'Steeling mind and body': Ideological metaphors in Japan 1937-1945.

How does the authoritarian militaristic regime of the Japanese Empire succeed in convincing its people to fight a war (1931/1937-1945) that lays waste to almost all of East and Southeast Asia? Specifically, drawing on Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, Rhetoric and Cognitive Linguistics, this dissertation looks at whether and how metaphor and ideological aspects of language use contribute to mobilizing the Japanese (especially the young) during the war years. In this dissertation I focus on a very specific wartime metaphor that links 'effort of body/mind' and 'steel' ('Steel your mind and body' – shinshin-tanren). This metaphor gained such momentum that it trickled from the conceptual and lexical to the graphic level, affecting the very orthography of the kanji characters. Its functioning is considered ideological in the sense that it contributes to a network of ideas, opinions and beliefs that are carried along in the investigated discourse as if commonsensical or natural.The main corpus on which the research is based consists of the two biggest daily newspapers in wartime Japan, Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun, spanning the years between 1931 and 1945, as well as textbooks used in ethics school teaching and legal documents. A secondary corpus contains personal documents, letters and diaries written by Japanese conscripts during the war.

Keywords:LINGUISTIC PRAGMATICS, LANGUAGE AND IDEOLOGY, POLITICAL DISCOURSE, METAPHOR

Disciplines:History, Linguistics, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Other languages and literary studies