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Akio Kamio In Memoriam

A brilliant beacon of Japanese linguistics has been extinguished.
Professor Akio Kamio, of Dokkyo University, Greater Tokyo, departed this life on Sunday, February 24, 2004, jointly with his wife Noriko.

We mourn this loss of a good friend and a faithful supporter of our Journal, whose keen advice and always willingly provided assistance we will be sorely missing for many years to come.

Akio Kamio is best known for his ground-breaking work in pragmatics. He developed the theory of ‘territory of information’ in order to explain why certain locutions are pragmatically impossible in Japanese under certain conditions. Thus, for instance, in Japanese one cannot state anything directly about another person’s private state (of mind or body). Rather than saying to a person: ‘You are sad’, one has to limit oneself to expressing one’s opinion of the other’s state, e.g. by saying: ‘To me, it looks like you’re being sad’. Hence, all such expressions of ‘direct intervention’, even if they are grammatically and semantically correct, and seem to obey all of the rules, cannot be properly produced, because they pragmatically impinge upon another person’s ‘territory of information’, that is to say, on information that the addressee controls. Akio Kamio’s theory (which is generally valid, and thus not only concerns Japanese phenomena of language use) has met with acclaim, ever since its first publication in Japanese (based on his 1987 Tsukuba University dissertation) saw the light (Joohoo no nawabari riron [Theory of the territory of information], Tokyo, Taishukan, 1990). Subsequent publications in English in the Journal of Pragmatics (‘The theory of territory of information: The case of Japanese’, 1994, Journal of Pragmatics 21(1):67–100) and ‘Territory of information in English and Japanese and psychological utterances’, 1995, Journal of Pragmatics 24(3):235–264), and not least the book that Akio Kamio published in 1997 with John Benjamins Publishing Company in Amsterdam/Philadelphia, entitled Theory of territory of information (=Pragmatics and Beyond, Vol. 48) represent his successful attempt to introduce pragmatic thinking into the study of Japanese as well as of other languages.

Over the years, the theory’s impact has started to reach out further and further, as many young and mature scholars in their work adopted the viewpoint that Kamiosensei had advocated. The present Focus-on Issue, which we have entitled, in honor of Akio Kamio, ‘Particles and Discourse: The Territory of Information’, bears ample testimony to this fact, vide the frequent references to, and quotations from, Akio Kamio’s work that adorn its pages.

The niche that Professor Akio Kamio has created for his theory is thus by no means empty, even after its creator left us. But it will be a long time before the field of pragmatics and of Japanese linguistics recovers from this severe loss. We honor the Kamios’ memory, and while in mourning, extend our profound sympathies and condolences to the members of their families, as well as to their close and remote friends and colleagues, both in Japan and abroad.

J.L. Mey
1100 West 29th Street
Austin, TX 78703-1915, USA
E-mail address: inmey@mail.utexas.edu