This paper discusses language issues of the Olympic Games, offering two types of data gathered from an econolinguistic viewpoint. The first involves using Google search to observe changes over time in mentions of language in connection with the Olympics. The market value of language, which in the past has been greatly impacted by war, now is influenced by economics. In contrast to the short span of interest seen when the Olympics are hosted, interest in language is far more enduring, so any sporting event can only have a limited effect on language.

The second issue concerns the linguistic landscape of the city hosting the Games. Any international sporting event will be accompanied by the appearance of a multilingual landscape. It is reported, however, that the management of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games will rely on a combination of Japanese, English and pictograms, which seems to represent a setback in the provision of language services. Private corporations, on the other hand, may well use multilingual services to attract customers in order to seize this unique business opportunity.

In response to the choice of Tokyo as the host city for the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, as well as the current and projected rapid increase in tourists from abroad, a Council for Multilingual Measures in Preparation for the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games has been established, with the goal of eliminating communication barriers for foreigners during their stay in Japan. Further, three subcouncils have been set up, to deal with issues related to Public Transport, Roads and Signage, and Tourism and Services. These will survey existing facilities for welcoming and assisting foreign tourists and consider how they may be expanded and improved. It is to be hoped that the results of the various initiatives undertaken by the Council will remain in place as a legacy of the Tokyo Olympics, and culminate in a linguistically barrier-free environment accessible to all.

This paper reviews the goals of the Olympic Games cultural program, going back to the art competitions devised by Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games. Envisioning the cultivation of individuals with a well-rounded mix of physical and mental attributes, Coubertin sought for athletes to achieve artistic excellence. In his Ode to Sport, submitted under a pseudonym for the literature competition at the 1912 Games, he extolled human effort in addition to the possibilities of sports. After the Second World War, the art competitions were repurposed as an art exhibition, and further revised as a cultural program starting from the 1992 Barcelona Games. The Olympic anthem was revived in 1958, and the Japanese translation conveyed well the stirring quality of the original text. The 1972 Sapporo Winter Games and 1998 Nagano Winter Games lacked exhibitions of linguistic culture, but an engagement with language was shown by student essays and by the One School One Country Programs, in which schools would undertake cultural exchanges with a country chosen from among the participating countries. A cultural program is being planned for the 2020 Tokyo Games, but there seems to be little emphasis placed therein on linguistic culture. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that the Olympic and Paralympic education and will provide the opportunity to experience the linguistic culture of many countries.

In this essay I demonstrate the importance of communication for an athlete based on my own experience, and discuss the relation between communication skills and athletic skills. I further note how my personal identity as a hammer thrower is affected by language and a characteristically Japanese bodily awareness, self-scrutinize the significance of Olympic athletes, and explore the contributions that they can make to society.

For this report, a staff of the Nagano City School Board was interviewed about the One School One Country program carried out during the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympic Games. It was learned that about ten schools have kept up this program to the present day. Among factors conducive to the continuation of the program, the establishment of a clear theme and of an organized framework for mutual exchanges may be cited. Further, in the course of the activities, students discovered many commonalities and differences between languages, and achieved a heightened awareness towards the language of the partner country.

In Japanese language teaching and previous studies, the meaning and usage of the conjunctive particle monodakara is described by focusing on the character of the event, or the function that P monodakara Q expresses. This paper reveals a characteristic of the context in which monodakara is used by focusing on the connection with another event expressed in the context. This characteristic is that P monodakara Q is used in a context in which an ordinary event and an unusual event are contrasted, and to assert that the unusual event Q is due to an unusual cause P.

This paper also demonstrates that this characteristic of the context in which monodakara is used leads to the condition that monodakara is used when speakers consider that what happened is not an ordinary event, but an unusual event, and that this usage condition in turn leads to its usage in making an excuse for unexpected and unfavorable events.

This paper proposes a way to select basic vocabulary for onomatopoeia in spoken Japanese, aiming to develop teaching materials for onomatopoeia based on the selected vocabulary. The procedure of selecting the basic vocabulary consists of three steps. First, I collected 273 onomatopoeia words from the two spoken Japanese corpuses with reference to four onomatopoeia dictionaries. However, the appearance frequency of each word was so biased that it was difficult to rank the words. Second, I conducted a questionnaire survey on how familiar the collected words were and received answers from 458 participants' (218 male and 240 female). Third, I applied a principal component analysis on the frequency and familiarity data, and ranked the 273 onomatopoeia words based on the result. Finally, 252 onomatopoeia words were selected as the basic vocabulary for teaching materials, excluding the 21 lowest scoring words.

This study focuses on changes in the practice and beliefs of Korean Japanese-language teachers in Korean secondary schools, and explores the causes of those changes. Through an analysis of qualitative data obtained from 12 teachers, it was found that two factors cause these changes. First, the changes result from teachers' attempts to implement into everyday practice the recommendations of education policy concerning the subject, contents, and teaching methods. It was found that there are three prerequisites for this implementation: (1) the teacher should have the motivation within his/her practical context; (2) the teacher should have a concrete idea of how to implement the new knowledge; and (3) the teacher's beliefs should be sympathetic to what is going to be done and he/she should be able to expect a worthwhile result. Second, teaching practice is repeatedly re-organized through teachers' interactions with their students and with society as mediated by the students. Thus, teachers' beliefs mentioned in their narratives have various sources, such as their own experiences and the mediated society, which have accumulated in a multi-layered fashion. It can therefore be expected that such changes give beliefs their polyphonic nature.