Problems on Untamed Expressions and Their Address in Interactive Public Comment

Abstract

Interactive public comment is a method for public involvement which authors have developed, the aim of which is to collect citizens' opinions, and summarize and deliver them to administrators. Opinions collected at such workshops, however, very often contain a lot of "untamed" expressions, contrastive to professional terms familiar to most of administrators, and then requiring sensitive handling by operators. Through analyzing examples of those expressions observed in fieldwork, this article exhibits a possibility that these untamed expressions are not addressed to the facilitator of the workshop but rather to other co-participants who sometimes have co-membership with the speaker and are adopted in order to elicit empathy with and affirmation about the opinions from them, and argues that it therefore is necessary to devise some ways to appropriately utilize advantages of such untamed expressions.