Valorization of an ‘Enemy Language’: Politics of ‘Progressive Anti-War’ Position and English-Worship in the Japanese TV Show Massan

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes portrayals of English in Japan during World War II in Massan, a Japanese television show that features the life of a mixed-race bilingual couple, Masaharu (the Japanese husband) and Ellie (the Scottish wife), and their adopted Japanese daughter (Ema) living in Japan. I argue that the show constructs a hierarchy of languages where English is valorized as a sign of an anti-war position, speaking one’s mind and material wealth, all framed as progressive, in contrast to Japanese language. As the use of language is connected to race relations in the drama, this hierarchisation of English and Japanese languages is consistent with the historical and current valorization of English and whiteness in Japan. However, this hierarchy contradicts the show’s explicit message of inclusiveness of all races. This article analyses a set of performative messages conveyed by this highly popular drama in the current Japanese political and racial context to show the ways uses of language convey unarticulated and sometimes contradictory messages.

Notes

¹ To consider ‘Japanese’ as the language of Japan implies a nationalist conception of a homogeneous language, as well as the existence of homogeneous speech communities. However, because this article focuses on the English–Japanese relationship, I will use this artificial binary between English and Japanese in this article.

² See Ito (this issue) for another analysis of how English depicted in the drama.

³ Notions of ‘race,’ ‘nation,’ and ‘ethnicity’ are all social constructs with specific connotations, such as biological (race), political/legal (nation), and cultural (ethnicity), though they are all contextual and complex (e.g., race has negative and ethnicity has positive connotations—see Urciuoli, 1996). As analytical concepts, the distinction between these terms is irrelevant because these theoretical notions are merely ‘takes’ on phenomena popularized among theorists during a particular time period (Wolf, 1994). Therefore, in this article, for consistency I use ‘race’.

⁴ See Suzuki (this volume) for a discussion of Ellie’s hair color.

⁵ Though probably not so familiar to the Japanese audience, this treatment of Ellie is reminiscent of that in Japanese American internment camps in the U.S. during this time—being treated with suspicion because of race despite their loyalty to the US.

⁶ During the war, it is suggested in the show, wearing nice clothes was condemned as not sacrificing oneself 100% for the war efforts and flaunting oneself in the face of those who do.

⁷ See Suzuki (this issue) for a brief discussion of the same photographs.

⁸ The show’s message about mixed-race couples introduced at the end of the episodes puts all mixed-race marriages side by side in an equal footing and is an important performative act to equalize their positions. However, it is problematic also to ignore the history of discrimination and its legacy against certain marriages depending on the race of the spouse of the Japanese. For more on this topic, see Koikari (1999); Lim (2015); Miller (1995); and Doerr (2013).