The last several years have seen a burgeoning body of research on stance-taking as an interactional activity. This research has shown that speakers can mobilize a wide variety of practices to negotiate and achieve stance-taking through turn-by-turn interactive processes. One common practice for observed across many different languages is the practice of deploying some indicators of stance in turn-initial position, as turn beginnings are a strategic site for the placement of markers that convey the current speaker's stance toward what the previous speaker has just said. The present study explores one such practice observed in Japanese conversation-the deployment of the non-lexical response token eh in turn-initial position. By examining different types of turns initiated with eh produced in different types of sequential/activity contexts, this study demonstrates that eh serves essentially as a marker of "departure"-i.e., that the matter begin addressed departs in some way from how the matter should be, or normally is, from the eh speaker's perspective. While marking departure seems to be a common denominator for the kinds of stance indicated by eh, the paper also shows that the specific sense of departure indexed by the token varies considerably depending on the sequential/activity contexts in which eh-initiated turns are deployed. In my talk, I will present detailed sequential analysis of eh-initiated turns produced in different types of contexts to show what specific kind of stance is indexed by the turn-initial deployment of eh in each given context.