ダニエルの冒険

There are lots of rules in Japan, just like in other countries. What makes Japan different is that they never stop reminding you about these rules. I’m sure this is annoying for lots of people but I find it entertaining, and more importantly, something that helps me from messing up. A lot of them are common sense or pure courtesy, but I don’t think it’s any harm to be reminded.

The photos below are from a single train car and the platform at the station. A lot have to do with the “silver seats”, which are the seats at the end of the train car with orange handles hanging above them instead of white ones. You can guess what these are for based on the photos below. And no, I have never seen anyone switch off their phone near these seats.

Danny Choo recently wrote about subway posters too. Lots of Tokyo Metro’s “Do it at Home” posters can be found on their website.

“Gropers will not be forgiven.”

“Manners: Please turn off your phone near the silver seats.”

“Power OFF!! No phones near the silver seats.”

“Thank you for understanding. Silver Seats.”

“STOP. Don’t rush. Don’t hurry.”

No bikes on trains. (It must be folded up and put into a special bag if you want to bring one on.)

“Let’s protect children together.” The people at the bottom are being very helpful and polite

“Please give thought to preggers girls. If you see this ‘maternity mark’, we ask for your kindness.”

English has been trending in Japan for quite a long time. Recently it seems that Korean is taking its place, thanks to Korean boybands and TV dramas, but English still prevails as an important marketing tool in Japan. It can give that air of exoticness or refined European style, without requiring the reader to learn a new alphabet, unlike Korean. Even the local supermarket is trying it out on the side of their vending machine!

However, when words start becoming more complex, and are neither commonly used words nor easily pronounced for Japanese, it can become a problem. For example, when a chain of cafés called “Excelsior” first appeared, no one knew how to pronounce it. Excelsior could have helped by putting a katakana (phonetic) pronunciation on their signs, but they didn’t and people were going there without knowing the name of the place.

KFC has a pronunciation guide. ケンタッキー (kentakkii) on the right of the sign below is how Japanese people refer to KFC (“Kentucky”).

McDonald’s is an interesting case. Their recent restaurants have signs just like in the US.

But of course, McDonald’s is a household name here now. Even for someone who doesn’t know the roman alphabet, just by the shape and colour of the letters they would be able to read it. However, not every business has the luxury of being a household name, and McDonald’s was once one of those businesses. Check out their older signs.

That is totally in katakana, so is very easily pronounced, and on top of that, it explains what sort of restaurant it is! Just in case you didn’t know what sort of restaurant it is, it says “McDonald’s Hamburgers” (マクドナルドハンバーガー, makudonarudo hanbaagaa).

Valentine’s Day has come and gone in Japan. They really have a great system here: women buy chocolate for men, and not the other way around. And not just for their boyfriends/husbands, but for everyone. There are two types of chocolate that women have to give: the type reserved for the boyfriends/husbands is called honmei chocolate (本命チョコ, honmei meaning more-or-less “true-feeling”); others get giri chocolate (義理チョコ, giri meaning “duty” or “obligation”). I suppose it shares roots with the gift-giving wars Japanese people have with each other, and with the ridiculous amount of new years cards (年賀状, nengajou) they send every year—at least when they’re not in an economic recession… I hear there was a lot more email/SMS cards last year.

In my case, this year I received my first ever honmei chocolate! Woo! Last year I received giri chocolate from my private lesson teachers, and I reciprocated with chocolate on White Day; the day exactly one month later (14th March) when men give chocolate back to the women who gave them chocolate on Valentine’s Day.

Check out my honmei chocolate!

I was at a restaurant a few days ago for dinner. One of the staff greeted another, and I knew from the greeting that her shift had just started. I could tell, because she greeted him by saying “good morning” (おはようございます, ohayou gozaimasu). The first time I heard this, I was greeted by a private lesson teacher in Yamasa at 4pm with “good morning” and I thought it was a joke, but she explained that in Japan when people arrive at work, they often greet each other by wishing each other a good morning, even if their shift starts in the afternoon or even at night time.

If you’re a foreigner you might be greeted with the odd “harro!” (hello), especially from enthusiastic middle-school kids who have just started their English classes. It is no secret that the difference between R and L is negligible in Japanese. For example, in Lost in Translation Bill Murray took a while to understand why a woman sent to his room to entertain him was demanding that he “lip” her stocking. It shouldn’t be a big surprise though: R seems to vary a lot in difference regions. French Rs, Spanish Rs, Italian Rs, English Rs… even within English it varies—in Ireland we call it “or” and pronounce it just like the Americans do, but in England and the US it’s called “ar” and the English soften it so much it sometimes disappears altogether (put on your best posh English accent and say “our door”). In Japanese, it is simply pronounced similarly to L, and since there is no “L” in Japanese, they just blur together and out drops cacophonies such as “harro!!”.

