Category Archives: polite

How to Japanese Podcast – Episode 44 – スミマセン

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In the newsletter this month, I took a look at 非外来語のカタカナ表記 (non-gairaigo katakana notation), which is a complicated way of saying “katakana used to write words that are normally written in kanji or hiragana.” I found a very interesting paper on the phenomenon that’s worth a read if you’re interested.

The main idea is that the visual aspect of katakana can be used to provide extra-linguistic nuance to a sentence. I looked specifically at スミマセン, which is usually written as すみません.

This reminded me that there’s an even more casual alternative: ずびばぜん (zubibazen). This is the way that すみません would be pronounced if you were sobbing profusely. Searching on Twitter is one of the best ways to find examples.

Like this mother who is apologizing for breaking a promise to not drink until after her son’s sports festival at school.

I spoke about this and more on the podcast this month. Give it a listen!

How to Osaka

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To be honest, I don’t know how yet. I’m still figuring it out. I got here three weeks ago and had 10 days before work to learn the layout of the city, find a place to live, and make time for some recovery after a four-week sprint back to the U.S.

Take a look at what I’ve been up to:

@howtojapanese

Week 1 in Osaka. #japantok #osaka #大阪

♬ Last Summer Whisper – 杏里

@howtojapanese

Week 2 in Osaka #japantok #japan #osaka #大阪

♬ original sound – Feelingblew

@howtojapanese

Week 3 in Osaka #japantok #japan #osaka #大阪

♬ original sound – Jason Marsalis

So far I really like it here, although I’m itching to get into my own space, even if it will be mostly void of furniture until I get a sense of how much space I have and bank a paycheck or two. So check back for more Kansai content in the near future. At the very least, you absolutely must visit the Nakanoshima Museum of Art to see the Okamoto Tarō retrospective. (See my thread on the exhibit below.)

His giant sculpture Tower of the Sun is on my to-do list, but I’ll wait until the weather cools down first…hopefully I can find a bike as well.

Don’t forget to check out the newsletter this month. I took a deeper dive into the language of job-hunting emails.

August 2021 JT Blog Bonus Coverage

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I am extremely ご無沙汰 with my Japan Times update. I had two articles published at the end of August.

The first — “Make Japanese politics more concrete by training your ears” — was inspired by this little passage I heard on NHK Radio News on June 14 at 7:00pm. I was so surprised I could understand it that I transcribed this passage about the Israeli elections:

ただ、新たな連立政権には中道派、右派、左派、アラブ系の合わせて８つの政党が参加していて、中でもパレスティナ問題をめぐって各党それぞれの立場の隔たりは大きく、政権として一致した政策をとることができるかどうかは未知数です。

For whatever reason, the sounds all just stood out. う and さ do so much work despite each being just a single syllable. It gave me an intense appreciation for all the time I’ve spent doing Japanese, and at the same time it made me wonder what was the best way to communicate this phenomenon to students who are just starting their studies. There’s such an emphasis on learning what the language looks like visually that the importance of the sounds sometimes gets lost in the shuffle.

Please also enjoy this introductory paragraph that got lost on the drawing room floor:

There’s something comforting about the infamous English textbook phrase “This is a pen”: It’s so physical and definite, not to mention the nearly one-to-one correspondence with the Japanese equivalent これはペンです (Kore wa pen desu). You can imagine students on any side of the Pacific, desperate to cement their understanding of the language, wrinkling their brows with focus as they stare at a pen clutched in their hand.

So that’s where my mind was when I wrote the article. I think there’s a way to do “flashcards for sounds.” I’m not sure exactly how it would work. Maybe it’s something that teachers could implement as as short activities alongside regular coursework. Drilling sounds. The one thing I remember doing to train my listening was transcribing things that the teacher said.

I also had an article about 敬語 (keigo, polite speech): “Let the verbs do the work when it comes to pronouns and polite speech in Japanese.” Something that clicked for me at some point was the idea that pronouns are naturally built into Japanese speech patterns. Polite speech is pretty complicated, but one thing that’s easy to understand is that certain verbs correspond to people of different social status (e.g. the Emperor gets his own special verbs) and make it so that you don’t actually have to say their names.

