posted on 2013-12-11, 13:47authored bySachihiko Kondo
This thesis takes a discursive/rhetorical approach to the topic of support for modern
constitutional monarchy. It examines in detail some of the rhetorical devices used by
modern Japanese speakers when they discuss monarchism. In so doing the thesis
highlights both the discursive and social dilemmas involved in contemporary
monarchism. In Britain, another constitutional monarchical state, critical psychologists
have analysed what have been called 'dilemmas of lived ideology' (BiIIig et al., 1988).
Billig (1992) analysed ordinary people's discourses about British monarchism. He
points out that people employ dilemmatic themes as they justifY, mitigate and make
sense of their own non-privileged positions under egalitarianism. I use Billig's work as
a main reference, and apply his analytical frameworks (discursive psychology) for my
investigation ofJapanese monarchism. Amongst several features ofJapanese
conversation, I focus on its complicated naming and honorific systems. These systems
almost always encode power structures amongst speaker-addressee, speaker-referent
as well as addressee-referent relationships. Analysing people's mundane (family)
conversations about the Emperor system, I have found contradictory rhetorical
common-places, which are not always voiced explicitly, but are often formulated
implicitly through these linguistic implications (i.e. naming, honorifics). Moreover,
these codes have to be managed in their particular discursive contexts where the
different systems of showing honour can conflict. By analysing news articles, in
addition, I focus on a terminology which is employed exclusively to describe an
Emperor's death. Lookingat the contexts in which terms are used (and not used), the
process of construction ofthe social reality (i.e. monarchism under egalitarian social
norm) is illustrated.
Through my analysis, I believe, a new perspective for Japanese monarchism is
introduced: people represent the institutional reality and accept the inequality
simultaneously through mundane discursive interaction.