Mock foreigner speech and the reification of mediatized (white) foreignness in Japanese media

This article examines the metapragmatics of ‘Mock Foreigner’ speech and its associated characterological figure in a Japanese popular media context. Mock Foreigner speech is a language ideological construct commonly used in Japanese media in the portrayal of non-native Japanese speakers of Western origin. Building on previous research of mock language varieties as ethnolinguistic boundary markers, I analyze both the representation of this figure in popular media genres, and in particular, metalinguistic discourses about the use of Mock Foreigner speech. The data in this study draws on popular media wiki entries in order to explore how media consumers understand the style and its margins. In particular, I focus on how the non-Japanese people have been represented in media over time from both a characterological and linguistic perspective, and how those representations persist today in the form of linguistic stereotypes and ideologies of foreignness. This study also demonstrates the existence of a perception gap between the imagined foreigner character (e.g. white Americans who use grammatically marked Japanese) and actual non-Japanese individuals. Mock Foreigner serves as an explicit marker of the imagined foreigner character, thus reifying the position of white foreignness as both default and linguistically saliant. • Speech by foreigner characters has long relied on the use of katakana, albeit how katakana is applied has changed over time. • Nihonjinron contributes to false dichotomy between an essentialized ‘Japaneseness’ and everything else in media. • Gap in acceptability of Mock Foreigner speech between foreigner characters (accepted) and non-Japanese people (criticized). • Mock Foreigner and foreigner character reify whiteness as default, despite lower proportion of white immigrants in Japan.