Up to now I’ve spoken about verbal characters from the perspectives of “class,” “status,” “gender,” and “age” (parts 57–72), and addressed in detail one question I feel my readers may have had —are just four perspectives enough (parts 73 on)? Through this process, we have touched on some of the “Other” characters, such as the “Heian aristocrat,” “Westerner,” “country folk,” “cat,” and “Pyo–nese” (parts 76, 77 and 78).

With your permission, we’ll diverge from our main topic to talk about the “Other” characters a little bit more, particularly the “Kansai native”(1) character.

“Why is the ‘Kansai native’ an ‘Other’ character!?” (or in Kansai dialect: “Kansaijin” ga nande “ijin” ya nen!) I hear some of you retorting. As we saw in the example of Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel The Makioka Sisters (parts 15, 16, and 17), in this series I have said I am observing the “Japanese-speaking community,” but in fact I have only been looking at a very small part of this, the “standard Japanese-speaking community.” I apologize for the lateness of this disclaimer. I hope you will be placated to hear that the “Edokko” is also treated as an “Other” character (part 78).

So, what is normal to a “Kansai native” is only normal in the Kansai community, and not in the “standard Japanese-speaking community.”

Thus the “Kansai native” character reeks of “Other.” In fact, counterfeit “Kansai natives,” who try to utilize this smell of “Other” also crop up sometimes. An example of this is the painter in Yamamoto Shugorou’s Me no Naka no Suna:

I know a Western-style painter named T. He was quite well known as a member of the Shujitu Association, and although his paintings were drab and strange, they sold well so he was famous. Although he was born in Shounan(2), he fluently used Kansai dialect, which he said was the “secret to his sales.” He told me, “It’s hard to sell paintings speaking in standard Japanese, but everything goes smoothly when I speak in Kansai dialect. I can pull in the big bucks whenever I need.”

[From Yamamoto Shugoro Me no naka no Suna (in Neboke Shocho) 1948]

Ugh! What an unsavory artist, with his unsavory Kansai dialect! But if we can put aside this reaction (or even if we can’t), we notice the verbal character that this artist of Western-style pictures deploys when making sales is the “Kansai native,” which is a verbal character that specializes in selling things. When I say that “when we wish to engage in a certain communicative behavior, we deploy the character that is skilled at it” (part 11), this principle is not limited to the context of play but can in fact be observed more generally.

This case is similar to the carpet salesman I encountered in a certain Middle East country, who suddenly deployed a “Kansai native” character, saying Sonna tsumetai koto, iwantoite (have a heart!) when his sales negotiation hit a rough patch (part 5). In the case of the carpet salesman, his “Kansai native” is a failed character (part 74), as his sudden use of Kansai dialect for just that part of his sales pitch was strange, and there was no way someone with such a Middle Eastern appearance could pass himself off as a Kansai native (or rather as Japanese). No, this was probably a gag, aimed at failure, to elicit laughter from the customers and propel his sales negotiation in a more profitable direction. This sort of intentional character failure, which I suppose we could liken to a calculated bankruptcy or fraudulent marriage, is also of deep interest.

However, speaking of overlooked cases of “Kansai native” characters, we should probably cite the public prosecutor Yokoi in Takahashi Kazumi’s(3) Hi no Utsuwa.

(To be continued)

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