Increased intercultural contact has drawn linguists’ attention to investigating how culture-specific practices are sustained and/or changed by a different culture. The senpai-kohai (senior-junior) hierarchical relation is regarded as a significant cultural concept in Japanese society. Considerably, a disagreement, which is a “dispreferred speech act” (Pomerantz 1984), or Face-threatening Act (Brown and Levinson 1987), when conducted by a kohai toward a senpai, is generally regarded as an act challenging social morality in Japan. 

Taking approaches of discourse analysis and conversation analysis, this study examines how Japanese young people who have been exposed to western culture utilize various strategies to conduct disagreements while maintaining the hierarchical order and interactional harmony between kohai and senpai. Two 30-minute semi-authentic conversational data were collected, each of which has a male kohai and a female senpai who are Japanese college students studying abroad in the United States. By closely analyzing sequences where a divergence emerges between the kohai and senpai, this study claims that disagreement patterns are not merely determined by the power relation; rather, other social and interactional factors such as gender, conversation topics, individual personalities, and intimacy between the speakers all come into play.