What I have found particular interesting is how I have trouble learning new non-Japanese words because of this. One brand of ibuprofen tablets here is “Bufferin”, but I was calling it “Buffalin” in my head until I saw it written in English. On TV I saw a documentary about an elephant called “Randy” but I was calling him “Lundy” in my head until an American woman started talking in an interview about him. A ploblem it is, but at least it’s a cute ploblem.

I’ve been doing a lot of shopping recently; for an apartment, a fridge, a TV, a washing machine, and a whole lot of furniture. One phrase I’ve found myself using a lot while shopping is “shou ga nai”. In Japan, when you rent an apartment there is often 礼金 (reikin), which is literally “gratitude money”. This is typically one or two months of rent. I really don’t like the idea, because you never see this money again and it doesn’t have any direct value to you, but when I found a great apartment that wanted 2-month reikin I found myself saying “shou ga nai”. When I went to pay the reikin/deposit/first month/auctioneer fees/insurance there were quite high bank fees, but I just thought “shou ga nai” and paid them right away. There are plenty more times I’ve used this with furniture and electrical appliances too, over the last week.

The best approximation in English is “there’s no helping it”, I suppose. But it really is a mindset rather than just a few words. When a big decision is ahead of oneself and a compromise has to be made, rationalising the compromise is important to keep away that horrible old buyer’s remorse. It can be tough to compromise using logic, but “shou ga nai” helps compromise without having to resort to actually really compromising: it’s a shortcut! I don’t want to give away 2 months of rent for (what I perceive as) “nothing”, but—shou ga nai—has to be done.

At the same time, I have been doing my best to still be a good shopper. Though shou ga nai comes up all the time, I managed to get my reikin negotiated down to 1 month, and I transferred a lot of extra money in one go to bring down the bank fees as much as possible, and so on—but it is always there.

Maybe part of this is owing to my mother’s “shopping genes”? Also, on my way to Dublin Airport last month, I ran into my Japanese teacher on the train and one piece of advise that she gave me is to try to hold onto my ability not to take “no” for an answer, that lots of non-Japanese have, but that lots of Japanese lose (in part to “shou ga nai”, surely).

I leave discussion of whether the “shou ga nai” has an effect on how the Japanese deal with natural disasters, crazy low interest rates, and so on, to commenters

In the last few weeks there have been a few words that have come up again and again, but that I had never studied before. After hearing these words so often, I was surprised that I had never learnt them before. I know a few readers here are studying Japanese, so here they are:

口座（こうざ）bank account
交差点（こうさてん）traffic junction
時期に（じきに）soon
順調（じゅんちょう）progressing well/making progress
帖（じょう）counter for tatami mats (and therefore, floor space)
手数料（てすうりょう）fee
手続き（てつづき）process (or step in a process). For example, filling out forms, etc.
床屋（とこや）barber
平米（へいべい）square metre
要は（ようは）in summary

Others that you might not have come across but I heard a lot recently:

契約（けいやく）contract
解約（かいやく）contract cancellation

Copy and paste the lot into WWWJDIC for more information.

Japanese business has lots of interesting rules, and I learnt a very interesting one yesterday.

I received a letter from my fibre provider, NTT, requesting my payment details. Inside the envelope was a document explaining the process, one form for bank account details, one for credit card details, and a small, addressed, franked envelope to return the forms in.

In Japan the addresses are “backwards”, beginning with the lowest level of detail (country or city) and becoming more detailed as it progresses, ending with the recipient’s name. In this case, it was to NTT. There was a suffix after “NTT”: “行” (yuki). 行 means “to”. Satomi’s mom crossed it out and rewrote it as “御中” (on-chuu).

When sending a letter to a company in Japan, the correct suffix is 御中 (on-chuu) as this is most polite. To an individual, it’s 様 (sama). 行 (yuki), however, is not polite at all, and is complete neutral, meaning simply “to”. When NTT wrote its own address, it would have been embarrassing to use the polite suffix for itself: using an honourific word to refer to oneself is a big no-no in Japanese. However, it is good form to change this to the honourific form when sending it back as you would never write someone else’s address without an honourific if you were writing it yourself.

This is one example of the big differences in Japanese depending on the relationship between the speaker and listener. When I speak with someone older than me, or a stranger, I conjugate my verbs politely, but when I speak with someone younger than me, I conjugate them casually. When I’m a customer, the staff use very formal conjugations and vocabulary with me, even though I am often much younger than them. In business it’s very important to get this right, and in English the words “our company” and “your company” are simple, but in Japanese they come with honourific/humble prefixes: 御社 (on-sha) means “your honourable company” and 弊社 (hei-sha) means “our useless company”.

There’s very little room for error, which is a challenge I look forward to every day.