Public and Private Archives - understand-culture

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.

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.

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.

Party Without Rank

A bureikō is a banquet held without regard to rank or etiquette. The most famous one in Japanese history was held by Emperor Go-Daigo in the Kamakura period. He used it to gather people of different ranks and plot in secret. One guest told his wife, and the plot leaked.

The same source notes that, in practice, rank does not disappear at a bureikō. Communication at company drinking parties has its own coined word, nominication, from nomu (to drink). It first appeared in the media in the 1980s.