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Acculturation and Locality of Shinokubo-Focused on Linguistic Landscape

Park, Su-Kyung 1

1부산대학교

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ABSTRACT

This study concentrates on Shin-Ookubo, the new uprising Koreatown in Tokyo, as a tour spot for local Japanese visitors to connect and assimilate with another culture, especially by analyzing the phenomenon by examining the names on restaurant and road signs. Restaurant signs are named from a process of “naming.” “Naming” not only happens individually, but also by a group of individuals of a certain culture. As the naming is approved, it soon acquires social characteristics. Especially, language on signboards sensitively portray the lifestyle and the changes in the society. This, in other terms can mean that individual lifestyles and psychological emotions get affected by being exposed to such signboards. However, language on signboards does not hold an exclusive meaning, and can be interpreted in different meanings. The meaning is not fixed. The user can take in the meaning of the signboard the same way as the namer(producer)’s intention or in a completely different way. Therefore, it is important to learn how Shin-Ookubo became the center of Koreatown by observing its history, space, and location, and to observe how the Korean wave, the term for Korean pop culture, assimilates and connects with different cultures by looking through store and road signs. As a result, modern awareness interpreted non-western, colored, and women as minorities in comparison to western, white, and men. Also, modernization caused alleys to disappear by newly constructed main streets. Meanwhile, while narrow alleys are symbolized as high-quality culture in Ginza, Shin-Ookubo welcomes women visitors with hand-written signs, and women also are attracted by meaningless pictures and Japanese letters that does not follow their norms. People are seeking change by experiencing new culture and space by recalling one’s family and home and recovering from the loss. Also, intertwined Korean and Japanese signboard languages can be interpreted as a resistance to norms and people have the ability to read out those resistance whether it is occurred consciously or unconsciously. Resistance and acceptance without subject also can be another key feature to understand the meaning of the space.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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