Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to a number of people. First and foremost, I would like to thank the almost 500 speakers of the Tokyo standard-variety of Japanese who anonymously took my survey and carefully answered all questions. Without their cooperation and insightful comments, this study would not have been the same.

This book was built on my PhD project at the Australian National University. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my chief supervisor, Duck-Young Lee, for his continuous support, intellectual criticism, and clear advice. I am also grateful to my second supervisor, Tim Hassall, for his invaluable suggestions, and adviser Shun’ichi Ikeda for his warm encouragement. I was privileged to receive extremely helpful feedback on my thesis from Anthony Backhouse, Catherine Travis, and Nerida Jarkey. In particular, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Nerida Jarkey, who recommended that I publish this monograph and, with immense generosity, read my final draft. Without Nerida’s incredibly insightful suggestions and invaluable input, as well as her warm encouragement over the course of revising the manuscript, this would not have been possible.

I am grateful to the three anonymous reviewers of this book for their extremely useful suggestions. Huge thanks also go to the editors of this series, Horst Simon, Bettina Kluge, John Hajek, and Maria Irene Moyne, for their expertise and precise advice in bringing this book to publication. In particular, the biggest thanks go to the chief editor, Horst, for his continuous support in guiding me on this publication. I am immensely grateful to James Rowe and Jeremy Jones for patiently proofreading my manuscript. I would also like to thank Bert Peeters, who kindly read my earlier draft, but sadly, passed away in 2021.

This study was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award for the initial PhD project and by a Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Grant for the final book production stage.

Special thanks go to a number of people who have kindly helped me in various ways. Particularly, I thank the exceptionally inspiring teachers and students of linguistics at the Australian National University for their scholarship, which gave me a lifelong love of language during the course of my PhD candidature. Thank you also to members of the Sydney Japanese Linguistics Symposium, an incredibly supportive academic group, led by Nerida Jarkey and another wonderful linguist and mentor, Harumi Minagawa. A special thank you to Narah Lee and Xiangdong Liu for giving a home to our emerging and exciting address-term research collaboration in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.

To my dear friends in different parts of the world, all of whom I cannot list here, thank you for your continuous warm friendship. Thank you also to my wonderful colleagues past and present, in particular, my amazingly supportive colleagues at the School of Languages and Cultures, and the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, at Victoria University of Wellington. Your friendship and kindness have been priceless during these years of my settling down in Wellington. Thank you also to a number of my past colleagues at the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University, who have helped me in innumerable different ways.

Last but not least, my deepest gratitude goes to my family in Japan and Australia, especially to my partner Jim, and my daughter Natsuko. I have been finalizing this book in the year the world was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. This separated us between Australia and New Zealand for nearly an entire year. I am so profoundly indebted for their love and support from a distance. This book is dedicated to them.