the writers' village

an Asia-based community centre for authors

Writers' Village

LIVE Diary

BE AN AUTHOR!

Become an author

Advanced fiction

Story workshop

Non-fiction/Memoir

Mastering Screenplays

Children's literature

Coming courses

Opportunities for writers

Summary of choices

Questions answered

The story so far

Nury's books

Dead Eric Gets a Virus

Twilight in the Land of Nowhen

The Feng Shui Detective

The Feng Shui Detective Goes South

The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook

Alfonso Fonso and the Tree of Good and Evil

The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics

The City of Dreams

Mozzle and the Giant

The Place You're Meant to

The World's Funniest

The Day It Rained Letters

The Paper Princess

May Moon

Classic Columns

What Kids Eat

Family Issues

A Boy Named Joy

What Asians Eat

Branding For Thieves

Filipino Wordplay

Xtreme Politeness

Who Is This Guy?

The Official Version

The Other One

A Really Funny Q&A

Two Types of Tears

Short stories

The Boy Who Could Not Finish a

Lateral Thinking Puzzles

Press reviews

Reviews From Around the World

Nury's Photo Gallery

Contact!

July 20: THANK YOU for reading this column. Thank you for reading the previous sentence, this sentence, and the following ones. Thank you for not printing out this page and lining a bird cage with it. This columnist has decided to adopt Japanese standards of politeness as an experiment today. You see, there’s ordinary politeness, and then there’s Japanese politeness, which is a different thing altogether.
     This becomes clear if you take a ride on the Gomen Nahari Line, a semi-private railway in Kochi Prefecture. One station is now called Arigato, which means thank you, and another is Gomen, which means sorry. Gomen has been around for a long time, but officially turning the pair into Thank You Station and Sorry Station was the idea of Takashi Yanase, 85. Mr. Takashi is famed for his original thinking, being the creator of the cartoon superhero Anpanman, a bean paste-filled roll of bread which fights crime with superhuman (super-bakery-item?) powers. (I’m serious.)
      The obvious question, at least to anyone non-Japanese, is: Why? There’s no answer to this. “Just saying ‘sorry’ and ‘thank you’ together makes you feel good,” Yanase told the Mainichi Shimbun. “I’d like this to be useful for tourism.”
      Imagine the next meeting of the Kochi Prefecture stationmasters’ association:
      Thank You stationmaster: “Thank you for coming. Sorry, but which station do you represent?”
      Sorry stationmaster: “Sorry. Thank you, Thank You.”
      Thank You stationmaster: “Sorry?”
      Sorry stationmaster: “Sorry.” 
    Thank You stationmaster: “Oh, Sorry! Sorry, Sorry. Thank you.”
      Sorry stationmaster: “No need to say sorry, Thank You, but thank you.”
      Et cetera, et cetera. 
      Actually, it’s very Japanese that there is no indication about what Thank You Station is thankful for, nor what is being apologized for by Sorry Station. The Japanese (like the British) scatter the two terms around willy-nilly to create a general feeling of good breeding. Meetings between Japanese and British delegations often collapse from the sheer scale of pleasantries involved.
      However, the rigidity of Japanese communication is loosening in one key area: personal names. For decades, parents have only been allowed to choose names from The Official List of Allowed Names. The result is that huge numbers of boys are called Kaito and Takumi, and huge numbers of girls are called Misaki and Aoi. In 1993, a creative (if insensitive) couple tried to call their child Akuma, meaning Satan, but officials refused permission.
      But now 578 new words have been proposed as additions to the list, to be ratified later this year. These include the kanji characters for Cancer, Corpse, Excrement and Hemorrhoid. The government is trying to be non-prescriptive, giving members of the population freedom over their own language.
      But Japan is not America. Critics have apparently failed to realize this is an anti-censorship move, and have lambasted the government for enabling parents to curse their own children’s lives—quite literally, since another of the new words is Cursed.
      Yet the freedom to criticize leaders must also be defended. One thing Japan has developed in common with the West is a refusal to let powerful people get away with saying things which are sexist or just plain stupid.
      State Minister for Disaster Prevention Kiichi Inoue said the recent killing of one schoolgirl by another was an example of how women were becoming “lively participants in Japanese society.” Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki added that in his opinion, arson was a “girly” crime, while cutting someone’s throat was a “manly” offence. Both were criticized for being inappropriate.
      Japan needs to learn that the freedom to say what you think doesn’t mean that saying what you think is always a good idea. Similarly, being able to choose inappropriate names for one’s offspring doesn’t mean people have to do that.
      But Asia being Asia, they probably will. In a year’s time, you could easily be making a tourist visit to Sorry Station sitting next to a baby named Cursed Hemorrhoid.
      Thank you for reading this column. You may now print it and approach the birdcage.

Back to Blog home
Next to Free Downloads
Back to Jamland home

 

    


Website powered by Network Solutions®