And here’s a paragraph that got cut from this article as well:

Keigo is extremely useful in situations that might require you to be a little nosy. For example, if you need to politely ask for someone’s name (either for the first time or because you can’t quite remember it), you can take the versatile verb 伺います (ukagaimasu, to ask/to visit/to go) and use it in a sentence like お名前をお伺いしてもよろしいでしょうか (Onamae o o-ukagai shite mo yoroshii deshoo ka, May I ask your name?).

This will be my last post on this side of the Pacific for a bit: I’m heading to Japan in just over a week! Stay tuned here, on Twitter, and over at my newsletter for any insights I encounter. I’m sure there will be many.

Serenity Nowish

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I was in the Japan Times twice late last month, and it’s taken me a little while to get around to posting the links here.

The first is a Bilingual piece: “Getting a party rolling in Japan.”

The origin of this piece is a little depressing…and may have caused the pandemic. I was preparing an MC script for an event in Japan in May. I wanted plenty of time to really familiarize myself with the pronunciation, so I had a full event planned out, and then *gestures vaguely at the universe*

The content actually came from the same place as my article in early March about “emergency Japanese.” Back in February I had already started planning the agenda for the May event and decided to just script out the whole thing and a bunch of emergency language to boot.

So of course the whole thing has been canceled.

I couldn’t fit all of the parenthetical language I was planning to use. In addition to the strict open and closing phrases I introduce in the piece, these are good to gather the troops before you get started and signal that the event is coming to an end:

まもなく、１０時半より始まりますので、皆様お席でお待ちいただきますようお願い申し上げます (Mamonaku, jūji-han yori hajimarimasu no de, minasama oseki de omachi itadakimasu yō onegai mōshiagemasu,We will begin the program at 10:30, so we’d like to ask everyone to take their seats.)

そろそろお時間となりました。皆様、本日のコンフェレンス楽しんでいただけましたでしょうか？ (Sorosoro ojikan to narimashita. Minasama, honjitsu no konferensu tanoshinde itadakemashita deshō ka? We will momentarily be at the end of our time. Did everyone enjoy today’s conference?)

Very useful phrases, and you can Frankenstein little bits of them to use in all sorts of other ways.

My other article is a review of Automatic Eve by Rokuro Inui: “‘Automatic Eve’ review: Familiar tropes reimagined with brilliant sci-fi originality.”

If you haven’t picked it up yet, this is a great time. I’ve devoured it twice now, and I’m sure I’ll read it again. It’s such a fun world to inhabit. I want to go there.

I was working on the sequel in Japanese but got sidetracked by some other books. The sequel is set in a fictional Chicago just before an exposition modeled on the Columbian Exposition. He’s clearly taken some inspiration from Devil in the White City (which I still haven’t read—I’m a lousy Chicagoan). The sequel is interesting, although maybe not quite as successful as the first book, both structurally, plot-wise, and writing wise. The first book works so well because structure as a set of short stories provides succinct, contained plots with a quick payoff, getting readers into the novel. Inui was able to kind of embed a larger plot within all of this. With the second book, he’s clearly building toward something, but I’ve found it more of a slog…and not just entirely because it’s in Japanese.

But I will admit that’s probably one of the reasons I haven’t picked it up during the pandemic. I just need easy right now. I’m moving some Murakami to the top of my to-read list because that feels accessible, do-able for me. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s his travel journal. Take me away. Serenity now!

Fun Times

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The last two weeks have been…interesting. I had been following the coronavirus developments in China through work and then in Japan through work, friends, and acquaintances. But it did seem like it might be contained to Asia for a minute.

It’s such a blur now—everything: the day job which has been busy and challenging and fulfilling, the writing I’ve been doing for the Japan Times, the hustle to stock up my apartment, trying to exercise and sleep and relax—that I can’t even remember when I started to sense the “cone of uncertainty,” as we say in New Orleans.

The cone is the graphic that meteorologists deploy when hurricanes start to approach the Gulf coast. They use a number of different storm models to create a wide path where the hurricane is likely to hit. Once that cone starts to point at New Orleans, you either get out or you prepare to hunker down and shelter in place.

My mom is a legendary evacuator, and my dad is a legendary hunker-downer/waiter-outer. So I am kind of wired for prep. Once I felt the cone, from news reports, from articles, I made a plan.

