Kabu no Isaki, book 5 by Hitoshi Ashinano

[james_davis_nicoll]

Kabu no Isaki, book 5 by Hitoshi Ashinano

Comments

[bwross]

Actually in songs, "boku" is about as gender neutral as it gets. Plenty of women use "boku" in songs. My theory is that it's used most where the market of the songs has a large cross-gender fanbase that might want to sing it at karaoke.

[butsuri]

While young women who use boku for self-reference (bokukko) exist, it may be misleading to base an idea of how common this is on the use of boku by female singers. As I understand it, there is in Japanese popular music much less of an assumption that, in a song in the first person, the character who sings must be the same gender as the performer. So a woman who uses boku in a song is often just playing a male part, as it were. (So I have been told by my J-pop-loving friend, anyway.)

[(Anonymous)]

That's why I specified "in songs" to begin with. I've joked for years about songs being their own dialect ("uta-ben")... women using "boku" is just a part of that. Outside it's rare, but in a song, its pretty much the go to for neutral... there are other options for when you want to impose a gender, "boku" says pretty much nothing in comparison.

[scott_sanford]

But what we really need to know is what pronoun Japanese robots are using. *grin*

[ba_munronoe]

"his fits nicely with the way we don’t really find out why someone would have built a series of facilities way up the slope of Mt. Fuji."

Well, if you have a 38 kilometer high mountain, it would be a nice place to put an observatory.

[butsuri]

The "thing standing 700m high that looks like a person" in the west that the Blacknose mentions is the Tower of the Sun, built in Osaka for Expo '70. It's about 300km from Mt Fuji *here*, so 3000km *there*, roughly as distant as Manila or Ulaabaatar *here*.