How Junko and Armin spent their days in Tokyo (September 2021- March 2022)

After emerging from an obligatory two-week home quarantine in Tokyo, Junko and Armin were involved (mostly virtually…) in linguistic activities at the Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) with their collaborator Haruo Kubozono  (who was a one-year Fulbright scholar in our department in 1994-95). In the process, they presented at the Prosody and Grammar Festa (Jan 29-30, 2022) “Postnasal Voicing and the stratified lexicon of Japanese” (https://www2.ninjal.ac.jp/past-events/2009_2021/event/specialists/project-meeting/m-2021/20220129/), taking up former work of their own and recent contributions by Jennifer Smith (UNC, Visiting Assistant Professor at UCSC in 2000-01). At the Graduate School of Humanities of Kobe University, they gave a keynote lecture entitled  “An OT typological perspective on Japanese lexical and postlexical accent”. The event, called “The Kobe-NINJAL Linguistics Colloquium: Frontiers of Japanese Language Research”, http://www.lit.kobe-u.ac.jp//event/2022-02-24-01.html) took place (actually in person!) on March 10, 2022 and celebrated Professor Kubozono’s retirement. There, they also met up with Maho Morimoto (UCSC Linguistics PhD 2020), who just got a three-year postdoc position at Sophia University.

Besides these activities, they were involved in two editorial projects. The first is with Haruo Kubozono, Oxford University Press, Prosody and Prosodic Interfaces, publication date: 05/12/2022. It contains contributions by Ryan Bennett (UCSC PhD 2012), Robert Henderson (UCSC PhD 2012), and Megan Harvey, on lexical pitch in Uspanteko as well as our joint paper with Jennifer Bellik (UCSC PhD 2019) and Nick Kalivoda (UCSC PhD. 2018) on matching and alignment. Junko (who is a fan of penguins) is very happy with the front cover of the volume!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/prosody-and-prosodic-interfaces-9780198869740?lang=en&cc=gb The second editorial project, Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory Theory and Analyses, eds.  J.  Bellik, J.  Ito, N. Kalivoda and A.  Mester, will appear with Equinox (https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/syntax-prosody/), publication date:  01/03/2023. Besides the editors, other contributors are Santa Cruzians involved in the SPOT NSF project: Richard Bibbs, Dan Brodkin, Yaqing Cao, Benjamin Eischens, Edward Shingler, Max Tarlov, and Nicholas Van Handel.

Oh yes, in between all of this, they went to a Kabuki performance, a sumo tournament, and warmed up in hot spring onsens in Tohoku and Hakone.