I think I’m in a good place. I can work from home for as long as I need to, and I don’t really need to leave my apartment if I don’t want to. (Obviously that much care is probably not required – I’m in a Chicago neighborhood, so the density is probably enough to take walks and get some air on the lake or in parks nearby, maybe even do some shopping if necessary.)

This is my monthly update to plug my Japan Times work, so it feels bizarre to me to line these two headlines up next to each other:

“’Emergency’ Japanese can help build fluency”
“Your Japanese vocabulary can expand as the new coronavirus spreads”

I didn’t mean “emergency” in that sense of the word. But that would make a good article, too. One that I’m not sure I feel comfortable writing without doing some research — I haven’t been in a Japanese clinic for a while.

The emergency article is a strategy that I thought up to develop more familiarity with complex phrases. I specifically wanted to prepare for a May conference that now may not end up happening. Or at the very least, I may not end up attending. The strategy itself feels sound, although the results will vary based on the repetitions you do with your document. (I just did a lap through right now after feeling bad for neglecting it over the past couple weeks.)

The coronavirus article came together quickly with some research, and I was a little surprised by what I found. The emphasis on 肺炎 (haien, pneumonia) is interesting and notable in Japanese. In English it’s just this vague virus, and lots of association with the flu, which feels like fever, chills, and a kind of generic run-down illness. Pneumonia, on the other hand, is much more specific, especially to someone like me who has had it before.

I got bacterial pneumonia during my first year on the JET Program. I remember it pretty vividly. It hit late on a Friday night, which was about the worst time for it to hit, especially since the following Tuesday was a holiday. I had a couple beers, watched “The Godfather” on NHK, and went to bed. I woke up drenched in sweat and feverish. I spent the weekend going in and out of fever as I went through my ibuprofen and tried to negotiate some sort of balance of warmth in my apartment using the kerosene heater. I drove into Aizu-Wakamatsu and had McDonalds, did some shopping in the city, and called in sick on Monday.

By Tuesday I still hadn’t slept off whatever it was I had, and I was alternating between burning up and terrible chills, so I got in touch with my supervisor to ask about how to go to the town clinic. The doctor there was a young guy with a full beard, and he was only able to diagnose the pneumonia with an x-ray. It was a mild enough case that he had trouble detecting it with a stethoscope.

This is all to say that pneumonia is terrible, and I can’t even imagine what an acute case would feel like. Stay indoors. Isolate yourself. Work from home. If you start to feel like your workplace is putting you in a dangerous position, make an executive decision and stand up for yourself. Sometimes all you have to do is ask—it doesn’t have to be confrontational or personal. You can be calm and professional and assertive at the same time.

Ugh. Fun times!

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On a separate note, I have two pieces in the new print edition of Neojaponisme.

The first is an excerpt from the massive look at the Top 50 Enka songs I did back in 2017. (19 of the 50 videos are still up on YouTube, which is a higher percentage than I expected! You can find the others [hopefully] with the PERMASEARCH links I cleverly left. Thank you, past Daniel!) I highly recommend listening through these songs. You’ll learn a TON of useful Japanese and perhaps even find a few tunes that you can use to impress the locals.

They also asked me to translate a conversation between Jacques Derrida and Japanese scholars Karatani Kōjin and Asada Akira about deconstruction. To be perfectly honest, I’m not even sure I understand what the English means, but I am confident that David and Matt helped me smooth over the language so that it is a decent representation of the Japanese.

I’m still digging through this volume, but Ian’s design is incredible, I’m hungry for the 洋食 (yōshoku, Japanese take on Western food) described within, and I can’t wait to check out Matt’s translations, including one from Tanizaki. Highly recommend picking up a copy.

The おじさんing

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I’m in the Japan Times Bilingual page this week with a look at “words of personal reference”: “How to address the ‘sisters’ we’ve never met.”

This article starts with a story that happened to me shortly after I moved to Tokyo in 2008. I wish I’d written down the details at the time! Especially what the women said when they replied to my friend. Their tone (the laughter, the appreciation, how easily we all had such a nice time) is still so clear in my mind, but the words have gone.

It was such a great party with fun people and really interesting conversation. The Japanese guy who used お姉さん went on to try his hand at stand-up comedy. Not sure how that worked out.

The bar was Yokohama Cheers, if anyone wants to check it out.

I ran out of space in the article but wanted to look at where the division line is between お姉さん and おばさん and between お兄さん and おじさん.

