IMAGES OF INVOLVEMENT AND INTEGRITY - RHETORICAL STYLE OF A JAPANESE POLITICIAN

This paper analyzes a political discourse in the Japanese let focusing on the testimony given by the former Prime Minister, Noboru Takeshita, on 7 December 1992. Given the fact that Takeshita's rhetorical style-often referred to as Takeshita-go ('Takeshita-speak')-is dubbed as gengo meiryoo, imi fumei ('clear-in-language, unknown-in-meaning'), in this paper I investigate the former Prime Minister's speech style and question what it is that causes his particular style of speech to be characterized as such. I analyze the tape-recorded hearing and identify various pragmatic strategies to achieve 'involvement' and 'integrity'. These devices include, among others, politeness expression, self-quotation, quotative explanation, repetition, lexical choice and lexical (re-)definition, and strategies to humble oneself. An overall pragmatic strategy that Takeshita-speak favors is juxtaposing different semiotic contexts: the ordinary and the institutional as well as the linguistic and the metalinguistic. I conclude that juxtaposition of semiotic contexts along with involvement and integrity strategies plays a significant role in characterizing Takeshita-speak as 'clear-in-language, unknown-in-meaning'. Comments are made regarding the possible universal versus culturally relative nature of the pragmatics of the style, and theoretical implications of this study are suggested.