Gendered first-person pronouns in Japanese?

[pauamma]

In a recent IRC discussion, someone mentioned that Japanese first-person pronouns could be gendered in some contexts. That got my attention, because I remembered this as an uncommon language feature, and I found that according to WALS, Japanese doesn't have it. So I'm wondering whether WALS is wrong on that point, whether I'm looking at the wrong

Comments

[akibare]

What the others said, but also waga is pretty common in writing as part of set pieces like "wagakuni" (our country) "wagaya" (my house) etc. I wouldn't gender it but I suppose the feeling I get is some old guy, but that's more from the style of pieces it's often used in I think.

Atashi is feminine but specifically young feminine. Young girls use it, then women will use it IF with other women who are their same age and so from that same young peer group, but never as an addressing a general audience thing, then you'd use watashi.

And, there's a slightly more formal version of watashi "watakushi" that you will usually hear politicians or people giving polite speeches using (if they need to refer to themselves).

This does make me wonder though, what do languages with actual grammatical gender do if they want to obscure the gender of someone to set up a mystery in a story or something like that? Japanese can omit any sort of "he/she" and just uses names so it's trivial to not need to know if "Tanaka" is male or female until later on in the book, or whatever. English would do "the caller" or similar, or maybe just call someone "Jones" (omitting Mr/Ms) but if the verbs actually have to agree with gender on "Jones said" what happens?

[viata]

>but if the verbs actually have to agree with gender on "Jones said" what happens?
In case of Russian (where adjectives are to be marked all the time, and so are verbs in past tense) there are, to my knowledge, two options.
Firstly, you can try to avoid the "gendered" forms which is far from trivial but still possible.
Secondly, you can just use male forms and remember that they are default and so in some cases can refer to a female too. E.g. "тебя искал один человек/someone (one person) was looking for you". Один/one, человек/person and искал/was looking are grammatically male, but semantically it is irrelevant and the phrase can refer to a female just as easy.
Plus, btw, you can use the default male forms to mislead the characters of your story and the readers into believing someone is male and blame them later for making assumptions.

[helle_d]

I've often wondered about this in relation to a children's book, 'The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler', where only at the end of the book is the reader told that the narrator, Tyke, is a girl - before that her gender was never mentioned, and you just assume from her brash, outgoing characteristics and male friendship group that she isn't.