Are 俯かせる and 俯ける the same?


>   1. そしてそのまま顔を **うつむかせ** 、「ぅえ……っ、ぇ……っ」と嗚咽を漏らし始める。
>   2. そして、ウサギの耳付きフードをきゅっと握って顔を **うつむけ** 、目元を隠すようにしながらたどたどしく言ってくる。
>

Hi. Can we use 俯かせる and 俯ける interchangeably in the above two example? Are 俯かせる
and 俯ける the same? Thank you.




Here, you are seeing two different verbs:

  * うつむく: godan, intransitive (連用形/masu-stem = うつむき)
  * うつむける: ichidan, transitive (連用形/masu-stem = うつむけ)

It's the same pattern found in 開く/開ける, 進む/進める, etc. うつむかせる is the causative
form of うつむく. So yes, うつむかせる and うつむける are similar, and I see no big semantic
difference between them.

However, I personally feel 顔をうつむかせる is unnecessarily wordy, and うつむける is
simply uncommon. You can say just うつむく without any object, and this is by far
the most common way of saying this in modern Japanese (e.g.,
そのままうつむいて嗚咽を漏らし始める).

I checked BCCWJ, and there was no example of をうつむかせ(る). There were several
examples of をうつむけ(る), but many of them were from old novelists born before
1950.

[![BCCWJ
results](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3twh1.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3twh1.png)

