Who Did You Say You Were? : A case study of character creation through language usage in Takarazuka plays

Abstract: This case study of the effectiveness of the usage of Japanese role language uses character portrayals from performances by the theatre company Takarazuka Revue to investigate how native Japanese speakers perceive characters solely based upon lexical or grammatical cues in spoken language. With a foundation in Satoshi Kinsui’s description of role language and Christopher Vogler’s character archetypes, a number of protagonists, antagonists and supporting characters were selected for their disparate characteristics and conformity with different stereotypes to see if there were particular speech patterns which could be seen for example among good and evil characters, or protagonists and non-protagonists. The conclusion reached was that the informants were able to discern both patterns of conformity and divergence between these particular characters. It was also seen that language structures in connection to gender identity as well as personality were aspects which were considered when evaluating the similarity between the self and the characters. While conforming to a standard language pattern was not imperative for the informants to see similarities between themselves and the characters, the character seen as the most similar to the informants used a gender-ambiguous form of standard language.