Ancestors

Written by Rick Scott 🏳️‍⚧️ on 2025-01-26 at 05:49

random musings:

the way language encapsulates culture is super interesting.

and it's both amazing & disappointing that translating a sentence often crushes all the nuance out of it

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Written by Rick Scott 🏳️‍⚧️ on 2025-01-26 at 05:55

eg:

「JR東日本をご利用くださいましてありがとうございます。」

the usual, mundane way to translate that into English is:

"Thank you for using JR East."

but it doesn't really express the degree to which, despite you being a paying customer, they really appreciate you using their train. as if you are doing them a favour as well 😅

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Written by Rick Scott 🏳️‍⚧️ on 2025-01-26 at 05:56

and I feel like it's not really possible to express that concisely in English without making it sound obsequious in a way the original doesn't.

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Written by Rick Scott 🏳️‍⚧️ on 2025-01-26 at 06:01

also it's such an iconic phrase that you hear so often, it comes with its own specific cultural inflection as well.

try saying it, if you're a Japanese speaker. I bet you'll notice some things that are different from how you'd deliver a random mundane text that you read aloud. 😅

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omtDvS_WTY0

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Written by Kotaro on 2025-01-26 at 06:07

@shadowspar I am Japanese, and I think there is a uniquely Japanese way of spirit with "The customer is God" included.

JR East was originally state-run, so the intention is to emphasize that it is fully privatized.

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Written by Rick Scott 🏳️‍⚧️ on 2025-01-26 at 06:26

@kotaro right? like, when speaking, that spirit is expressed using 敬語, but it goes far beyond just language

also thank you for pointing out the privatization angle! I probably wouldn't have thought of that; I lived in Japan in 1995, so I've never experienced JR before privatization 😅

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Toot

Written by Kotaro on 2025-01-26 at 06:33

@shadowspar It may be that Keigo itself is originally an obsequious emotion, rather than a Japanese word that sounds obsequious when translated into English.

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Descendants