Performing Cool Japan and Uncool Hybridity: Analysing 'luugo' (Lou Language)

‘Metrolingualism’ refers to young people’s use of new hybrid language or foreign languages/dialects, in popular culture or everyday interactions (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010). They are creative moves which challenge and loosen cultural, historical, and political boundaries, in-sync with the late-modern and globalised social reality that we apparently live in today.

  As of Japan, Maher (2005) provocatively stated: ‘Cultural essentialism and ethnic orthodoxy are out. In Japan, metroethnicity is in. Cool rules’. True, young people in Japan today are far more ‘open’ towards foreign cultures and languages: dimsum and Thai curry follow for dinner, followed by drinks at a British pub with the NBA games on TV screen. But are they really feeling ever so border-free in terms of language? And do many discursively engage in such border-loosening behaviours? If not, why not?

  Luugo (‘Lou language’) is a performative and comic idiolect of a TV personality, Lou Oshiba. Luugo is a deliberate mixture of English words into Japanese phonology and syntax. In his communication styles and stunts, he also reenacts the stereotypical culture shock between ‘Western’ and traditional Japanese non-verbal communication styles.

  Using discourse analysis, I discuss how the intricate mixing of the two linguistic/cultural codes is interpreted as uncool, illegitimate, unprofessional, undesirable, idiosyncratic, foolish, and fantastic, rather than cool, creative, liberating, desirable, ubiquitous, skillful, and down-to-earth.

  Despite the popularity of such cunning comedy, the boundaries between languages and ethnicity do not look as if they are loosening and liberating. Rather, the comic act securely positioned the hybridity in the marginal discursive space. In turn, even the seemingly liberal, multi-layered and sometimes fun nature of hybridity is supporting the hegemony and the distinction between the socioeconomically powerful and the rest.