Mediated Masculinities and Screen Speech in Japan

Indexicality, Ideology, and the Translation of Male Language

Abstract

This article examines the representation of male speech in two episodes of the Japanese television segment Shirabete Mitara, aired on Fuji TV between August and November 2025. Focusing on interviews with foreign men in Japan, it analyzes the voice-over and subtitling strategies through which their utterances are mediated, with particular attention to the role of audiovisual translation in the construction of masculine speech styles. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative distributional analysis and qualitative discourse analysis to examine correlations between speakers’ age, nationality, and the distribution of masculine-coded linguistic resources (ML). The analysis documents the distribution of marked linguistic resources and their relationship with hon’yakuban otokokotoba (translated male speech style), examining their occurrence in relation to interactional positioning, epistemic stance, and mediated interpersonal alignment. Particular attention is paid to the distribution of stance-marking and explanatory resources across speakers and interactional contexts, as well as to the relative presence or absence of strongly marked masculine features.