Katakana Analysis Draft

Of the four textbook examples given, only one mentions katakana's use in emphasis, which is not at all uncommon in Japanese print materials and probably the more difficult concept for foreign Japanese students to understand and master. For example, in the manga below, "oyaji" is written in katakana. "Oyaji" means something like "my old man" and is a Japanese native term that has its own kanji (so does most nouns, but most of the characters are not frequently used), but here "oyaji" is written in katakana, obviously for emphasis. It's understandable why katakana would be used for emphasis. It is more angular-looking and therefore it looks much more alarming than the cute, round characters of hiragana and is not as difficult to read as kanji. Questions still remain, however, such as where do we draw the line? When do we simply make the hiragana or kanji larger for emphasis? When do we want to turn hiragana/kanji into katakana?





Another example is the term "hachimachi" in the following picture (this is a game called しらのきせき made by my favorite game company Falcom, which, I heard, is not producing PC games anymore. I'm deeply sad). "Hachimaki" means headband, or 鉢巻. There are a few important things about 鉢巻: 1) 鉢巻--the kanji version--is a commonly used term (according to Denshi Jisho); 2) it's something that can be called "very Japanese" because non-Japanese people don't really wear headbands in the ways that Japanese people do. The question then becomes why did しらのきせき's game maker decide to write 鉢巻 in katakana, the writing system used mostly for foreign loanwords, onomatopoeia, and emphasis? I believe this decision to use ハチマキ instead of 鉢巻 or はちまき is, in fact, for emphasis, but not in the same way as how おやじ is written as オヤジ. First of all, the game has an imaginary but heavily Western industrial--sort of--setting. Due to the nature of the game, it would be awkward to have something that is "very Japanese" appear as an accessory on a game character. So perhaps the game maker want to use katakana to emphasize that this headband, hachimaki, is just a headband and no more. Therefore, katakana, in this case, is used to deemphasize the nativeness of the word.

Why do most of the textbook examples given to us evade emphasis, whose use is as unclear and puzzling as I demonstrated in the previous two examples? I think there could be a few possible explanations. First of all, a textbook can't explain everything, especially an intro-level textbook. As a native Chinese speaker, I could not possibly imagine any book that can fully explain the uncountable subtleties of the Chinese language. The use of emphasis through katakana is sometimes painfully straightforward (like its use in loanwords and onomatopoeia), but it can be also very, very subtle. To fully understand those subtleties--to a point that we could use them with ease--requires us to have genuine, day-to-day interaction with Japanese people and culture for a very long time. Textbook explanations would never suffice. Therefore, these textbooks did what they could with explaining the overarching idea that katakana is used mainly for loanwords and onomatopoeia.