posted 2007/07/03 at 14:23
I can't say that I've particularly cared for most of the Internet phenomena that have cropped up since the introduction of YouTube. I suppose that this is because I got more than my fill of "wacky" videos of people and animals when I was younger and ABC's America's Funniest Home Videos was the top-rated show in all of television. I never saw the particular attraction of this show and was honestly nauseated by how much it became a part of American culture at the time, to the point than even now, long after shedding his good-guy image from back then and resurrecting his career through his appearance in The Aristocrats, I still don't particularly care that much for Bob Saget. Although there are those people and organizations out there that make good use of YouTube, for the most part the service seems to be America's Funniest Home Videos on a global scale without the benefit of having the clips passed through editors first to make sure that they might possibly have at least the slighest bit of comedic value. I get quite my fill of these kinds of clips when Keith Olbermann shows them on the Oddball segment of Countdown, and for the most part I don't go looking for the "hot videos" on YouTube or any similar services.
There has been one recent exception to this, though: I have made a point of watching the videos of Carolyn, aka kerokerorin86. Carolyn vlogs in Japanese (except for the odd English vlog here and there), and while I really can't judge how well her Japanese is, I can easily say it's several degrees better than mine. (Sadly, I haven't really studied or even practiced my Japanese after I passed the translation exam for my MA degree last autumn.) What makes Carolyn's vlogs so compelling to me is that even though she isn't Japanese and claims never to have been to Japan in her life, she sounds, almost stereotypically, like a young Japanese girl. What makes this all the stranger is that when she does speak in English, she sounds, well, American. It's almost impossible to believe that she's able to change her accent so well for each language.
I think what fascinates me so much about Carolyn's videos is that I've been fascinated with how people in different countries and cultures develop their unique ways of speaking, particularly Japanese women. One of the reasons why I think the anime productions of Oh My Goddess! have been so wonderful is that Inoue Kikuko so perfectly captured Belldandy's voice; there's a gentleness to her Belldandy voice that is necessary to help convey the essence of Belldandy's character. I think Juliet Cesario did about the best job she could when she did the first AnimEigo dubs of the original OVA, although I think she put too much emphasis on Belldandy's sweetness as opposed to her gentleness. The American voices of Belldandy that followed Cesario have, to be honest, disappointed me wholly.
Back then I wondered if it would actually be possible for someone who was born and raised in America to capture the qualities of Belldandy's voice that Inoue-san brought. Based on little more than my own admittedly ignorant perceptions of Japanese and American cultures, I suspected that there were underlying cultural reasons why Japanese women spoke so differently from American women. In my mind I reasoned that things like American children being allowed to be much louder than Japanese children, and the much lower rates of smoking of Japanese women compared to American women, played a huge part in why Japanese women sounded so different from American women to my ear. Just to clarify things, I'm not saying that Carolyn sounds like Inoue-san's Belldandy; by her own admission, Carolyn's "accent" when she speaks Japanese is probably attributable to her being such a fan of the girl group Morning Musume. Still, the sharp difference between how Carolyn sounds when she's speaking Japanese versus when she's speaking English makes me wonder about where that distinctive (again, perhaps stereotypical) young Japanese women's way of speaking comes from.
At the very least, watching Carolyn's videos has me wanting to crack open my Japanese textbooks again, so some good may come out of me watching her videos.
For a second I thought it was this person:
http://leah-dizon.net/
(more English info available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leah_Dizon )
Hmm..actually, they're both 20 and both look pretty similar...maybe this is her alter ego?
By the way, at 1:48 of the video you point us to, she tells us that she has been to Japan before, for three months even, but that was before she could speak any Japanese.
I think Leah's eyes are far too dark for them to be similar.
My comment on Carolyn not being to Japan before was based on her line on her YouTube profile saying she's never lived in Japan. I guess I took that line the wrong way.
Colored contact lenses are not hard to come by.
I disagree with your assessment that she's "changing accents". She has only one English speaking style, and only one Japanese speaking style. If you compare the two they are different, but that would be an invalid apples/oranges type comparison. An American will never become fluent in Japanese until he/she realizes that he/she must adapt themselves to the language, not attempt to adapt the language to themselves (to this extent, Carolyn has been quite successful, and no doubt dozens of hostess clubs would line up to employ her should she even return to Japan...)
Your filtered view of "young Japanese women's way of speaking" is quite romantic, but not really resembling the reality for all but a handful of cases. But you're entitled to your fantasies I suppose. ;-)
I didn't intend to say that all young Japanese women speak a certain way. Still, I do think there is something of a pattern to the way that young Japanese women tend to speak, or at least those women who are seeking to fit into certain cultural norms. My first-year Japanese instructor at UT -- a woman barely older than I was -- sometimes fell into that pattern in class, though when she was speaking with the main Japanese prof there (a much older man), all traces of that would disappear from her voice.
I think it may have something to do with the increased cultural expectations on Japanese women to act and behave much younger than their counterparts in Western societies, the same thing that results in Japanese women still toting around Hello Kitty merchandise and the like well into their 30s. (Do I even have to tell you about how much of an impact "loli" fashion is having here in the States?)
I don't mean to say that this holds true for all cases, because it certainly doesn't, but there is a general pattern here to be sure. I probably would have learned more about this if I'd had the time to take a sociolinguistics course at UT, but I didn't.
I finally found Sean's ideal Japanese woman!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF8nbESwjbk
Well, except for the fact that she has short hair now...
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon