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.
