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.
There was a guy in my Japanese class in Sapporo who was called “Ahasan”. This caused all sorts of confusion and misunderstanding in Japanese because when he would say “My name is Ahasan” it would sound like he was saying “My name is Aha-san”. And then when other people would address him they should actually say “Ahasan-san”, which most people in my class did, but I just called him “Ahasan-kun” cause it was easier to say and he was a year younger than me anyway so it was appropriate.
Another interesting moment I had when I was working in Sapporo was when myself, the vice-manager and manager went to see the 部長 (bu-chou, department head). Normally I was used to speaking friendly but respectfully to the vice-manager (who I interacted with alot) and only had very formal interactions with the Manger. (going up to him in the morning to give my greeting…such a civilised country!) Often the Manager would call out loudly in casual Japanese for the vice-manager to come over and look at something and the vice-manager would always scurry over in a most urgent and diligent manner.
But when the three of us went to see the department head, the manager who I was used to seeing being hugely respected and tended to was suddenly just like myself and the vice-manager, furiously bowing and speaking in humble language to the department head. The three of us were like three young boys in the headmistresses office in school, desperate to not screw up!
It really is very important to try and get it right (though Japanese are accommodative of foreigners making mistakes as they often aren’t exactly sure themselves of the right behaviour at times) but when you do pull it off it produces a sort of harmony and pleasant aura, as all interactions are “correct” and everyone knows what to expect from the other party.
It’s definitely the best way to organise a civilised society. 頑張りましょう！