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Two papers
First, Japanese has syllables: A reply to Labrune (2012), by Shigeto Kawahara:
In a provocative article, Labrune (2012b) argues that there is little phonetic or psycholinguistic evidence for syllables in Tokyo Japanese (henceforth Japanese), and that phonological phenomena which have been hitherto analyzed in terms of syllables can be reanalyzed by deploying a distinction between a "regular/full mora" and a "deficient/special mora". She concludes that Tokyo Japanese does not have syllables, and as a further theoretical consequence of this view, she argues that not all prosodic levels are universal, extending on the suggestions by Hyman (1985, 2008). Although this proposal is very thought-provoking and its theoretical consequence is an important one, it does miss some of the previous experimental findings about the existence of syllables in the prosodic organization of Japanese. Therefore, this reply article summarizes evidence that Japanese does show evidence for syllables both phonetically and psycholinguistically.
I like Kawahara's directness here, from the title of the paper to its conclusion ("In conclusion, Japanese has syllables"); for what it's worth, I also found Labrune's arguments unconvincing at the time (I haven't read the 2012 paper Kawahara specifically refers to, but she discussed the issue in The Phonology of Japanese (2012), which I did read, and it doesn't sound like she used substantially different arguments there.)
Kawahara also recently published a couple of papers on "maids," i.e. employees in maid cafes, which may be of somewhat less universal interest although I found them good reading: "The phonetics of Japanese maid voice I: A preliminary study" and "The sound symbolic nature of Japanese maid names", both available here (along with the rest of his papers, it seems).
Two experiments show that obstruents are associated with tsun-type maids, whereas sonorants are associated with moe-type maids. [...] Morever, the identified sound symbolic relationships exemplifiy cases of emergent sound symbolic relationships, not based on conventionalized rules, as the notion of "tsun" and "moe" are new notions.
Second, Helen J. S. Lee's Writing Colonial Relations of Everyday Life in Senryu (2008).
Life in the colonies for Japanese settlers was — as life everywhere is — largely shaped by class status. Peter Duus provides an insightful distinction of class membership by identifying two types of settlers: immigrants and colonists. The working-class Japanese settlers depicted in the poems belong to Duus's definition of "immigrants," which he opposes to "colonists" whose presence in the colonial territory was subsidized by the state and who had membership in the dominant stratum of the host society. The elevated and privileged status of "colonists" engendered markedly different colonial experiences from those of their countrymen who went to colonial territories as "immigrants"; the latter were "oppressed, assimilated, and rejected by the host society," although they still ended up contributing to the exploitation of the colonized in one form or another.
[...] Senryu poetry illustrates the diverse colonial experiences of Japanese immigrants who took up a wide range of occupations, such as day laborers, peddlers, shop clerks, and factory workers. Rather than assert a monolithic portrayal of these working-class Japanese settlers, this article explores the colonial dynamics rendered in each poem as a way to offer insight into the multifaceted lived daily experiences of Japanese immigrants in colonial Korea.
The details and close reading get denser towards the end of the paper. It's worth the buildup.
The book Lee uses as her main source, Chōsen Senryū 朝鮮川柳, is actually available online (albeit in hated .djvu format). This allowed me to confirm that kahetamanma on page 617 of Lee's article is indeed the weird transcription error it appears to be. The original is 咬へたまんま, which although a bit obscure orthographically (the "standard" Japanese reading for 咬 is kamu) is almost certainly to be pronounced kuwaeta manma — cf 鉛筆なんか咬へて pronounced enpitsu nanka kuwaete here.
leoboiko:
> Morever, the identified sound symbolic relationships exemplify cases of emergent sound symbolic relationships, not based on conventionalized rules, as the notion of "tsun" and "moe" are new notions.
I kind of don't get what he's getting at with this statement. "Tsun" and "moe" may be new notions, but the subjective feelings that they're based on – harshness and cuteness – are as old as humanity itself; and sound-symbolism with, respectively, obstruents and sonorants (in this case) is ~exactly~ the synæsthetic association you'd expect, given all that's know about sound-symbolism both in Japanese and universally. The author is aware of this point and discuss it at length at the Conclusion; so why claim that the maid gitaigo are emergent and not based on rules? They're just as emergent as any other sound-symbolic datum.
> If this hypothesis is on the right track, then our results predict that front or acute
vowels like [i, e] are associated with tsun maids and back or grave vowels like [a, o, u] are associated with moe maids. This prediction is to be tested in a future study.
I wonder if Tokyo Japanese will see a less pronounced effect on /u/, since it's often devoiced.
Great find btw :)