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JAPANESE TERTIARY EDUCATION 

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drinking sessions, not necessarily of the same “culture.” Hence the participants of 

these events exhibit different language use because of different interpretations of 

the greeting or discussion/debate genres, depending on the context. Elsewhere I 

have tried to demonstrate that aisatsu is one such category (Poole 2005a). Though 

it is essentially a “greeting,” of sorts, to translate and interpret this indigenous 

speech category so simply may not aptly account for the many “strings to the 

aisatsu bow.” In Japanese usage the breadth of this linguistic category extends 

beyond Firth’s (1972, p. 1) universalistic characterization of greetings as “the 

recognition of an encounter with another person as socially acceptable… the prime 

relevance [of which] is the establishment or perpetuation of a social relationship, 

the recognition of the other person as a social entity, a personal element in a 

common social situation.” 

Alternatively, the very language use exhibited by members of the university 

community affects the social construction of the group reality. I have argued that in 

a university entrance ceremony the aisatsu locates the speaker and hearers along a 

deixical axis that emphasizes the social realities of in-group/out-group. But in this 

same aisatsu genre in the faculty senate, the speaker’s deixis can shrink to the size 

of “ego”—the president can use aisatsu to deflect criticism and construct a 

consciousness that emphasizes the individual. The speaker makes the context (not 

just words) mean what he wants them to mean (see Weber 1958). This is not to 

suggest, however, that the social world is so simple that one specific component is 

the cause of another. Like Moerman, I would emphasize that “Thought, individual 

activity, and social action … each has its own determinants and organization” 

(Moerman 1988, p. 64). Likewise, I demonstrate that we cannot describe the 

interaction of the social and the linguistic in such a way as to suggest a recipe of 

words determined by the situation. In demonstrating this, description and analysis 

of a microethnographic kind proves a fruitful exercise for illustrating how the 

university community is “society in a grain of rice” (Moerman 1988, pp. 68–100). 

Meetings are one arena for such microethnographic observation. In particular, 

the ritualized and formal faculty senate is quite unlike the smaller, often more 

relaxed committee meetings. It is an event usually held at 3:00 o’clock in the 

afternoon on the last Tuesday of every month, with an intended function that 

appears to be university governance. From my observations, often the faculty 

senate becomes the political arena for a sort of antagonistic interaction that the 

anthropologist Victor Turner (1974) has described as typical of social dramas. One 

faculty senate at EUC was just such an arena for social drama. The president had 

been hospitalized with a stroke and was publicly lambasted in absentia for his 

inability to adequately fulfill his responsibilities. This in addition to the 

complaining and backstabbing that had been conducted over the months before the 

meeting in the informal social gatherings of faculty members in the corners of the 

faculty lounge, the privacy of individual offices, and in local eating and drinking 

establishments after hours. 

McVeigh (1997) and others (Roger Goodman, personal communication) have 

observed that generally meetings in Japan are intensely ritualistic, not least being 

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CHAPTER 1 

the language itself. Such ritual language has been mostly neglected by linguists of 

Japan in their study of communicative behavior, who are often more interested in 

more creative language and less so in conventionalized linguistic behavior (cf. 

Loveday 1986a, 1986b). Within the bounds of such ritual behavior and language of 

the Japanese meeting, I find that the interlocutors at a faculty meeting generate 

creative and novel approaches to their communicative behavior and linguistic 

discourse.  

For example, in my fieldwork I found that since the ritualized aisatsu greeting 

genre used to open the meeting is not normally a form of speech that invites 

discussion and debate in Japanese, in the faculty senate there are cases where the 

president is able to avoid argument and thus act in a self-defensive, self-preserving 

fashion through usage of aisatsu. There are instances where at the beginning of an 

extended aisatsu the president manipulates his audience by using a framing device 

to invoke, and evoke, the expectation of a typical, harmless speech event. This, I 

believe, is a device to hush the murmuring audience so the speaker, the president, 

has the attentive ear of those in opposition. A potentially hostile faculty senate, 

being “sympathetic” to the genre (the aisatsu greeting style of presentation), is 

“tricked” into a polite silence even as the aisatsu genre is extended from the 

“greeting” variant into a “formal address” that touches on controversial and 

politically explosive topics. Any other genre, such as the hōkoku (reporting) genre 

used throughout much of the faculty senate, would leave the meeting floor 

dangerously open to contentious debate, so a scenario such as I have painted is one 

that I have witnessed on a number of occasions. 

In this way the rules of ritual performance at meetings are well understood by 

the participants so that deliberate violations are manipulative in the way they can 

change the entire atmosphere, and possibly the outcome, of the social event. What 

appear outwardly to be tedious, unproductive meetings may not be so at all, since, 

of course, the faculty senate or committee deliberation has an internal logic that is 

implicit and not easily discerned by a visiting academic who happens to participate 

in the university function. If nothing else, then the faculty senate proves to be an 

important social identifier in the university community—most members

 

of the 

university are not invited to this meeting. 

Obviously boundaries of “membership” and “community” are contested, and the 

idea of a Japanese organization as “community” or “family” has been shown to be 

one that is a fluid and ambiguous one. Not only in the anthropology of Japan, but 

also in the larger field of social anthropology the notion of “community” has 

recently been problematized (Amit & Rapport 2002). 

CONCLUSION  

 Through an examination of key concepts such as daigaku (university), entrance 

exams,  kyōju (the professoriate), organizational structures, and administrative 

work, over the past 150 years the mission of daigaku in Japanese society has 

changed from that of elite to mass post-secondary education, and from highly 

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