Kobe Kaisei College

This paper discusses the use of English in the Japanese novel by Tsubouchi Shôyô Tôsei shosei katagi (“The Student Character of the Present Time”), which was published in sections between 1885 and 1886, and is considered one of the first Japanese novels to be influenced by English. It describes students in Tokyo around 1881 and 1882 (Tsubouchi 1977a), who were in the vanguard of the Meiji era (1868–1912), during which a great deal of effort went into the modernization of Japan. The novel can be said to reflect the actual use of English by students in Tokyo then because the author was a pioneer in realistic novels in Japan, and was himself a student at the University of Tokyo at the time of writing. The discussion deals with the author’s style repertoire, English use in the novel in relation to three language contact phenomena, that is, code-switching, code-mixing, and borrowing, and forms and functions of English use.

ABSTRACT: This paper describes the ‘style repertoire’ in modern Japanese literature and investigates the roles played by English borrowings in modern Japanese literary works. It first presents a brief summary of a previous study of English borrowings in Japanese, one of the implications of which motivated this paper. The second part of this paper describes the style repertoire in the context of Japanese modern literature and contemporary Japanese. The final section examines what kinds of stylistic effects the use of English borrowings has produced in modern Japanese literature. The results of the study show that, in some modern Japanese stories, English borrowings have played important roles such as special‐association providers, in‐group‐identity markers, and attention attractors.

The inactivation of the enzymes by linoleic acid hydroperoxides (LAHPO) was tested in connection with the toxicity of oxidized fat. At the same time, the inhibition of enzyme activities by linoleic acid was also tested. Ribonuclease (RNase), trypsin, chymotrypsin and pepsin which are considered to be simple proteins and not to be SH-enzymes were chosen as the enzymes. RNase was largely inhibited by LAHPO, but the other enzymes were inhibited by linoleic acid as well as LAHPO. The inhibition of each enzyme occurred at different pH. This fact may show that the inhibition occurs by binding of such hydrophobic compounds to the enzyme, and that the surface exposition of hydrophobic region may depend on the pH. Not only the reaction of some specific amino acid residue in the protein molecules with LAHPO, but also the binding of these hydrophobic compounds must be remembered in the mechanism of inhibition.