Title: Akanbe

General Information about Item:

• Customary Lore: Facial and Hand Gesture
• Language: Japanese
• Country of Origin: Japan
• Informant: Professor Mayumi Ishida
• Date Collected: 10-16-18

Informant Data:

• Professor Mayumi Ishida was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan.  She majored in English Literature during her undergraduate studies, and tutored Japanese students in English as a part time job. During her sophomore year of college, she studied abroad for one year in the United States at Tufts University. After returning to Japan, she continued her studies in English Literature and Language throughout undergraduate and the graduate level. While at graduate school, she chose to apply to a teaching fellowship program in which Japanese native speakers went abroad to the United States to teach Japanese. She was accepted as a teacher and began to teach Japanese in the United States. She has taught at academic institutions such as University of Wisconsin, Wellesley College, and Dartmouth College. When she is not teaching Dartmouth students Japanese, Professor Ishida can be often seen walking her dog named “Saki” around campus.

Contextual Data:

• Cultural Context: Japanese society often has strict set of social norms that people should not act too silly or offend one another publicly. As such, explicit insulting gestures are mainly found in the children demographic where acting silly or doing something very “rude” or “offensive” is less frowned upon and more accepted. Insulting gestures such as the “akanbe” which are directly communicating a rude or insulting meaning to another person is only acceptable in few situations: (1) a child is doing the gesture to another child (2) a child is secretly doing the gesture to an adult  (3) an adult is indirectly or secretly doing the gesture to another adult.
• Social Context: This gesture was mentioned when the interviewee was asked about any insulting gestures that exist in Japanese culture. Professor Ishida stated that she remembers a childhood friend from elementary school doing this gesture to her as a joke. She mentioned that children would sometimes do the “akanbe” gesture behind their teacher’s back at the teacher to express some sort of dissatisfaction due to an unfair treatment. For example, if a teacher were to scold a elementary school child, the child may retaliate with the “akanbe” gesture while the teacher’s back is turned away.

Item:

• The gesture begins with the actor pulling the skin underneath one of their eyes downward with one hand, which causes the red of the eye to be shown. The actor then sticks out his or her tongue.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

*Note: Professor Ishida did not wish to be photographed while doing the “Akanbe” gesture. The picture below is another interviewee Rina Yaita, who also mentioned the “Akanbe” gesture during her interview.

Transcript:

• “ Children from ages of kindergarten to even 3rd grade can be seen doing something like ‘akanbe.’ However, whenever the kids become a bit older and more of a teenager, then they want to be more adult-like and would not do something that would seem very childish… It’s quite rare that children would do the ‘akanbe’ to people that they are taught to show respect to. For example, children are taught to respect their teachers at school, so if a child would do the ‘akanbe’ to a teacher directly, that would be a very rude thing. So maybe in that case they would try to hide it.” – Professor Ishida

Informant’s Comments:

• While children do this kind of gesture to one another as a joke, in almost all cases Japanese adults or even young adults would not perform this gesture.

Collector’s Comments:

• This is one of the very few explicit and direct insulting gestures that I was able to collect from Japanese culture. In the case of the “akanbe” it seems like its major influence is seen more in children’s cartoons or comics rather than in real life. While in real life, children are expected to behave properly and politely, the world of cartoons or comics depict children behaving in a rude or silly ways. As such, the children in fictional settings are more frequently seen doing the “akanbe” than children in real life.

Collector’s Name: Young Jang 

Tags/Keywords:

• Insulting Gesture
• Akanbe
• Japanese children’s gesture
• Japanese Insulting Gesture