ABSTRACT
In November 2009 the New York Times Sunday Book Review published an essay entitled, “Is Technology Dumbing Down Japanese?” The article takes stock of the changes in the Japanese language as a result of media such as blogs and email but also “keitai shosetsu.” As the article notes:
Some of the most dramatic transformations have been taking place on cellphones, where writers, often young women, type stories into their keypads and readers consume them on their screens. Sentences tend to be short, and love stories are popular. The phenomenon peaked in 2007, when fi ve out of 10 of the year’s best-selling books were written on cellphones. While their popularity seems to have dropped off, keitai shosetsu still elicit scorn from some Japanese who see them as trashy.
