The East/West Debate over Politeness: Ideology and Practice

There has been a debate about whether East and West are different or similar in pragmatics. In this discussion note, I demonstrate that both views stemmed from a similar one-sidedness, namely scholars' assertion of cultural norms based on ideology rather than actual practice. I discuss the gap between ideology and practice by reviewing recent studies in Japanese that examined actual practice by drawing on naturally occurring data. To better approach this debate, I suggest a direction for future research in contrastive pragmatics in relation to the East/West debate.