The Transfiguration of Communication Style in Japanese Young Moderns

   The recent Japanese youth is called 'yasashisa-sedai' (the generation of tenderness) or 'masatsu-kaihi-sedai' (the generation to avoid friction), which means their sensitive personality to evade hurting each other on their interpersonal relationships. Many people have discussed such a personality of the youth connecting with the development of information media, and some of them have emphasized the stereotypical youth figure called 'otaku' (nerd), who shuts off interpersonal communication and compensates it with media uses such as watching video, reading comics, playing TV games and so on. In this paper, I criticize this view which regards all the youths as going to be otakus by examining some recent statistical data on the young people, and show that the changes of their communication styles and interpersonal relations are more delicate one by analyzing some colloquial expressions peculiar to the young from the viewpoint of speech act theory.
   Roughly speaking, the attitudinal change of youths' interpersonal relations for the last decade has two important features. First, they do not have a more negative attitude toward interpersonal communication than before, or rather it is indicated by some statistical data that they have become more positive to it. Second, to the contrary they have more negative attitude toward committing to or being chained to the interpersonal relations strongly. To sum up, they have some paradoxical attitude like Shoepenhauer's "the dilemma of hedgehogs" which means that they hurt each other when too close but they are frozen when too apart.
    This attitude affects the youths' colloquial expressions. According to Habermas' universal pragmatics theory, the illocutionary force of speech act establishes some interpersonal relationship (Herstellung der interpersonaler Beziehung) between a speaker and hearer based on the claim of speech-act validity (Geltungsanspruch) held up by speaker, and a responsibility for the validity claim is put on a speaker. Some youths' colloquialisms have pragmatic strategies to weaken the validity claim, to shirk the responsibility to some extent, and to mitigate speaker's commitment to the interpersonal relationship established by his/her speech act. These colloquialisms result in playing a role of a sensor to distinguish persons who have a same interpersonal attitude of 'yasashisa' (tenderness) from those who have not, so they can avoid beforehand to have relations with a person who prefers strong interpersonal relationships easy to cause friction. This may be their own answer to the hedgehogs' dilemma.