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Documenting Rural Gatherings in Aging Japan: Social Context and Language Use in Interaction at a Mobile Supermarket

This paper presents a documentation framework and an exploratory analysis of language use in everyday interactions at rural gatherings in aging Japan, a communicative setting shaped by distinct social contexts that remain largely absent from existing language resources. Drawing on studies of face-to-face encounters, we propose a typology of rural gatherings and examine mobile supermarkets (vehicles that transport and sell daily necessities at scheduled stops in areas that lack fixed retail stores) as a case study. We present a preliminary analysis based on a community-mediated recording methodology. The quantitative findings reveal that conversational hot spots occur immediately following the encounter and transaction phases, indicating that participants experience these encounters as occasions for social connection rather than mere commercial transactions. The qualitative findings from the interaction analysis demonstrate how participants simultaneously manage work and conversation through vocal, bodily, and temporal resources in a social context. We discuss how these findings illuminate dimensions in social contexts that require interdisciplinary investigation beyond what existing language resources currently capture.