Dr Jun Ohashi
Japanese Studies Room 320 Tel: +61 3 8344 4263 |
Background
Dr Jun Ohashi is a lecturer at the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne. Jun has considerable experience in teaching Japanese at universities in the UK and Australia. His PhD, a study on social meaning of thanking in Japanese, identified a Japanese cultural way of thanking, orei, and revealed what cultural codes and politeness orientations constrain cultural ways of thanking. He is now extending his research scope to include thanking in Australian English to investigate whether Japanese orei has relevance to thanking in Australian English. The Japan Foundation Fellowship Programme supported Jun to pursue and develop his research interests, and enabled him to carry out fieldwork in Japan.
Research Interests
His research has been concentrated on theoretical and methodological issues of cross-cultural pragmatic research. He is interested in offering a new interpretation of Japanese linguistic politeness phenomena from non-Western perspectives. His current interest is on communicative acts of thanking and their social meaning in Japan and in Australia. His other research interests include gendered and generational variation of speech act realization, and cross-cultural investigation of public signs and exhortations.
Research in Progress
Comparative pragmatic study of Japanese and Australian speech act of thanking