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This article updates the trends and developments of Japanese as a second language (JSL) research since Mori and Mori (2011) by reviewing nearly 200 selected empirical studies published in English or Japanese between 2010 and early 2019. The first section of this review examines the cognitive aspects of second language (L2) Japanese development, focusing on vocabulary and kanji (i.e., Chinese characters transferred into Japanese) learning, syntactic development, and the issues surrounding reading and writing. The second part investigates sociocultural issues in L2 Japanese development and use, including pragmatic development, multilingual/translingual perspectives, and multilingual youth. The third section explores the role of affective variables (primarily learner motivation) in L2 Japanese development. The last section considers various pedagogical issues, including corpus-based studies and the development of materials and resources, instructional designs and classroom studies, technology-enhanced language learning and new instructional models, critical approaches to teaching Japanese and content-based instruction. The review of these themes illuminates trends and emerging areas of interest in post-2010 L2 Japanese research inspired by current developments in applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) research, as well as unique features of Japanese language and sociocultural contexts.

The current study examines how Japanese and international care workers at a geriatric healthcare facility in Japan manage one of the most fundamental elements of handover interactions -- person reference and recognition to identify a particular care receiver and discuss their specific conditions and needs. By using Conversation analysis (CA) as a central mode of inquiry, this study examines how the participants approach the establishment of referential common ground while simultaneously attending to the progressivity of ongoing activity, and how written records on care receivers are incorporated into the process. The juxtaposition of three international care workers' performances effectively illustrates how the international care workers' performative competence is co-constructed with their Japanese colleagues in this interactive process and how the participants exhibit different kinds of orientations towards the activity arranged for the dual purpose of actual handover and for the international care workers' language learning and socialization. As a contribution to a growing body of CA studies of second language talk at work, this study considers possible tensions between engaging in a language-learning activity regarding specific linguistic elements during a particular professional activity and learning to become a competent actor in the particular activity.

Translingualism advocates for the appreciation of multilingual speakers' fluid, flexible, and creative deployment of semiotic resources without regard to the ideological constructs of named languages. While this scholarship has been developed primarily in the contexts of world Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and bilingual education in Anglophone nations, its implications to foreign language education in higher education have not been fully explored. The current article addresses this issue by shedding light on the conditions of teaching and learning of indigenous languages spoken in once-colonized regions of the world as an additional language for English speakers. More specifically, it examines how American students who participated in an eight-week Yorùbá study abroad program in Nigeria navigated a rather conspicuous gap between a monolingual utopia promoted by the program and the complex translingual realities of everyday language use outside of the classroom. Through the review of the perspectives of students with diverse backgrounds, the article discusses the significance of taking sociohistorical and geopolitical contexts surrounding the target language into account to cultivate informed learners.

The recent influx of international students from Asia to the United States has drastically changed the demographics of students studying languages, including languages other than English, in many large universities. For some languages, it is not uncommon for international students from Asia to constitute more than 50% of current enrollments in a language class. This new reality poses a number of questions, including how to meet students' diverse needs and goals for language study and how to mobilize increasing student diversity to enhance the development of global competence among all students, regardless of country of origin. Using semi-structured exploratory interviews conducted with domestic and international students of Japanese as a foreign language at an American university, this study investigated the challenges and opportunities presented in the globalized language classroom.

A growing number of studies have examined qualitative research interviews in terms of how researchers' own identities and agendas are implicated in the construction of interviewees' responses. Adopting the constructionist conception of research interviews, the current study introduces a comparative analysis of 2 interviews with a multilingual speaker of Korean, English, and Japanese conducted by 2 researchers who come from distinctive cultural, linguistic, and professional backgrounds. Informed by ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and membership categorization analysis, the current analysis reveals how the interviewee came to co-construct a different set of accounts with each interviewer in comparable segments where the same topics were discussed. The focal segments examined in this study can be seen as an illustration of how this Korean student interacting in her everyday life with others may co-construct her ever-shifting identities vis-a-vis membership categories such as American, Korean, or Korean-American. (Contains 11 notes and 8 excerpts.)

