I Am Completely Serious

"To collect my data, I read approximately two-thirds of the entire manga, which currently numbers 255 chapters. Each time a female character used a first-person pronoun, I noted that character’s identity and the pronoun she used. I did not count the number of times a certain character used a given pronoun because some female characters appear for only a few panels in one chapter, while others appear nearly every week. Tallying every occurrence would have skewed my results.

I found a total of twenty-three female speakers in Bleach who used a wide variety of first-person pronouns. The two most common pronouns were watashi and atashi; atashi was actually the pronoun of choice for more than half (twelve) of the female characters. Eight speakers habitually used watashi, and one speaker each used uchi, washi, and ore.

Most characters, to my surprise, used only one set first-person pronoun. Only two displayed a variation in their pronoun usage based on the formality of their situation, which is considered an important aspect of politeness and propriety in spoken Japanese. In both cases these speakers habitually used atashi and “upgraded” to watashi when circumstances, such as directly disobeying a superior officer or reciting a ritual phrase, required.

Leaving these two instances of situational variation aside, I found that the choice of first-person pronoun was strongly indexed to age or to apparent maturity. Younger speakers overwhelmingly used atashi, while a majority of older speakers used watashi, including one apparently college-age speaker who was probably trying to mark herself as “mature” by using watashi. Watashi was also strongly indicative of authority: of the eight female characters of all ages placed in positions of responsibility, five used watashi.

What watashi did not index, however, was combat ability, which is not something traditionally associated with the ideology of femininity and of proper feminine behavior that accompanies ideas of “women’s language.” Because watashi is more gender-neutral than atashi (men will use it in formal contexts), I would have expected characters such as the runner-up national girls’ karate champion to use watashi. However, this was not the case. Of the seventeen female speakers with some sort of combat ability, ten used atashi, four watashi, and three some other pronoun.

The three speakers who did not use atashi or watashi bear some further explanation. None of the three are “human” speakers in the strictest sense of the word; in Bleach one is either a member of the human world or of some alternate spiritual dimension, although almost all characters in the manga appear completely human. The speaker who used uchi spoke Kansai-ben exclusively; thus her use of uchi, which was originally a dialect form and is now gaining more currency throughout Japan, is unremarkable. The character who used washi spends more than half the manga in the form of a cat; thus when she reveals herself as a woman the audience is stunned, since washi has “old-man” connotations. The character who used ore is perhaps best described as a law unto herself—she smokes a pipe, is missing an arm due to her work as an firework-maker, and intimidates almost everyone, including her tough-guy younger brother and the punkish main character of the manga.

In conclusion, it seems clear that Bleach is at least nudging gently at the boundaries of the ideology of women’s language, not so much through actual language practice (since only three of twenty-three speakers do not use the ideologically permissible pronouns watashi and atashi) as through how speakers of ideologically acceptable pronouns are portrayed: they fight, hold positions of authority, and do not hesitate to punch the manga’s main character. None of these activities were formerly considered “feminine,” and to a large extent they are still not.

Further study would reveal whether these language/ideology developments are an idiosyncracy of Kubo Taito or whether popular culture in general is expanding the concepts of “proper” female behavior via language markers. A synchronic study of one issue of Shonen Jump, which features twenty-two manga series a week, would be one possible method. Another would be to examine a similarly popular shoujo (girls’) manga magazine using the same methodology. " (12/12/06)