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Personal Pronouns and Gendered Speech in Popular Manga (Japanese Comics)

Article  in  LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts · May 2014

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Giancarla Unser-Schutz
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Manga—Japanese comics—are often noted popularly as one location of linguistic change amongst young Japanese.
Attention has been paid particularly to the role that manga play in changing gendered speech, and manga are often noted as an
influential factor in young women choosing to use the masculine first personal pronouns ore and boku (e.g., Endo 2001).
Research hitherto has, however, focused on conscious surveys and interviews amongst young people on their personal pronoun
usage, and not on their actual use in manga. Before one can evaluate the role that manga may play, it is crucial to better grasp
how personal pronouns are actually used. Here I attempt that through examining the distribution of personal pronouns in a corpus
of popular manga titles.
The difference between male and female speech has often been given as one of the major characteristics of Japanese.
These differences are non-obligatory, and mainly phonological, morphological or lexical (Shibamoto 1987). Such differences are
realized in a variety of different forms and environments, but some of the more commonly noted points are intonation, emphatic
sentence final particles, and personal pronouns. In recent years, however, there has been a marked decrease in the differences in
speech patterns between male and female speakers. These changes can be seen in many different locations; however, one
particularly prominent example is that of the emphatic sentence final particles. Sentence final particles give emphasis or show the
relationship between speakers, with some being female (wa, kashira), others male (ze, zo) forms, and some neutral (ne). While
they have been given as a typical example of gender-differentiated speech, reports in recent years show that the female-specific
forms are essentially out of use amongst young women (Philips 2001, Ozaki 1999).
Personal pronouns, however, appear to be holdouts of gendered speech, with comparatively little change. Japanese
features many forms of first and second personal pronouns, and their choice depends on gender, but also on formality, their own
preferences, and so on. Following Shibamoto (2005), for first pronouns, women tend to use atashi or watashi, whereas men tend
to use ore or boku. Women tend to avoid second person pronouns, and men tend to use omae or kimi. There are no exclusively
female forms, but some examples of male ones are kimi and omae. Even with such variety, however, both Ozaki (3/2002) and
Hishikari (2007) report that there are no common first person pronouns used amongst male and female young adults in Tokyo of
junior-high-school to college-age.
This may not, however, be that clear cut, and there are some reports of young women using the masculine first person
pronouns boku and ore at at least some point in their lives. In a survey of a 136 female students, Endo (2001) found that 23
students have used at some point boku and ore, and 72 students reported seeing other girls use them, too. Miyazaki (2004) also
describes some junior high schools girls using ore, and it appears that some girls are now choosing to use masculine pronouns.
Such changes are attributed to many different factors, but mass media, and in particular, manga are a popular explanation. In her
survey above, Endo (2001) found that some respondents attributed their use and their acquaintances' use of ore and boku to
manga. Such explanations are commonly found in popular discourse as well. Looking at Yahoo Chiebukuro (Yahoo Answers), it is
not uncommon to find posts on manga and girls' use of boku and ore. To answer a question as to why men use ore and women
use watashi, one user wrote “I know girls who use boku because of manga's influence (Anonymous 9/26/2005).” Out of four
responses to another user's post asking if any girls around them used boku or ore, two said girls who read manga around them
did (Taruruda 6/25/2007). To another female high school student asking for opinions' on girls' ore and boku who herself attests it
to manga, two out of nine people replied that manga was influential (Misamisa091v 2/10/2009).
While it may seem strange to point towards comics as a possible source of linguistic change given their strong visual
elements, manga play a major part in Japanese media. By some accounts, they comprise up to 40% of all items published in
Japan (Schodt 1996), and the most popular series typically have strong narrative structures (Takeuchi 2006), making them
dependent on language. They are also popularly viewed as being influential in young people's language use: 45% point towards
manga as one of the factors influencing young people's speech in a 2007 survey by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs
(Agency for Cultural Affairs 2010). When it comes to answering how manga might have that influence, however, reports give
contradictory results and claims. Some have demonstrated data that seems to suggest that language in manga is fairly realistic.
For example, Aizawa (2003) demonstrated that the usage of feminine sentence final particles has gone down in girl-oriented
manga over time, similar to real life usages. Similarly, Ueno (2006) describes young female characters in girl- and adult-women-
oriented titles as using some masculine sentence final particles, and feminine forms rarely. Yet others, however, argue that it is
simulated. Kinsui (2003) argues that gendered language in manga is used stereotypically to create characters, and Takahashi
(2009) goes into detail of how this works in one popular series for girls, Life. There remains, however, no comprehensive studies
on the distribution of personal pronouns in manga.
This study attempted to deal with this problem by utilizing a 578,709 character (45,055 utterance) corpus of eight popular
titles (volumes 1-3 each). The titles were selected through sales ranking and a survey on high schooler students' manga reading
habits, and four titles each were selected from boy-oriented titles (Death Note, Meitantei Konan, Naruto, One Piece) and girl-
