ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some rhetorical features of Japanese writing that contribute to the impression of a cultural acceptance of or preference for hedging and indirectness. These features include verbosity, lexical ambiguity, euphemisms, unnecessary and often ambiguous phrases used to avoid a clear statement, indirect expressions (including requests and forms of advice, command and prohibition), contact phrases used to establish and maintain a rapport with readers or an audience, equivocal sentence-final expressions, self-effacing and self-deprecatory expressions, rhetorical questions, and the ubiquitous and multifunctional but often-vague nado. Transferring these culturally shaped expressions to a translation can have a different impact on English readers, who might misinterpret them as genuine hesitancy or modesty or even as evasion and equivocation. Nevertheless, these features do have a function in Japanese texts and society, so this chapter considers how best to convey that function to Anglophone readers as appropriate.
