Otsukaresama desu (お疲れ様です): at work, words of thanks and appreciation for someone’s effort, and a farewell at the end of the day. Colleagues also say it to each other in passing, at any time of day. It began as a respectful greeting to someone who was thought to be tired.
New Year Cards
Japan Post issued about 4.46 billion New Year postcards, nengajō, for New Year 2004, and about 4.35 billion for 2005. For New Year 2026, the first issue was 748.41 million cards.
The Magic of Greetings
Aisatsu no mahō (The Magic of Greetings) is a public service commercial by AC Japan that encourages children to greet people. It aired in huge numbers right after the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, when many sponsors had suspended their own commercials.
Circulating Board
The kairanban, circulating board, carries notices from the neighborhood association from one household to the next. In the town of Hayama, notices go through 28 neighborhood associations, and one round usually takes about 20 days.
Minato Ward in Tokyo now offers an app to replace the paper board. One problem it names: when the next household is away, the board does not move on.
Read
The messaging app LINE shows kidoku, read, once a message has been opened. The feature is said to have been designed after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, so that a sender could know the other person had read the message and was safe.
Leaving a read message without a reply is called kidoku surū, read and pass. The Daijisen dictionary lists the word. Gendai Business writes that the name came to be used as a reproach.
Morning Meeting
In a 2019 internet survey by NEXER, 37.5 percent of respondents said that their workplace holds chōrei, a morning meeting, every day. One former employee recalled one-minute speeches, sharing the day’s schedule and radio calisthenics.
Public Stance and True Feelings
Tatemae (建前): the principle one officially stands by. The outward view. A dictionary gives the example Ano hito wa tatemae to honne ga mattaku chigau, that person’s public stance and true feelings are completely different.
Honne (本音): one’s true thoughts or feelings, as opposed to what one says in public for the sake of harmony.
Deru kui wa utareru (出る杭は打たれる): the stake that sticks out gets hammered. A person who stands out or oversteps tends to be resented and criticized by others.
Unfinished Refusals
Chotto… (ちょっと…): a little… A sentence left unfinished, as in Sono hi wa chotto…, that day is a little…
A Japanese study of refusals calls such forms iisashi, sentences left unfinished. It explains that leaving the end of the sentence unsaid keeps one’s opinion from striking the other person directly. Among the unfinished forms in the study, chotto stood out as especially frequent.
The Managing Directors’ Meeting
Many large Japanese companies have a jōmukai, a meeting of the managing directors. Unlike the board of directors and the shareholders’ meeting, it is not required by law.
Japanese encyclopedias describe it as the place where matters that the board will formally decide are discussed in substance. There, nearly all important management decisions are made.
Envoy of Consideration
In a street speech on June 26, 2022, the opposition politician Tsujimoto Kiyomi said that Prime Minister Kishida Fumio’s nickname was kentōshi, the envoy of consideration. The name plays on his repeated answer kentō shimasu, we will consider it, and on the kentōshi, the envoys Japan once sent to Tang China.