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Abstract:
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Recently, the notion of "Kuki" (meaning "atmosphere") has been considered as an indispensable aspect of communication in Japan. That is, being "Kuki ga Yomenai (unable to read the atmosphere)", frequently referred to as KY, leads to communication breakdown because of its impoliteness (Culpeper, 1996) feature. Thus, in Japanese context, the sensitivity to Kuki is one of the prerequisites of communication (Reizei, 2006).
So far, many studies have investigated the notion of "Kuki" (e.g. Yamamoto, 1977; Reizei, 2006). Reizei (2006)'s survey distinguished it into "Kankei-no-Kuki (relational discipline in dyad)" and "Ba-no-Kuki (situational discipline in triad or more)". He also pointed out, from psychological perspectives, that the salience of Kuki-sensitivity among Japanese is mainly attributed to the fact that Japanese depends highly on context. Furthermore, it is often "Ba-no-Kuki" in which Kuki is mostly problematized, since it is hard to manage in triad vis-à-vis dyad.
Furthermore, Kuki is multidimensional: because the interpersonal relationship of Japanese is determined in terms of both "vertical" and "horizontal" relations (Nakane, 1967), its politeness norm also deviates from context to context. Therefore, the assessment of Kuki should be conducted not only from psychological level, but also from sociological level.
This study attempts to deal with the issue of Kuki by employing interpretive qualitative approach to "take a holistic perspective in conducting research" (Davis, 1995, p.432). In doing so, I conducted some oral interview regarding the KY experience to several Japanese university students. Besides, to guarantee emic perspectives, I will explain them from Nihonjin-ron perspectives (e.g. Benedict, 1948; Nakane, 1967; Doi, 1971; Sugiyama, 1974). Furthermore, through analyzing the data, this study also attempts 1) to clarify and compensate for some shortcomings of this research realm; 2) to discover more suitable research method for further exploration on "Kuki"; and 3) to seek for future perspectives of this research agenda.
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