Only idiots get vaccinated: A corpus-assisted analysis of laughter-text in Japanese online (anti-)vaccination discourses

This study examines the textual representation of laughter in the subforum korona wakuchin tte yabaku nai? ‘isn’t the COVID-19 vaccine insane?’ on the Japanese web forum 5channeru ‘Channel 5’. On Channel 5, user interaction is very straight-talking and the COVID-19 vaccine is framed as a highly controversial topic – two factors that prompt interactants to signal (dis)affiliation with the (no-vax) stance in a variety of ways, one of which is laughter. The study focuses on the character ‘w’, which conventionally denotes laughter in written Japanese, and asks what the interactional functions of written laughter are and what elicits it. The analysis of 3,006 comments (285,582 tokens) revealed 195 instances of ‘w’ used to index laughter. The close reading of concordances, combined with collocational analysis, showed that, in this specific setting, laughter is almost invariably triggered by the very same post it is embedded in and often accompanies messages conveying aggression towards or superiority over the recipient (laughing at). Methodologically, the study demonstrates that CADS methods and taxonomies can be applied across discourse types and languages and, conversely, the systematic analysis of languages other than English can add to our ability to uncover non-obvious meanings.