CHAPTER ELEVEN STEREOTYPING COMMUNICATIVE STYLES IN AND OUT OF THE LANGUAGE AND CULTURE CLASSROOM: JAPANESE INDIRECTNESS, AMBIGUITY AND VAGUENESS BARBARA PIZZICONI 1. Introduction Quite often, in conversation with trainee teachers of Japanese, most of whom are native speakers of the language, I have heard statements about the Japanese language, to the effect that “Japanese is ambiguous” (‘aimai’) or that Japanese “don’t say things clearly” (‘hakkiri iwanai’). For a language with an exceptionally rich repertoire of devices specialized in marking the speaker’s stance vis-à-vis the proposition or other speech participants (see for example Narrog 2007 on modal markers), statements such as these can appear contradictory. And yet, they are far from unusual. In a study of seventy native speakers of Japanese, Haugh (1998: 40) found that up to 77% of them agreed/strongly agreed with the statement “spoken Japanese is vague”, while only 10% disagreed. Moreover, this view is sustained by native and non-native users alike, and perpetuated not only in popular books about Japan and the Japanese people, but also in many pedagogical grammars, textbooks, and classroom instruction. This paper sets out to deconstruct this discourse and tease apart the truth from the stereotype. Stereotypes, the result of our ability to ‘typify’ linguistic usages, gestures, clothing, looks (i.e. different semiotic systems), are of course crucial to our ability to learn and function in the world. They allow us to reduce the infinite variations of people, linguistic forms or other entities to a few, manageable, categories. But when, as in language classrooms, we