Abe's statement

[Chris Allen Thomas]

PM Abe:
"To create a 'beautiful Japan,' we need to remind ourselves once again how
great and wonderful our nation is," Abe told the Diet in his policy speech
in January. "We will start a new, future-oriented *purojekuto* (project)
aimed at strategically sending, both within Japan and abroad, the new
Japanese *kauntori aidentiti* (country identity) . . ."

Even when a Japanese word of equivalent denotative meaning is available, the 
English borrowing has a connotation the Japanese word does not appear to 
deliver. Borrowings are marked in Japanese as coming from outside and as new. 
Abe's use of the English is not surprising following "future-oriented" 
and "new". The English emphasizes that meaning he wished to communicate 
connotatively. The more interesting question to me is not how can 
Japan "purify" its increasingly corrupted language, but why can't the Japanese 
equivalents carry the connotation of the English borrowings?

Chris Allen Thomas
Educational Linguistics (Ph.D. Student)
Graduate School of Education
University of Pennsylvania
My Webpage: http://dolphin.upenn.edu/~chthomas