I found this really interesting discussion site.

Here’s a key quote that backs up what I remember from the conversation:

最近は気を使う方が増えてると思います、呼ぶ時におばさんだと失礼にあたると思われるのか、お姉さんを使う男女の方がなかにはいらっしゃいますね。

The women we spoke with laughed when my friend used お姉さん, but it was a friendly laugh, one that recognized the difficulty of the situation.

Another commenter provides this loose breakdown in the terminology, although clearly the cutoff for お姉さん is a little young:

26歳くらいまでがお姉さん
以降、40代までがおばちゃん
50代からはおばあちゃん
60代超えだしたらお婆ちゃん　かな～

I also found a personal blog with an interesting discussion of what the writer’s niece and nephew’s children call her. Here’s an interesting line:

かといって　呼ばれ慣れない「おばさん」や　まして「おばあちゃん」もなんか私じゃないみたい。

And I also found some surveys. I can’t vouch for their methodology, but they suggest that one becomes either おじさん or おばさん around 41-45 years old…which is approaching way too quickly in my case ^^;

Cool Word – 幸い

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Japanese, like all languages, is all about figuring out secret codes. How to use language to communicate information, effect change, and create action.

One of the pieces of code that has been useful for me recently is 幸いです (saiwai desu).

This phrase is used when making requests, a particularly fraught moment for Japanese.

It is most commonly preceded by いただければ (itadakereba), いただけましたら (itadakemashitara), or いただけますと (itadakemasu to) – a veritable catalog of conditional potential forms of いただきます (itadakimasu, to receive, humbly). So, in effect, it means “If I can have you do X, I will be 幸い.”

The best and simplest definition of 幸い I’ve seen online is from Yahoo Chiebukuro (surprise!):

文字通り、そうしていただければ幸せだということです。
そこには、望ましい、ありがたい、都合がいい、などの意味が含まれています。

It literally means, “If you could do that for me, I would be happy.” It also has elements of “desirable,” “grateful,” and “convenient” wrapped up it in.

So it means “I would appreciate it if you could X.”

The reason I call it “secret code” is that there’s a sense wrapped up in the language itself that, yes, what I’m asking is reasonable and you will undertake it for me. It’s making a request without making a command, without even asking a question. Just by stating that one would be pleased. This is an especially potent combination with an airbag phrase.

I guess this is true with English as well, come to think of it. You can even flower up the English to something like “It would please me greatly if you could X” to match 幸いに存じます (saiwai ni zonjimasu), a keigo alternative, although the Japanese lacks any sarcasm.

It’s difficult to find any raw examples with a web search because there are so many Japanese websites explaining grammatical usage these days, so I recommend checking out a Twitter search to see how the term is being used. A bunch of them out there.

Cool Word – オブラート

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I’m in the Japan Times this week with a look at a couple of websites that I’ve noticed popping up whenever I search for a polite way to phrase something: “When stumped in Japanese, go where the stumped Japanese go.”

The websites are Mayonez and Tap-biz. Mayonez seems like a more fleshed-out, coherent project, but they’re clearly very similar. I wondered how they were funded, but further investigation has shown that the articles are really just cover for the job hunting websites that likely fund the whole shebang.

Still, the articles are pretty interesting, and I think they offer pretty effective language tips.

In the course of reading through the Mayonez article about 希望しない alternatives, I saw the phrase オブラート包んでお断りすることがマナーです (Oburaato tsutsunde okotowari suru koto ga manaa desu, Saying no in a roundabout way).

オブラート (oburaato, oblaat) is a very interesting word I hadn’t heard before. Oblaat are those thin, transparent layers of rice starch that are used to wrap things like dagashi.

So the phrase オブラートに包む, then, means to kind of mediate a phrase in a way that makes it more palatable/handleable. Pretty cool.

And of course there’s a ridiculous Yahoo Chiebukuro site involving オブラート: “「死ね」 をオブラートに包んでください(“Shine” o oburaato ni tsutsunde kudasai, Say “Go kill yourself” in a polite way). Some pretty funny answers.

And on a side note, next month is the four year anniversary (FORTY EIGHT consecutive months!) of the Japanese Reading Group that I’ve been running through the JET Alumni Association Chicago Chapter. We’ve been meeting on Google Hangouts for the past year or so, and it would be great if you’d join us! Check out the event details here.

