“KUKI GA YOMENAI”: SITUATED FACE-THREATENING ACT WITHIN JAPANESE SOCIAL INTERACTION

The number of foreign students has mushroomed in Japan lately. One of the cultural difficulties they are most likely to encounter and should overcome resides in non-verbal communication resources; aka, the “atmosphere” of the discourse is called as Kuki. A number of studies delineated that the sensitivity to Kuki is one of the essential aspects to establish rapport in Japanese discourse; otherwise, you will be labeled as “Kuki ga Yomenai” (KY) and marginalized from the discourse community. This study investigates how the perception of “Kuki ga Yomenai” is affected by the degree of face-threatening act (FTA), or FTA occurring in the discourse. Therefore, this study attempts to demonstrate how the perception of KY depends on the occurrence of FTAs based upon qualitative interviews.