This paper looks at multilingual signs and what these signs have to tell us about multilingualism in Japan in general. Working with a larger sample of signs collected in central Tokyo, it is shown how these signs can be read to reflect larger transformations in Japanese society and its linguistic make-up at large. Four interrelated factors are identified as indicative of these transformations: (1) favourable attitudes toward foreign languages, (2) official internationalization policies, (3) growing ethnicisation in some areas, and (4) a recent interest in Korean culture and language.

This paper looks at compliance-gaining interaction in a Japanese elderly care facility from a conversation analytical point of view. Focus is on the various ways compliance is sought for by the caring staff with getting the residents out of bed and starting the daily morning care procedures. Three extracts are discussed in detail. The analysis shows how the residents in all three cases display clear signs of resistance to get up, but finally have to submit to the planned course of actions pursued by the care workers. A closer look at how this is played out in interaction suggests that the residents' compliance is enforced rather than gained. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.

This paper looks at communication between staff and residents in a Japanese elderly care facility. It discusses the role of politeness in this special type of health care setting from a cross-cultural perspective. Starting with a review of previous literature on the topic, some basic characteristics of communication between staff and residents in nursing homes are outlined. The overall conditions that apply in the caring context with regard to linguistic politeness are described on the basis of Brown and Levinson's framework. The main part of the paper presents speech data from a Japanese nursing home, analyzed in direct comparison with data from other cultural contexts. In so doing, an attempt is made to outline some common communicative,features in institutional elderly care. The summarizing discussion focuses on the question of whether the special conditions of institutional elderly care may indeed generate very similar types of communication across different cultural settings.