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This paper examines the ways in which healthcare professionals interact with patients' family members, and/or colleagues. The data are from healthcare discourses at difficult times found in the manga series entitled Nurse AOI. As the first step, we selected several communication scenes for analysis in terms of politeness strategies. From these scenes, we extracted individual events that exhibit any one of five main constraints/maxims that follow Leech's (2009) Grand Strategy Politeness (GSP) framework--generosity/tact, approbation/modesty, obligation, opinion, and feeling. The in-depth analysis was conducted using the following three perspectives: the contextual background of the communication, the relationship with patients' family member and/or colleagues, and the degree of face-threatening acts. This last perspective was evaluated by Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), judging the imposition of face-threatening acts, social distance, and relative power. Each communication event was examined in terms of politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Yoshioka, 2007). At difficult times optimal politeness strategies are required while simultaneously providing urgent medical care for patients or victims. The findings of this study indicate both potential problems with healthcare communication at difficult times such as disasters and also suggest the ways in which the quality of communication may be enhanced.

This study examines the ways in which college students in Japan overcame sensitivity to external evaluation and increased their willingness to communicate in English. It is not uncommon for university students in Japan, who are otherwise proficient speakers of English and motivated to learn, fail to exhibit English competency in real communication situations. In interviews with students and teachers we discovered that sociocultural factors impede spontaneous communication, resulting in a reduced level of willingness to communicate in the students' L2, English. The social norms of the language classroom at a Japanese university create a milieu where individual students are sensitized to the social appropriateness of their communication acts. Since these norms are related to both the speech community of college students as well as larger societal expectations, including the concept of "seken" (public eye), we suggest that language educators need to consider carefully the social context of the Japanese student language community when facilitating individuals' development of English language competence. Serendipitously we discovered that communication apprehension decreased when socially appropriate acts of communication were encouraged. The participants for this study read books (graded readers) of their own selection individually as a part of reading classes and gave in-class presentations, an idea self-initiated by the students themselves. Without any explicit attempt at boosting their levels of willingness to communicate, the participants of this study reported that they gained higher self-perceived communicative competence and felt more comfortable in speaking.

This article examines how healthcare professionals use encouragement. Focusing on GAMBARU ["to try hard"], forty-one scenes were collected from healthcare manga. Each scene of encouragement was analyzed from three perspectives; the contextual background of the communication, the relationship with the patients and the patients' response to the encouragement, and the evaluation of the imposition of face-threatening acts, social distance, and relative power (Politeness Theory). Further analysis was conducted using Leech's (2009) Grand Strategy of Politeness, and each chosen communication event was categorized among ten types of speech acts. The findings suggest some implications to enhance the quality of healthcare communication that offers patients encouragement. (Contains 1 table.)

The main purposes of this study are: (a) to identify the constructs that may generate communication apprehension and to investigate how they influence communication apprehension and reduce the level of willingness to communicate; and (b) to explore the basic mentality underlying these constructs. The data were obtained from semi-structured interviews with 10 Japanese female college students and one Vietnamese male student who provided a contrast for the data from the Japanese students. The study suggests that constructs such as perfectionism, competitiveness, "good-student" mentality and face-protecting orientation may generate communication apprehension and the basic mentality underlying them may be other-directedness. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

When translating culturally-colored discourse, a great deal of effort is required to overcome the complexities of and problems caused by the uniqueness of the source text. In this study, rakugo, which is the traditional Japanese performance art of telling comic stories, will be a source text for analysis. The culturally-specific features and the factors causing complications in the translation process will be explored, based on some excerpts from "Himaraya no hokutoshichisei: Septentrion over the Himalaya", the original rakugo script written by Sanyutei Kyoraku. According to linguistic relativity, differences in perspectives on reality often manifest themselves as specific features in language use in speech communities, and these differences seem to cause complications in translation because some words are specific to a particular language and cannot be translated literally. Translating the culturallycolored script, therefore, may necessitate the in-depth examination or exploration of given cultures or worldviews. As a more specific method for analyzing the translation process, the notion of high context vs. low context will be utilised. By examining the data with the notion of linguistic relativity in mind, the first and second person pronouns are highlighted as focal points. Accordingly, the purpose of this article is to examine the frequency of first-person pronouns uttered or not uttered in Japanese where they are uttered in English, and the frequency of second-person pronouns uttered or not uttered in Japanese where they are uttered in English, and to investigate the ways in which these phenomena are related to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, such as in Hall's notion of highcontext and low-context societies. Furthermore, Japanese socioanthropological characteristics are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]