Mayumi Usami is Professor of Social Psychology of Language and Teaching of Japanese as a  Second Language, the JSL (Japanese as a Second Language) Research Division, at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL). She received her MA in psychology from Keio University in Japan, and Ed.M and Ed.D in Human Development and Psychology, Acquisition of Language and Culture from Harvard University.

Her research interests lie in Discourse Politeness Theory, the social psychological approach to conversation analysis, language and gender, pragmatics, and intercultural communication. She taught Japanese and Japanese culture at several universities in Taiwan from 1984-86, at Colby College from 1987-88, and at the University of Chicago from 1988-90.

She has published more than a hundred of articles and books including Discourse Politeness in Japanese Conversation: Some Implications for a Universal Theory of Politeness, Hituzi Syobo, 2002, Kotoba wa shakai o kaerareru [Language can change the society] Akashi Shoten, 1997, “Discourse Politeness Theory and second language acquisition,” In Wai Meng Chan, Kwee Nyet Chin and Titima Suthiwan. (eds.) Foreign Language Teaching in Asia and Beyond: Current Perspective and Future Direction. De Gruyter Mounton: 45-70, 2011 (originally published in 2006), “Discourse Politeness Theory and Cross-Cultural Pragmatics.” In: Readings in Second Language Pedagogy and Second Language Acquisition: In Japanese Context, Edited by A. Yoshitomi, T. Umino and M. Negishi, 19–41. [Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics, 4], John Benjamins, 2006. She is currently on the Board of The Japanese Association of Sociolinguistic Sciences and The Society for Gender Studies in Japanese.

Dr Jun Ohashi is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at The University of Melbourne. His ongoing research interests include interpersonal pragmatics, (im)politeness, critical discourse analysis, media literacy and linguistic rituals.

Jun is the author of Thanking and Politeness in Japanese (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and has published papers in the Journal of Pragmatics, Multilingua, Journal of Japanese Studies, and many more. He has contributed a book chapter to two books on the post 3.11 media literacy (Hitsuji, 2015, 2017); the former analyses the discourse of government officials at a series of press conferences after the Great Tohoku earthquake, and the latter investigates the realization of wakimae (discernment) of Japanese government officials protecting national interests in the post 3.11 disaster discourse.

His recent research interests include new roles of the Japanese language education in Australian Higher education (a book chapter with H. Ohashi, Routledge, 2015) and the discourse of neo-liberalism and the university world rankings (with H. Ohashi, Journal of Oceanian Education Studies, 2016). Jun’s current research on progress is on small talk, and he uses his innovative analytical tool, the balance sheet of obligations, to make sense of how conversationalists evaluate small talk. His pilot study is featured in Chapter 11, Impoliteness and relationality (Ohashi and Chang 2017) in the Handbook of Linguistic (im)politeness (Culpeper, Haugh and Kádár eds. 2017) published by Palgrave Macmillan.