A correction
I hate to admit I was wrong about this, but my conscience compels me.
In my review of Bones season 4 episode 23, I got all in a huff over what I thought was an erroneous treatment of Japanese personal pronouns and ended up writing:
And there’s absolutely no way to infer gender from second- or third-person pronouns.
This is, I now realize, blatantly false. It is in fact very easy to infer gender from certain third-person pronouns, those being kare “he” and kanojo “she”. (Random side note: these words can also mean “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” respectively.) So I was completely bloody wrong about that.
In my (feeble) defense, I have this to offer: the use of personal pronouns in Japanese to refer to people is not common; certainly it’s much rarer than it is in English. Most often, people are referred to either by their proper name, by a demonstrative such as kochira “this person here” or simply not referred to explicitly at all (Japanese permits omission of subject and object from a clause when they can be inferred from context). In formal contexts, the demonstratives are usually preferred over the personal pronouns. The most common scenario I can imagine in which a third-person personal pronoun would be used is in reported speech, such as recounting a conversation. Using personal pronouns there would still be relatively uncommon.
Excusatory heuristics aside, I can’t explain away the obvious factual error, which is somewhat embarrassing. I promise to more rigorously fact-check any linguistics-related content in future.
