Every year, Keidanren, the Japan Business Federation, asks its member companies what they value most when they hire new graduates. In the survey published in December 2017, komyunikēshon nōryoku, communication skill, came first. Keidanren called it the fifteenth year in a row, although its report a year earlier had counted thirteen years.
Planted Questions
Under the cabinet of Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō, the government held 174 town meetings with citizens. An investigation committee reported on December 13, 2006 that at 15 of them, the government had asked participants in advance to make remarks with specified content. At 105 meetings, people had been asked to speak.
The committee concluded that asking anyone in advance to make a particular statement at such a meeting must be strictly forbidden. The press called the planted questions yarase, staged.
Questions Sent Ahead
Before a Diet committee session, members send their questions to the ministries. This is called shitsumon tsūkoku, question notice. Officials then write the minister’s answers. In a 2025 survey by the Cabinet Personnel Bureau, half of the questions arrived two days or more before the session. Nearly all the rest arrived by 6 p.m. the day before.
On average, officials could start writing at 6:32 p.m. and finished the answers at 1:48 a.m.
Off the Record
On the evening of February 3, 2023, Arai Masayoshi, a secretary to Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, spoke to reporters off the record. He said he would not even want to see same-sex couples, and that if same-sex marriage were allowed, some people would abandon Japan. The Mainichi Shimbun reported the remarks under his name. Kishida dismissed him the next day.
In July 2011, the minister for reconstruction, Matsumoto Ryū, berated the governor of Miyagi in front of cameras. Then he told the reporters: Kaitara, mō sono sha wa owari dakara. If you write this, that company is finished. A local broadcaster aired the scene, and he resigned on July 5.
The Ichiriki Teahouse
In Act 7 of the play Kanadehon Chūshingura, first staged in Osaka in 1748, Ōboshi Yuranosuke spends day after day in revelry at the Ichiriki teahouse in Gion. The act is called Bōsui no dan, the scene of feigned drunkenness.
Everyone around him, enemy and ally, tries to learn his true intention. His enemies suspect that his drinking hides a plan of revenge, and they lay traps to expose it. Yuranosuke has prepared for their tricks and defeats them.
Obligation Chocolate
On Valentine’s Day in Japan, women give chocolate to men. Giri choko, obligation chocolate, goes to men they have no romantic interest in. Honmei choko, true-favorite chocolate, goes to the man they love.
On February 1, 2018, Godiva Japan ran a full-page ad in the Nikkei with the headline Nihon wa, giri choko o yameyō. Japan, let’s stop obligation chocolate. The ad said that obligation chocolate was not needed, and in these times, it was better without it.
Shanshan Meetings
A shanshan sōkai is a shareholders’ meeting that ends in a short time, with no real discussion and no questions.
A Japanese legal journal writes that shareholders’ meetings were once called shanshan meetings, and that obtaining a valid resolution, free of defects, in a short time was considered desirable. A money magazine adds that at the time, a shanshan meeting was considered a good shareholders’ meeting.
The Vocabulary of Front and Back
Kuromaku (黒幕): black curtain. In kabuki, a black cotton curtain that hides the stage between scenes or serves as a background. In everyday use, a person who stays out of view and directs or plots behind the scenes.
Tatemae (建て前): in building, raising the main frame of a house, its posts, beams and ridge, on the foundation. The same word is used for the public stance, in the pair tatemae to honne, public stance and true feelings.
Hara o waru (腹を割る): to split the belly. To tell one’s true feelings without hiding anything.
Every Few Seconds
Japanese linguists have measured how often listeners give aizuchi. Mizutani (1988) found that native speakers give about 15 to 20 per minute on average. Komiya (1986) found one every 9.6 seconds in a television interview program, and one every 6.1 seconds in telephone conversations.
I See
Naruhodo (なるほど): I see. It expresses agreement with what the other person says.
A business manners guide warns that it can also sound as if the listener is judging the speaker’s words. This sometimes becomes a problem with superiors. The guide suggests Hontō ni ossharu tōri desu ne, it is truly just as you say.