Encountering trouble producing a word in the midst of a turn at talk is an everyday experience for foreign language learners. By employing conversation analysis (CA) as a central tool for analysis, the current study explores how students undertake a range of word searches while they organize a pair work session designed for the purpose of language learning. The analysis demonstrates how the learners simultaneously employ structurally different kinds of semiotic resources, such as language, body, and the structures of their textbooks and notebooks for language learning. The close explication of the ways in which cognitive states are embodied, displayed, and treated by the two students during the word search sequences reveals how they conduct indigenous assessment of each other's knowledge while "doing being a foreign language learner in a classroom."

This study examines casual interactions between first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of Japanese, paying special attention to the coordination of vocal and non-vocal resources that are brought to bear on the achievement of intersubjectivity. More specifically, this study investigates a practice of "embodied completion" (Olsher 2004), namely the practice of deploying a partial turn of talk that offers a projectable trajectory of ongoing action and completing that action with a gesture or other embodied display. The participants' conduct that precedes this embodied completion reveals the local processes used to evaluate, discover, and establish shared linguistic and non-linguistic resources in pursuing intersubjectivity. Further, the sequence of actions that follows the embodied completion provides an incidental, interactionally motivated opportunity for the L1 speaker to reformulate what the L2 speaker has said with a more sophisticated linguistic expression. Through the close analysis of two focal cases of embodied completion, which underscores the conversation analytic (CA) perspective of "competences as resources," this study explores the kinds of contributions that can be made by using CA's explication of interactional details towards the understanding of language learning as it occurs in socially situated practices.

Using the methodological framework of conversation analysis (CA) as a central tool for analysis, this study examines a peer interactive task that occurred in a Japanese as a foreign language classroom. During the short segment of interaction, the students shifted back and forth between the development of an assigned task and the management of problems associated with their lack of lexical knowledge. The close observation of the participants' vocal and nonvocal conduct during these different types of sequences and sequential boundaries demonstrates how the students transform in a moment-by-moment fashion their converging or diverging orientations towards varying types of learning and learning opportunities. Through the presentation of a single case analysis, this study discusses one way of applying CA techniques to the study of classroom interaction in order to promote an overall sensitivity to the intricacies of classroom talk and to generate critical reflection on classroom policies and instructional designs.

Investigates how Japanese and American students initiate topical talk as they get acquainted with each other during their initial encounter at a student-organized conversation table. Looks at the observable and reportable ways in which the participants demonstrate the relevance, or the irrelevance, of interculturality in the development of the interaction. (Author/VWL)

Using conversation analysis as a central tool of analysis, examines the sequential development of talk-in-interaction observed in a small group activity in a Japanese language classroom. Explores the relationship among task instruction, students' reaction to the instruction during their pre-task planning, and the actual development of talk with the native speakers. (Author/VWL)

Introduces the special issue of this journal on microanalyses of classroom discourse, providing an explanation of the how the issue is organized and describing each of the five articles contained. (Author/VWL)