oriented titles (Kimi ni Todoke, Nana, Nodame, RabuKon) as a point of comparison. The corpus includes all data in comics and
categorized into one of eight groups based upon how they appear in the text: lines, thoughts, narration, onomatopoeia,
background text, background lines/thoughts, comments, titles. Additional tags have also been made for page, frame, and category
numbers, as well as for sex in regards to voiced categories as either male, female, both/unclear, onomatopoeia, animal. Here I
limit the study to male (267,980 characters/17,623 utterances) and female lines (140,302 characters/9,284 utterances). I based
my search upon primarily the groupings made in Shibamoto (1987, 2005), with some modifications. All orthographic variations
were included, and some phonetic variations thought not to be separate forms were also grouped together (e.g., omae vs. omee).
Overall, the ratio of lines between male and females was somewhat skewed, with more male lines (62.9%). This was the result of
the extremely high average percentage of male lines in boy-oriented series (79.9%). Girl-oriented series tended to be more
balanced, with women's lines slighter only more common on average than men’s (55.5%). These factors must be kept in mind as
they will effect the net numbers of personal pronouns.
Looking at the distribution of first person pronouns, I found that the central male first person pronoun was ore (603
instances, in 5.72% of male lines), whereas the central female first person pronoun was atashi (452 instances/4.87% of female
lines). However, female characters in male-oriented series tended to use watashi more commonly than atashi, with in fact few
examples of atashi (209 instances/9.24% of female lines, vs. 15 instances/0.03% lines). Male characters show more variety in first
person pronouns than females overall, but interestingly, not all of these are forms commonly used in real-life, such as washi (79
examples/0.46% of male lines). There were also differences between series. Death Note and Meitantei Konan use ore
infrequently (3 and 8 examples respectively) in favor of boku and watashi (boku: 122, 30 respectively, watashi: 122, 62
respectively). Death Note deals in part with the police, and Meitantei Konan is a detective story, and both feature numerous public
scenes; that may have influenced characters towards the more formal boku and watashi. Female characters in Nodame
Kantaabire also use the first person pronouns infrequently. They may be using alternatives forms like their first names. Male
characters in Kimi ni Todoke also have a very low percentage of first person pronouns, possibly because there are very few male
lines in general, giving perhaps insufficient environments for their appearance. As opposed to the way that manga is commonly
perceived, however, there were no examples of masculine first person pronouns amongst female characters, although one male
character used atashi – a female-identifying transsexual (RabuKon). Interestingly, they also lack the feminine uchi and masculine
jibun, which Hishikari (2007) reports as recently being in common use.
In regards to the distribution of second person pronouns, it appeared that the main male second person pronoun was
omae (416 examples/3.54% of male lines). The main female second person pronoun was anta, with anata a close second (53
examples/2.34% of female lines and 46 examples/2.03% of female lines, respectively). As with the first person pronouns, male
characters tend to use a wider variety of second person pronouns, but this difference was somewhat less dramatic. There were
also some differences between series. In particular, male characters in Meitantei Konan tended to favor anata over the familiar
omae (77 examples vs. 48 examples), possibly also because of the many public scenes. There were also some examples of
female characters using masculine second person pronouns. Some characters used omae, although they tended to be older
women – or, in Death Note, non-human. There were also some examples of female characters using the highly masculine temee,
but these were almost all attributable to the punk character Nana in the series of the same title. Interestingly, however, there
appears to be an asymmetrical usage here within gendered first and second person pronouns: while Nana refers to others
commonly in the familiar, masculine and rude temee, she also uses the feminine atashi to refer to herself.
The question remains, then, why it is that, for all that manga are described as being one source of girls' using masculine
first person pronouns, there lack any examples of such. These results go somewhat against Ueno (2006)'s finding that young
female characters used some moderate masculine speech patterns. One possible reason is that it was not a sufficient sample.
While the corpus has an acceptable number of characters in it, the number of series are limited, with only the two major genres.
Many of the story-lines are also similar, meaning that the social environments in which characters are in may be too limited for
unusual speech patterns to appear.
What seems more likely, however, is that manga are the ones being influenced by real world changes, and so show a
lag in adopting them as in Yamane (1986) on cute handwriting and manga. Authors may also not be in touch or comfortable with
young people's natural speech, as Mizumoto (2006) suggested for television dramas. This may also be the reason that the
popular uchi and jibun are not present. It also may not be female characters who matter. While boys tend to read more
restrictedly, girls read a variety of works, including series for boys (Allen and Ingulsrud 2005). Given how few lines are spoken by
females in series for boys, female readers may identify more with male characters. The psychologist Takashi Tomida in fact notes
this in an interview (WXR 8/22/2008).
While such possibilities remain conjecture, there is clearly a gap between the way that the popular perception of manga
and it's linguistic reality. Certain modifications to the data may make them more informative in future surveys. Adding additional
series and tags may be helpful. Particularly, given that the listener and speaker's relationship is essential to personal pronoun
choice, supplying more information about the speaker (e.g., name and age), may prove useful.

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