This handbook is a significant contribution to the English literature on Japanese language issues. It is replete with information on the state of socially oriented language research on (Standard) Japanese, first, but also on language issues in Japan beyond the monolingual. Topics include substantial coverage of non-Standard Japanese dialects, Ainu and the Ryukyuan language group, English as a global language, sign language, and the language of longstanding and newcomer migrant groups. Contributors include scholars working in both western sociolinguistic and Japanese sociolinguistic traditions; taken together, readers will find many challenges to ‘received knowledge’ about the state of language use in Japan.

These challenges, it must be said, are made more, well, challenging by the fact that there is no editors’ introduction to direct the reader's attention to the contribution each chapter makes and how the chapters cumulatively can best inform our understanding of the social life of language in Japan. The co-editors’ acknowledgements stress that they have collected a broad variety of contributors, from ‘critical’ sociolinguists, sociolinguists emerging from extensions of Japanese dialectology and gengo seikatsu ‘language life’ studies, and western trained sociolinguists (xviii). This is a welcome step toward a more global, rather than western-dominant sociolinguistics. The diversity of academic backgrounds, however, no matter how welcome in a truly global sociolinguistics, would be rendered even more valuable with an introduction outlining the differences between, for example, western sociolinguistics and gengo seikatsu, particularly in terms of orientation toward description vs. theory development, and the editors’ assessment of each approach's contributions. Apart from this, Patrick Heinrich offers the best history (and characterization) of Gengo seikatsu ‘language life’ research and other socially oriented linguistics in Japan that I have read either in English or in Japanese in chapter 26, and readers who start there will be able more fully to appreciate the contributions of what unfolds in each of the remaining sections.

A prior read of Patrick Heinrich's chapter 26 will be of particular benefit in Part 1, ‘The languages and language varieties of Japan’, which covers Ainu, the Ryukyuan languages, and Japanese dialects in chapters that provide very detailed treatments of these varieties, but that are generally less sociolinguistic than descriptive dialectology. In the penultimate chapter, Ruriko Otomo takes on in-migration to Japan over time, and, in particular, provides excellent coverage of in-migrations in recent years and the very many linguistic obstacles that migrants face. Ryuko Kubota ends Part I with a theoretically rich discussion of how English is narrated as a must-acquire global language in Japan in ways that serves the ideological purposes of both internationalization and nationalism in the contemporary context.

Part 2, ‘The multilingual ecology’, highlights the multilingual reality of Japanese urban, at least, space. Topics covered include metroethnicity—a language aesthetics that involves multilingual/multidialectal play—and its converse, metrolingualism, which covers the everyday use of multiple languages. The multilingual nature of the visual linguistic landscape of Japanese urban centers are taken up next. All of these contributions seem to point toward a healthy environment for multilingualism, but the final two chapters in this section, which cover bilingual education in Japan, provide an overview of the social environment within which bilingual education and bi-/multi-lingualism must, even today, co-exist with the official ideology of monolingualism and its weakening but still powerful popular uptake.

Part 3, ‘Variation, style and interaction’, begins with a chapter offering a very clear critical review of the phonological, morphosyntactic, and gender-related research on Japanese in the LVC mode. A chapter on code-switching, language crossing, and mediatized translinguistic practices covers a wide range of nonsingularly defined code uses, not all of which—especially the mediatized examples—are typically included in discussions of code-switching, but which seem perfectly at home in the Japanese case. In particular, a section on mediatized ‘translinguistic’ practices includes an interesting discussion of how non-Japanese forms are appropriated into Japanese-for-SNS use, suggesting that we have a lot of linguistic rethinking to do to meet the challenges of our mediated and mediatized twenty-first-century world. These two chapters, which make clear and strong connections with the interests of Western sociolinguistics, are followed by an important bridging chapter by Zi Wang, who reviews research focuses and methodologies of Japanese sociolinguistics as it developed historically and the effects of the later adoption of selected western sociolinguistic approaches. This chapter should be required reading for anyone seeking an introduction to a Japanese approach to sociolinguistics. Part 3 concludes with three very competent chapters on two focal concerns of sociolinguistic interest in the Japanese case: politeness (including impoliteness, an area where Japanese linguists were arguably pioneers) and gender.

Part 4, ‘Language problems and language planning’, shifts the focus away from speakers to policy-makers and planners. The seven chapters in Part 4 cover language policy and planning in general; the more specific issues surrounding Japanese script, orthography, and literacy; language spread and language shift; and language rights. Ruriko Otomo reviews language policy and planning (LPP), covering the top-down creation of a kokugo ‘national language’, the coercive planning efforts aimed at suppressing or assimilating the archipelago's indigenous languages (Ryukyuan, Ainu), and language policies in the colonies during the first half of the twentieth century. She also deals with English language education policies in ways that resonate with Ryuko Kubota's discussion in chapter 7.

