Honorifics, “politeness,” and power in Japanese political debate

This paper analyzes the use of honorific forms in televised Japanese political debates. Data are six taped episodes of the Sunday debate show, Nichiyō Tōron, where representatives of Japan's main political parties discuss current issues. Although in Japanese, honorifics are powerfully linked to notions of linguistic politeness, a detailed analysis of a subset of interactions in these data illustrate how a powerful political performance is achieved using honorific forms to engage opponents in ways very different from the normatively or strategically polite, offering insight into how speakers negotiate “politeness” to interlocutors while simultaneously striving to negate their interlocutor's points. Although debate participants are not necessarily striving to be polite to each other, conditions of public debate require them to seem to be striving toward that end. Public debates are, however, performances to a viewing public and debaters need to win their point and overtly argue against those of their interlocutors. Honorifics are seen in these data to serve as a multiply indexical set of forms, strategically used simultaneously to serve several different ends, rather than a static set of forms linked solely to politeness, as they have generally been treated in politeness theory ( Brown and Levinson, 1978) or the counterpart theory of wakimae ‘social convention’ ( Ide, 2006).