Kampung Baru Archeological Site is situated in Bujang Valley archaeological area and the site is in Kuala Muda, Kedah to be exact. Past excavations conducted in Bujang Valley have discovered a lot of Middle Eastern ceramics and the archaeological sites which had been found in these excavations were dated from 5th to 12th century AD. Middle Eastern ceramics had been produced in Middle East but have been found not only in Middle East but also in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan. Most Middle Eastern ceramics found in Southeast Asia and Far East Asia are Blue-Green Glazed ceramics and the archaeological sites where these ceramics had been found usually dated from 8th to 10th century AD. Many Blue-Green Glazed ceramics are believed to be used as container to transport trade goods and finding of these ceramics can be evidence of trade with Middle Eastern countries. This study employed typological and morphological analysis on the Middle Eastern ceramic that have been discovered at this site. The results of this study found that there were 241 shards of Middle Eastern ceramic discovered in Kampung Baru site and dating for these ceramics is from 8th to 10th century AD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examines how Japanese and international care workers at a geriatric healthcare facility in Japan manage one of the most fundamental elements of handover interactions – person reference and recognition to identify a particular care receiver and discuss their specific conditions and needs. By using Conversation analysis (CA) as a central mode of inquiry, this study examines how the participants approach the establishment of referential common ground while simultaneously attending to the progressivity of ongoing activity, and how written records on care receivers are incorporated into the process. The juxtaposition of three international care workers' performances effectively illustrates how the international care workers' performative competence is co-constructed with their Japanese colleagues in this interactive process and how the participants exhibit different kinds of orientations towards the activity arranged for the dual purpose of actual handover and for the international care workers' language learning and socialization. As a contribution to a growing body of CA studies of second language talk at work, this study considers possible tensions between engaging in a language-learning activity regarding specific linguistic elements during a particular professional activity and learning to become a competent actor in the particular activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article updates the trends and developments of Japanese as a second language (JSL) research since Mori and Mori (2011) by reviewing nearly 200 selected empirical studies published in English or Japanese between 2010 and early 2019. The first section of this review examines the cognitive aspects of second language (L2) Japanese development, focusing on vocabulary and kanji (i.e., Chinese characters transferred into Japanese) learning, syntactic development, and the issues surrounding reading and writing. The second part investigates sociocultural issues in L2 Japanese development and use, including pragmatic development, multilingual/translingual perspectives, and multilingual youth. The third section explores the role of affective variables (primarily learner motivation) in L2 Japanese development. The last section considers various pedagogical issues, including corpus-based studies and the development of materials and resources, instructional designs and classroom studies, technology-enhanced language learning and new instructional models, critical approaches to teaching Japanese and content-based instruction. The review of these themes illuminates trends and emerging areas of interest in post-2010 L2 Japanese research inspired by current developments in applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) research, as well as unique features of Japanese language and sociocultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's rapidly aging population and chronic labor shortages have led the country to consider increased reliance on foreign workers. The government promotes the cultivation of nihongo jinzai 'Japanese language human resources' (MOFA, 2013), that is, highly skilled foreign workers proficient in the de facto national language, but in reality, such ideal individuals are scarce. Workplaces thus must explore ways to accommodate workers with limited Japanese competence. By introducing a sequential and multimodal analysis of shift handover interaction between Japanese and foreign care workers at a geriatric facility, the current article critically evaluates the monolingual, logocentric ideology reflected in the ongoing national debate as well as in the institutional convention of information sharing. The examination of the ways in which these workers deploy multimodal semiotic resources for the fulfillment