The Ministry of Education in Japan expressed a concern about local English teachers’ accent in the 1951 edition of the Suggested Course of Study in English, while presenting Received Pronunciation and General American as the model pronunciation for teachers and learners. Since then, Japanese-accented English (JAE) has been constantly criticised by both TESOL practitioners and ‘folk linguists’ in Japan as a gross and shameful deviation from standard speech, with native-speakerism being prevailed in and outside classrooms across the country. However, few empirical findings have reported on L1 English speakers’ perceptions of and ideologies towards JAE. By reviewing and re-analysing the data collected in New Zealand (NZ) at the beginning of the current century, this article sheds light on the identification and indexicality of phonological features of JAE among the Inner Circle speakers of English.
Despite their high motivation for pronunciation improvement, no late learners of English, regardless of their L1 backgrounds, were perceived as a native English speaker by the participants in the test environment. At the same time, JAE was identified at a higher rate than any other variety of L2-accented English, evidently due to the NZ listeners’ massive exposure to Japanese visitors. In the identification process, the conflation of /l/ and /r/ functioned not only as a marker but as a part of stereotype of JAE in a Labovian sense; once listeners had perceived it, they were more likely to assume the speaker to be from a Japanese-speaking background, although the same conflation was commonly observable in other East Asian accents as well. Arguably, this indexicality may have been specific to NZ people at that time.

Over the past ten years or so, the loanword for hospitality, which was not heard much before, has come to be commonly used in Japanese. Searching for the term hospitality in katakana in the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ), 46 out of a total of 50 examples appeared in the media since 2000. The loanword for hospitality (ホスピタリティ), which is based on the meaning of the original word hospitality, is often referred to as cordial omotenasi in Japanese, undergoing a unique change in the Japanese language. This article examines how the loanword for hospitality has been integrated into the Japanese language during the past 70 years, highlighting examples that appear in the written language media.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go has a phase of a dystopian world where the human clones are brought up to be donors, that is, they must compulsorily donate their internal organs till they die. Based on an analysis of the dehumanizing dystopia, this study emphasizes that the novel is constituted of Kathy’s monologue, i.e., a first-person narrative, which means that the story takes her view of the various events and problems. Employing a narratological approach, this study indicates that the information/discourse she gives to readers is not always logical and reliable. This narrative style leads the readers to the situation that they experience the events and the thoughts, assumptions, postulations and feelings of the characters in the novel vicariously.
This study also argues that the addressees of her narrative are other human clones brought up in a better environment, and at the same time the readers, i.e., human beings.
Such a procedure has an effect that the story is transformed from a mere fiction which results in a helplessness in the face of reality to a potency competent for confronting the reality.
“The Morningdale Scandal”, which reflects a typical traditional eschatology, reveals the defect of humanitarianism. This study argues that her method of the narrative can be an effective experiment which avoids and overcomes such a defect. By analysing how one can acquire factual knowledge in the chaos of false information, hypotheses and biased views, this study shows that Kathy’s way of fluctuating narrative is regarded as a functional solution to reach the real substantial knowledge.

One tool that impressively support Henry James’s complicated writing style is his ‘unreliable narrators’, but especially in his ‘international-theme’ novels, decent and reliable narrators play important roles. Winterbourne, the narrator in Daisy Miller makes a good example, who offers satisfactory reports to the reader as if he were a popular blogger today. When we focus on accessibility or modernity of James, reliable narrators and drastic omission in his stories can be the key to understand James’s stories. Traditionally, ‘international-theme’ novels is the term used for the novels in which James treated international relationships, but in this paper we’ll find another meaning we should add to these stories of James’s.