Shaping Shouten ‘Small Grocery Shop’ as a Place of Hospitality: Third-Party Participation in Remedial Work Within Hearable Space

This paper explores how hospitality is practised in community-based shouten (small grocery shops) in Japan, where staff and regulars are often acquaintances living in the same local community. It focuses particularly on the participation of third parties, who are co-present in the compact “conversation-hearable space” of shouten, in remedial work following transactional mistakes regarded as triggering events. Based on Goffman's participant framework, it analyses how the third parties contribute to shaping hospitality by: 1. evaluating a triggering event, 2. inducing humour from a triggering event, and 3. being drawn into the remedial work as if one were a ratified recipient. In conclusion, it suggests that spatial compactness and familiarity, which allow co-present individuals to overhear and follow a conversation, enable individuals who were initially third parties during triggering events to participate in remedial work, noting a retrospective way to treat an unratified overhearer as a ratified recipient.