of their duty points to the need for reevaluation of conventional practices in favor of increased affordance of spatial repertoire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kampung Pengkalan Pasir is one of the areas that have archeological sites associated with the prehistoric era where the remains of a temple built using laterite stone and brick have been found in this area. The study regarding the distribution of foreign ceramics in Kampung Pengkalan Pasir has not been done in detail where the Song Dynasty ceramic finds were only reported by Dorothy and Quaritch-Wales when they excavated Pengkalan Pasir Temple (Site 31). The discoveries of various types of foreign ceramics in Kampung Pengkalan Pasir has given a little insight into the chronology of the site of Kampung Pengkalan Pasir which is believed to have been active since the 13th century AD. Based on the report released by Sullivan, he suggested that the Pengkalan Pasir Temple is a Buddhist influence temple with the discovery of Buddhist bronze statues and lotus statues made of descriptive copper such as Avalokitesvara or the features of Goddess Tara are considered to solve the issue of the function of this temple. Analysis of the discovery of various types of ceramics in Kampung Baru shows that these ceramics originate from the identifiable times are T'ang-Song, Song, Song-Yuan, Song-Yuan-Ming, early Yuan-Ming and even Persians represent the century- 8 to 10 M. The most common types of ceramics are celadon and stone ware while whiteware, Qing-Pai and Persian ceramics are found in small quantities. This foreign ceramic analysis proves that the site of Kampung Pengkalan Pasir has been actively used since the 8th century AD and also indirectly shows that the site of Kampung Pengkalan Pasir serves as a jetty built along the Sungai Muda to accommodate the busy port of Kedah Tua entrepot [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Candi Kampung Baru, Kota Kuala Muda, Kedah is an archeological site which had been found in 2010. This site is situated in the bank of Muda River and the distance between the site and the center of Kota Kuala Muda is about 2 km. The Muda River basin is famous as a center of government, entrepot and development of Kedah Tua kingdom from 2nd to 14th century and this center had its core area in Sungai Mas. Results of excavations that have been done in 2016 have shown that Candi Kampung Baru site has a lot of shard of foreign ceramics, for example Chinese ceramics, Persian ceramics and Southeast Asian ceramics. About 700 pieces of foreign ceramics shard was found in the site when the excavation phase 2 had been carried out. The total number of the shard is almost the same with phase 1. All ceramics which had been found in the site were shard and there is no ceramic which remains complete shape. Finding foreign ceramics in the archeological site is very important because these ceramics can tell us the date and important information about the site which is associated with these foreign ceramics. Most of Chinese ceramics which had been found in the excavation phase 2 were from Tang Dynasty (A.D.618-906), Song Dynasty (A.D.960-1279) and Yuan Dynasty (A.D.1271-1368). These ceramics perhaps come from Fujian, Guangdong and Hebei, China. Persian ceramics also had been found in the site and the date of these ceramics may be about 8th to 10th century. Ceramic which is dated 10th to 14th century is the most common ceramic in the site based on results of the excavation which had been carried out in the Candi Kampung Baru, Kota Kuala Muda, Kedah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translingualism advocates for the appreciation of multilingual speakers' fluid, flexible, and creative deployment of semiotic resources without regard to the ideological constructs of named languages. While this scholarship has been developed primarily in the contexts of world Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and bilingual education in Anglophone nations, its implications to foreign language education in higher education have not been fully explored. The current article addresses this issue by shedding light on the conditions of teaching and learning of indigenous languages spoken in once-colonized regions of the world as an additional language for English speakers. More specifically, it examines how American students who participated in an eight-week Yorùbá study abroad program in Nigeria navigated a rather conspicuous gap between a monolingual utopia promoted by the program and the complex translingual realities of everyday language use outside of the classroom. Through the review of the perspectives of students with diverse backgrounds, the article discusses the significance of taking sociohistorical and geopolitical contexts surrounding the target language into account to cultivate informed learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusess topics within the issue including translanguaging, act of languaging, and transliterature.

