We are happy to invite you to our upcoming DIJ History & Humanities Study Group on Friday, 18 May 2012, 18.30 h.

Peter Backhaus, Waseda University

You've got sp[at]m: A corpus-linguistic analysis of Japanese dating invitation mails

This presentation examines one very common type of Japanese spam: mails that take the shape of dating invitations. The ultimate goal of these mails is t o make (heterosexual, male) readers give away personal information such as t heir address and credit card details. In order to do so, the mails pretend t o be written by female senders looking for a sexual relationship with the re ceiver. Since in many cases the receivers are offered larger sums of money f or the desired transactions, these messages in recent years have come to be referred to as "reverse compensated dating" (gyaku enjo koosai) mails.

Working with a sample of 434 such mails collected between 2009 and 2012, I analyse the genre-specific characteristics of this very special type of communication. Special focus is on three questions: (1) How are sexual taboos communicated in the text? (2) What linguistic strategies are used to fake female authorship? (3) What teasing strategies are at work to make people (other than spam mail researchers) open and read these messages?

Peter Backhaus is Associate Professor at Waseda University, School of Education. He has a broad interest in Japanese language and society. Major publications include Linguistic Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in Tokyo (Multilingual Matters, 2007) and Communication in Elderly Care (ed., Continuum, 2011).

The DIJ History & Humanities Study Group is a forum for young scholars and Ph.D. candidates in the field of history or the humanities organized by Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt and Susanne Klien.
All are welcome to attend, but registration
(iwata[at]dijtokyo.org) is appreciated.

German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ), Jochi Kioizaka Bldg. 2F,
7-1 Kioicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-0094, Phone:
03-3222-5077.

For a map please refer to www.dijtokyo.org