Critiques of the Japanese writing system abound in the literature. So it is no surprise that LPP in Japan inevitably involves issues of ‘what to do about the writing system’. Hidenori Masiko's chapter offers an excellent overview of the multiscriptal system, then systematically explicates its ‘problem areas’ (unneeded complexities, inconsistencies, etc.) Other perspectives are, of course, possible; the very complexity of the system adds a richness of nuance not possible in simpler systems. But good or bad, the system is undeniably complicated, and Takeshi Nakashima's chapter on literacy follows up with how that complexity affects illiteracy in Japan, effectively challenging Japan's ‘total literacy myth’ by outlining how literacy has always been out of reach for many constituencies in Japan. Productive links to disability studies and (in)sufficient access to information in natural disaster zones have shaped understandings of literacy as a multimedia project based on urgent needs to communicate critical information to all. It is hoped that Japan—a leader in multi-modal text production (just read a manga or a beer can label)—will ultimately lead us to a more universal way for peoples of all types to access the necessary information for a fulfilling social life.

The next three chapters turn to policies concerning Japanese outside of Japan and other languages inside Japan. The clearest message to be gleaned from these as a set is that Japan offers very little official support for non-Japanese language maintenance or revitalization. As Mark Anderson notes in his chapter on Ryukyuan, after reviewing the relentless process of language devalorization and register constriction, Japan has failed to provide an environment where minority indigenous languages can thrive or even, it seems, continue to co-exist with Japanese.

Part 4 ends, appropriately, with Goro Christoph Kimura's chapter on language rights, focusing on autochthonous linguistic minorities, immigrants, the Deaf, and jōhō jakusha ‘people who can't easily access [critical] information’ (390). Many of these are groups of speakers that readers will have encountered in previous chapters. In particular, Kimura points to the linkage of language rights with disability studies, which is a departure from Western language rights research and activism, oriented toward multilingualism. The benefit of this linkage is that ‘the disability discourse re-conceptualizes language rights, and in so doing, transcends problems of [identity] essentialism that are so strongly associated with language rights’ elsewhere (397).

Part 5, ‘Research overviews’, contains three chapters that one might be forgiven for thinking would offer a summing up of what has gone before. They do not, in fact, do that, but all three are extraordinarily valuable contributions. Earlier, I suggested Patrick Heinrich's chapter on gengo seikatsu research be read first; it is an excellent and thorough contribution that goes a long way to clarifying the underlying approaches of subsequent authors. The third chapter in Part 5 is a second contribution by Mark Anderson reviewing Ryukyu-substrate Japanese. Anderson argues for the utility of focusing on the replacing language as well as the retreating language in understanding what goes on in language shifts. This is a very solid and original contribution, but it belongs in Part 1 after the other Ryukyuan chapters.

It is the middle chapter in Part 5 that should conclude this collection. Riikka Länsisalmi turns everything that has gone before inside out. She begins by deconstructing ‘the Japanese speaker’, offering us Japanese first as a ‘native’ Japanese speaker, but then as a multitude of other kinds of Japanese speakers. These can be in-between speakers (e.g. in between normative gender categories) and in-between Japanese speakers (e.g. kikoku shijo ‘returnee children’) or ‘new speakers’ (e.g. resident Korean/Chinese, foreign spouses, nikkeijin, refugees, or others who might need some attention in order that they not be left out of educational and employment opportunities). There are also Japanese learners. And last, but not at all least, there are ‘virtual speakers’ in mediatized speech and in translated speech. Her final remarks: ‘in Japan…, the notion of “speaker” needs to be expanded in order to do justice to the fluidity or urban, globalized and digital life’ and ‘sociolinguistics needs to investigate who speaks what kind of Japanese, what it means to them to speak this way, and what they do with language in various local socio-cultural environments across the globe’ (431). This reviewer could not agree more.

In sum, this is an excellent collection that will be indispensable to scholars in Japanese sociolinguistics and beyond. Some chapters would profitably be reordered and all would benefit by cross-referencing other chapters in the volume. An introduction outlining the differences in approaches between/among the chapters or a series of short introductions to each part would be most welcome. But these are insignificant quibbles compared to the overall value of the volume. The topics are wide-ranging and the contributors have been attentive both to the historical development of the particular field they cover but also its connection to present trends in sociolinguistics globally. Both Japanese and western sociolinguistics will benefit immensely from the wealth of information this handbook makes available.