The recent influx of international students from Asia to the United States has drastically changed the demographics of students studying languages, including languages other than English, in many large universities. For some languages, it is not uncommon for international students from Asia to constitute more than 50% of current enrollments in a language class. This new reality poses a number of questions, including how to meet students' diverse needs and goals for language study and how to mobilize increasing student diversity to enhance the development of global competence among all students, regardless of country of origin. Using semi-structured exploratory interviews conducted with domestic and international students of Japanese as a foreign language at an American university, this study investigated the challenges and opportunities presented in the globalized language classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental problem for all educational reform efforts is one of specifying in practical terms just what the reform requires of teachers and students. In addressing it, educational designers have introduced the term “accountability” to characterize something missing in classroom discourse. This term, however, held special significance in the writings of the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel. Livingston applied Garfinkel’s treatment of accountability to understanding the lived-work of doing mathematics, particularly proving work. We examine an 8th-grade student’s presentation during a Japanese geometry lesson as a proof-account. Within it we see elements of both classical and natural accountability placed on display. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

High-resolution maps of potential frozen ground distribution in South America have been produced for the present day (0 ka) and the Last Glacial Maximum (21 ka). Surface air temperature outputs from global climate models (GCMs) of the recent Paleoclimate Model Intercomparison Project were used for the reconstructions, and then downscaled from regional to local scales, with the help of a 1 arc-minute digital elevation model. Their validity was examined using fieldwork-based evidence and knowledge. The downscaled map for the present day successfully reproduces the presence of permafrost in the Andes, a task at which original coarse-resolution GCM output maps failed. The map also shows close correspondence with instrumental observations. Similarly, the downscaled distribution of 21 ka frozen ground shows overall consistency with geomorphological and/or palaeoenvironmental reconstructions. Areal coverage of potential permafrost for all of South America is estimated at 139 000 km2 for today and 435 000 km2 for 21 ka, mostly along the Andean mountain ranges. Regional inspections, however, show divergence from field-observed features, attributed to microclimatic effects and past permafrost conditions. For southern Patagonia, and especially the eastern lowlands, the diagnosed lower limit for permafrost is about 1000 m asl, whereas field evidence at lower altitudes indicates the presence of either permafrost or deep seasonal frost. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human herpesvirus-6 (HHV-6) infection induces cell-cycle arrest. In this study, we found that the HHV-6-encoded U14 protein induced cell-cycle arrest at G2/M phase via an association with the cellular protein EDD, a mediator of DNA-damage signal transduction. In the early phase of HHV-6 infection, U14 colocalized with EDD dots in the nucleus, and similar colocalization was also observed in cells transfected with a U14 expression vector. When the carboxyl-terminal region of U14 was deleted, no association of U14 and EDD was observed, and the percentage of cells in G2/M decreased relative to that in cells expressing wild-type U14, indicating that the C-terminal region of U14 and the U14–EDD association are critical for the cell-cycle arrest induced by U14. These results indicate that U14 is a G2/M checkpoint regulator encoded by HHV-6. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, as part of a growing body of studies that investigate translingual communicative practices, introduces a microanalysis of doctor-patient interactions that took place in urban Japan, a country that has been identified as belong to the expanding circle of world Englishes (Kachru 1986). Through the examination of two cases of primary care visits, one conducted in lingua franca English and another in a hybrid of Japanese and English, the study demonstrates how a Japanese doctor and two migrant patients from Ghana skillfully deploy a variety of semiotic resources to achieve the problem presentation stage of their encounters. More specifically, it investigates how concerns expressed by the patients become constructed into ``doctorable'' (Heritage and Robinson 2006) medical conditions through their subsequent interaction. The turn-by-turn examination of interactions reveals how the doctor's biomedical knowledge, embodied in his interactional practices, together with his cooperative disposition (Canagarajah 2013) to the interactional uncertainty inherent in multilingual and multicultural encounters, serve as a critical vehicle for making both the doctor's and the patients' seemingly ``truncated multilingual repertoires'' (Blommaert 2010) work in this particular institutional context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review aims to identify major issues in and the direction of recent L2 Japanese research by reviewing over 200 empirical studies published in English or Japanese between 2000 and 2010. The first part of this article examines topics in second language acquisition (SLA) research with regard to L2 Japanese, including vocabulary and kanji (Chinese characters transferred into Japanese) learning, syntactic development, reading and writing in L2 Japanese, interlanguage pragmatics and language socialization, affective factors, and multilingualism and the acquisition of Japanese as a heritage language. The second part offers an overview of issues and problems in pedagogical practices, including curriculum design, culture in language education, classroom discourse, and study abroad. The review of these themes illustrates a broad picture of current research in L2 Japanese learning and instruction inspired by general trends in SLA and applied linguistics research, as well as unique features of Japanese language and social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Encountering trouble producing a word in the midst of a turn at talk is an everyday experience for foreign language learners. By employing conversation analysis (CA) as a central tool for analysis, the current study explores how students undertake a range of word searches while they organize a pair work session designed for the purpose of language learning. The analysis demonstrates how the learners simultaneously employ structurally different kinds of semiotic resources, such as language, body, and the structures of their textbooks and notebooks for language learning. The close explication of the ways in which cognitive states are embodied, displayed, and treated by the two students during the word search sequences reveals how they conduct indigenous assessment of each other's knowledge while “doing being a foreign language learner in a classroom.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on the need to invoke a priori exogenous theories to understand language learning behaviors, and another on the joint emergence of interactional and social-cognitive competencies.

