A Gaze at the Diversity of Language: Shuji Terayama's View of Language (early 1970s)

A Gaze at the Diversity of Language: Shuji Terayama's View of Language (early 1970s)

In the early 1970s, Japan was experiencing accelerated urbanization in the aftermath of rapid economic growth, and people's lives and languages were becoming more homogenized. The spread of television broadcasting had made the standard language pervasive throughout the country, and there was even a tendency for dialects to be treated as something to be corrected. As society as a whole strove for efficiency and uniformity, diverse local cultures were being marginalized.

Against this backdrop, Shuji Terayama actively affirmed the diversity of language. He disagreed with the social tendency to regard the spread of the standard language as progress, and rather argued that the cultural value lay in the fragmentation of dialects and regional languages. For Terayama, language diversity was not merely a difference in expression, but the basis for shaping the uniqueness of human relationships and local communities.

He believed that the sounds and unique connotations of dialects enrich people's relationships with each other and bring new seeds to the local culture. Standardization brings convenience, but at the same time it risks the loss of diversity and the flattening of human relationships. Terayama's perspective was also a resistance to preserve the depth of culture in an age when urbanization and mass media have homogenized the language.

This view of language is also a visionary view that is relevant to later postmodern cultural theory. Terayama's view of language not as a mere means of communication, but as a mirror reflecting society and human relationships, was a symbol of the cultural imagination's resistance to homogenization.