ABSTRACT
Traditional discussions on Japanese culture, from Motoori Norinaga’s mono no aware to Karatani Kojin’s psychoanalysis of Japanese culture, have mostly taken place within the discursive space of the binary opposition between kanji and hiragana. This article tries to reveal the epistemological limitation of that space by looking into the heterogenous or contradictory roles that katakana, as the third “alphabet” of Japanese, has played through a long span of history encompassing pre-modern to modern to contemporary periods. It tries to demonstrate how the exclusion of the katakana (non-)space always functioned as the condition, as a necessary outside within, for the preservation of the orderly (ideologically stable) opposition of kanji versus hiragana. It also suggests that the constant increase of katakana words in the context of globalization foregrounds shifting nuances in terms of gender, class, ethnicity and so on and that any serious attempt at discussing Japanese culture through the lens of linguistic operation can no longer be made without taking into account katakana’s heterogenous functions.