This commentary reviews the five studies of intercultural communication in this special issue by comparing the nature of data analyzed and analytical procedures adopted. The data span from Africa, Asia, to North America, where different cultural, national, or ethnic groups were engaged in different types of social activities; their diversity illustrates how the participants' ascription of, and resistance towards, their cultural, national, or ethnic identities reflect unique features of the sociohistorical contexts and the nature of their activities. In order to investigate such distinct treatments of interculturality, the researchers seek an analytical lens in the frameworks of 'interactional sociolinguistics' (Goffman 1974, 1981; Gumperz 1982, 1992) and 'membership categorization analysis' (Sacks 1972, 1992). The metamethodological reflection considers the selection of focal phenomena as well as the use of ethnographic information and the researchers' own membership knowledge in the process of interpretation, and addresses the issues concerning how to attain an "emic" perspective of cultural difference and sameness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how Japanese and American students initiate topical talk as they get acquainted with each other during their initial encounter at a student-organized conversation table. Whereas previous studies of intercultural communications tend to take interculturality for granted, this study investigates the observable and reportable ways in which the participants demonstrate the relevance, or the irrelevance, of interculturality in the development of the interaction. The participants in the data presented in this article recurrently produce a common set of questions that reflect on their categorizations of the coparticipants. This study closely examines vocal and nonvocal conduct associated with the delivery of these questions, the selection of respondents to these questions, and the treatment of problems emerging in the development of these question-answer sequences. In doing so, it explicates how the participants utilize their cultural differences as a resource for organizing their participation and, at the same time, recreates the salience of the interculturality of the interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the methodological framework of ‘conversation analysis’ as a central tool of analysis, this paper examines the sequential development of talk‐in‐interaction observed in a small group activity in a Japanese language classroom. While the group work was designed to have students engage in a discussion with native speakers invited to the class, the resulting interaction ended up becoming rather like a structured interview with successive exchanges of the students' questions and the native speaker's answers. How did the instructional design affect the ways in which they developed their talk? And conversely, how did the development of talk demonstrate the participants' orientation to the institutionalized nature of talk? This study explores the relationship among the task instruction, the students' reaction to the instruction during their pre‐task planning, and the actual development of the talk with the native speakers. The students' planning tended to focus on the content of discussion, compiling a list of sequence‐initiating actions, in particular, questions. While the plans contributed to the development of the talk, the episode reveals that a more natural and coherent discussion was afforded by the students' production of spontaneous utterances and attention to the contingent development of talk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one on the exemplar of the ethnography of communication perspective, a study which employs a systematic functional linguistics framework, and the use of a conversation analysis approach as a central tool in investigating the sequential development of talk within interactions that take place in a small group activity in an upper-level Japanese language classroom in the U.S.

The clinical records of 889 patients with olfactory disturbance who had been examined at the Olfaction Clinic, Osaka City University Hospital, Japan from January 1982 to December 1996 were studied in order to investigate the relationship between the patients' characteristics and their prognoses. Aetiologically the characteristic variables of “head trauma” and “congenital” had the greatest influence on prognosis, representing poor recovery. The patients with “rhinitis” and “head trauma” showed faster improvement of olfactory disturbance in “females”, “those with short duration of olfactory disorder” and “those with high olfactory acuity before treatment”. None of the characteristic variables influenced prognosis in the patients with “viral infection”. Age did not significantly influence prognosis. Improvement was recognized in most patients within 6 months. Hence, we should treat patients with olfactory disturbance for at least this length of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postviral olfactory disorder develops after infection with the common cold, and is a relatively severe and prolonged disorder without rhino-sinusitis. This epidemiological study aimed to characterize its clinical pathology and determine the causative virus. Postviral olfactory disorder occurs most commonly in middle-aged women and is most prevalent in spring and summer. A comparison of the monthly frequency of the disorder with the incidence of isolation of various viruses suggest that the influenza virus, respiratory syncytial virus, and herpes virus are not causative viruses, while parainfluenza virus type 3 is most likely to be a causative virus. This conclusion is supported by immunological study and analysis of symptoms of the cold. All patients with postviral olfactory disorder had increased serum antibody titre for parainfluenza virus type 3. No prominent or specific symptoms of common cold were identified as a potential trigger of this syndrome in patient questionnaires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT- Hepatitis B surface (HBs) and core (HBc) antigens (Ag) were studied in liver tissue in HBsAg seropositive patients with chronic liver disease complicated (n=32) and not complicated (n=36) by hepatocellular carcinoma. Both groups were matched by age, sex and underlying disease. There was no qualitative and quantitative difference in tissue HBsAg between the two groups. However, HBcAg was significantly less in quantity in hepatocytes of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma compared to chronic liver disease without cancer. Serum hepatitis B e antigen tested by radioimmunoassay was also less frequently positive in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma. These findings seem to suggest that hepatitis B virus replication becomes less active in the process of hepatocarcinogenesis. The relationship between intrahepatic hepatitis B antigens and liver cell dysplasia was also studied. In hepatocellular carcinoma, tissue hepatitis B antigens often coexisted in the same liver having liver cell dysplasia, but no such association was observed in chronic liver disease without cancer. However, no indication was obtained that the dysplastic cells harbor HBsAg more frequently than non-dysplastic cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]