Cool Compound – 出欠

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I was in the Japan Times this week with a tutorial on how to teach yourself Japanese that you’ve never learned before (a task that perhaps sounds easy until you think about it for a second…): “OK Google, auto-fill the gaps in my Japanese.”

I changed jobs recently, and I’ve been using more Japanese in my day-to-day thanks to this (somewhat ironically, given the last place where I worked…I’ll leave you to Google this).

I’ve been writing a lot of emails, and I’m often forced to fend for myself as the only Japanese speaker in the office. I’ve gotten fairly adept at using Google to piece together different fragments into what are (hopefully) near-native sentences.

One example that I didn’t have space for in the article was the excellent kanji compound 出欠 (shukketsu, presence or absence), which is a compound made up of opposite words.

I located this compound by searching for 参加するかどうか (sanka suru ka dō ka, be able to attend or not) plus 敬語 (keigo, polite speech). I was eventually able to track down a useful sentence with this phrase after some Google sleuthing and then isolating the phrase “出欠のご返事を” (shukketsu no gohenji o, a reply with your RSVP).

That led me to this sentence, which I used in an email: 出欠のご返事をいただけると幸いです (Shukketsu no gohenji o itadakeru to saiwai desu, We would appreciate it if you could reply with your attendance).

Pretty useful technique. This is the website I found, by the way. It has some excellent examples that are very useful in business emails.

I noticed on Twitter that Tomo brought up some other interesting Google autofill examples, including a way to explore Japanese curiosities about foreigners. The thread is worth checking out.

差し入れ Redux

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Merry Christmas! I’m home in New Orleans and not scheduled to be back in the Japan Times until early in the New Year, so I wanted to be sure to get a December post in. I may be able to get to another chapter of Hard-boiled Wonderland during my New Year’s break, but I’m not sure, so…

There was a work holiday party that I was unfortunately unable to attend because I was flying out right after work on December 20. The really unfortunate part is that we sat on the tarmac on the plane, fully boarded, for 2.5 hours before leaving, so I probably would have been able to have a quick drink at least.

I was reminded, however, of the lesser-known Japanese tradition of 差し入れ (sashi-ire), which I wrote about over nine years ago now. Fortunately I was reminded of this tradition with enough foresight that I was able to put together a 差し入れ of my own:

I brewed a Dark Mild for my homebrew club’s advent calendar and had plenty to share with coworkers. I’ve heard that it went over well, which is nice. It’s one of the better brews I’ve been able to put together.

I’ve updated one of the links from the earlier post that had died and I also looked through Yahoo Chiebukuro for some more examples. I found this post about someone who was scolded (?) for bringing a 差し入れ. Sounds like it was a kind of bizarre situation, although the best answer does note that bringing them too frequently could be pooh-poohed and that they generally only use them in the case of travel (which is good for me this time).

However, this post shows an example of someone bringing them to バイト coworkers when they have tests and other obligations. The best answer provides an EXCELLENT example of text you can use when providing a 差し入れ. It’s so good I’m going to blockquote it here:

「私用で仕事に出られず申し訳ありません、普段から皆さんには大変お世話になっていますので気持ちだけですがお礼をしたいと思い差し入れを持って参りました。ぜひ皆さんで召し上がって下さい」

You’ll probably want to adjust the punctuation here slightly, adding a few commas and periods, but the language is solid and very polite. Lemme break down how the language works: Apology (申し訳ありません) for being unable to go in for reasons (私用) —> Expression of appreciation for coworkers (大変お世話になっています) —> Expression of humility for gift being brought (気持ちだけですが) —> Performative statement expressing action of bringing a gift (差し入れを持って参りました) —> Expression asking coworkers to enjoy gift (召し上がって下さい).

13/10 would use myself.

The real goal of 差し入れ is to provide consideration coverage. They are a way to demonstrate that you’re tuned in and considerate of your surroundings. They show you’re a part of a group, that you can participate. In 2018, we should all endeavor to bring a little more consideration and participation into the world.

Except for Donald Trump and the Republicans. Seriously, fuck those guys and anyone who stands with them because they are petty racists and we’re going to unseat them all in 2018. They deserve no consideration because they give none.

#HARUMPH