Language Variation

Examples from this era include shamoji 'soup ladle' (lit. 'the thing whose name begins with the kanji character shaku 杓'. Cf. neutral and more common shakushi), gugo 'cooked rice' (cf. masculine meshi), o-futa 'lidded cooking pans' (cf. masculine futamono), o-miya 'gift' (cf. masculine miyage), and so forth. These words, called nyōbō kotoba, eventually found their way to samurai households, then, toward the end of the Edo period, to the merchant class. Beginning in Meiji, these words continued to be used by the general public. For examples, of these words, shamoji has lost its gender marked quality and is in common use today, gugo is no longer used, but meshi is still masculine marked word for cooked rice or meal.

Apart from vocabulary, there are several places we can look for evidence of gender-differentiated language. The end of a sentence is a place where gender differentiation is found in the choice of sentence particles--small words that give the sentence a variety of 'flavors'. Look at the following pair, both of which mean 'I am going'. The sentence particle wa is a feminine ending while ze is masculine.

Iku wa.
Iku ze.

The use of this particle wa is now limited to those above, perhaps, 50 years of age. (We note parenthetically that this use of wa was first used in Futabatei Shimei's novel Aibiki ('Rendezvous'), published in Meiji 21, 1888. We may say this final particle has had a lifespan of about a century.) The masculine particle ze is limited to mostly young males (sometimes females) in informal situations. Factors determining who uses which one when are complicated by factors such as formal/informal, young/old. And importantly, the use is not a function of gender alone. Nonetheless one can easily see that Japanese can distinguish masculine and feminine speech. Also gender-differentiate language use may show up in word choice, often in "polite" words having the -o prefix. (Note that not all -o prefixed words are gender-marked or particularly polite; e.g., okane 'money', oshime 'diapers', onigiri 'rice balls' (interestingly nigiri refers to nigirizushi, a type of sushi), otsumu 'head', oden 'a type of stew', etc.)

Female - Male Meaning

o-shōyu - shōyu 'soy sauce'
o-sake - sake 'sake'
o-jōzu - jōzu 'be skillful'

Other words are marked too for a gender. For instance, meshi 'cooked rice, meal' is masculine (see above in our discussion of nyōbō kotoba), gohan 'cooked rice, meal' is either gender. Umai 'delicious' is more masculine; in contrast, oishii 'delicious' is more feminine than neutral.

Many travelers to Japanese department stores observed that the female elevator operators, now almost completely gone, guided customers to appropriate floors in a distinctive very high pitched voice. The women were trained to speak in "the voice", but why in such a high pitch? In Japanese (and possibly in English too), a high pitched voice is associated with formality, attentiveness, and courtesy. Even today, many Japanese, both men and women (and women are perhaps more conspicuous when they use a high voice), used a higher register in their voice range to speak to superiors and store customers.