still learning how to cook.