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Acknowledgments

I WOULD like to express my deepest gratitude to the many individuals who over the years have provided me with the candid cultural information and the plain-spoken language data that were necessary for this book. I am especially grateful for the frankness with which they faced my grueling interrogations and for their generosity in offering to discuss private, personal, and often sensitive aspects of their life and work. Because of the delicate nature of their trade, many of the individuals who have contributed most to this book, have wished to remain incognito.

Among my American friends, I owe the greatest thanks to Burton Pike for his encouragement and inspiration, and for his constant advice and help. I am also grateful to my literary agent, Raphael Pallais, whose interest in medieval Japan proved to be most valuable, and to my editor Sally Schwager, whose profound knowledge of Japanese language and culture has been of great help.

I am grateful to Mark Peterson for sharing his intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of the New York street scene and its language. His analytic discussions of American street life helped me put my Japanese data into a Western perspective.

Among my Japanese friends, I owe special thanks to K. Inoue for the hours of sifting, dissecting, and analyzing the stacks of information that came pouring in, and to W. Ishida for our many frank discussions and for the many investigations that she tackled on my behalf. I am also thankful to N. Ichizono for her generous help, and to T. Yoshioka for her enthusiasm, encouragement, and for the fact-finding expeditions that she undertook.

I am especially grateful to the individuals who helped me in my research into slang expressions of ethnic Korean and Chinese extraction: I would like to thank L. Kim, S. Yang, and J. Ma, and Mr. Park, whose intimate knowledge of both the Korean and the Japanese scene helped me track the etymology of some of the more sinuous Japanese-Korean expressions.

Finally, a very special word of thanks to Dr. Lundquist, Chief Librarian of the Oriental Division of the New York Public Library, and to Ms. Kim, Section Head of the East Asian Division, whose scholarly council and advice on Japanese and Korean publications were of great help.