On September 7, 2013, at the IOC session in Buenos Aires, Takigawa Christel presented Tokyo’s bid for the Olympic Games. She spoke one word syllable by syllable, with a gesture: o-mo-te-na-shi.
The word was one of four joint winners of the grand prize of the 2013 New Words and Buzzwords Award.
Okyakusama wa kamisama desu: the customer is god. The line is famous as the words of the singer Minami Haruo. In his book Kagei no tenchi of 1984, he explained that in this sense the audience is a gathering of absolute beings, and that he had been taught that the absolute between heaven and earth is god.
His daughter, Minami Miyuki of his management company, says that the true meaning of the phrase is entirely different from its use today in cases of customer harassment.
Ichigo ichie (一期一会): one lifetime, one meeting. A tea ceremony phrase. Host and guest should treat each gathering as one that will happen only once in their lives, and act with complete sincerity.
It first appears in the record of the tea master Yamanoue Sōji as ichigo ni ichido no kai, a gathering once in a lifetime. Ii Naosuke later stressed it in his tea treatise Chanoyu ichie shū.
In August 2016, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry announced the omotenashi kikaku ninshō, the Omotenashi Standard certification. It certifies businesses that provide high-quality service. Certified businesses receive a mark, so that users can tell good service from bad.
In 1906, Okakura Kakuzō published The Book of Tea in New York. He wrote it in English, to bring the essence of Japanese culture and the Japanese sense of beauty to the West through the way of tea.
At many Japanese izakaya, a small dish called otōshi arrives without being ordered. Most are charged, usually 300 to 500 yen. A lawyer quoted by President Online says that the customer must pay if the dish was explained on entry or clearly shown on a sign or menu. Without such notice, no contract exists, and the customer can refuse both the dish and the charge.
Disputes with foreign visitors have occurred, and some shops now let customers decline it.
In 2018, the economic commentator Kaya Keiichi wrote in Newsweek Japan that 73.9 percent of the people in a survey had suffered nuisance behavior from customers at work. He described the reasoning behind it: in Japan, the customer is god, so a worker cannot stand up to a customer’s high-handed behavior.
In 2017, the Japan Productivity Center surveyed 500 Japanese who had stayed in the United States and 500 Americans who had stayed in Japan. Both groups said that Japanese service was better than American service in almost every field. The center measured the difference by asking how much more they would be willing to pay.
It concluded that, in 25 of 28 categories, the higher quality was not fully reflected in Japanese prices.
Omotenashi (おもてなし) is motenashi made polite with the honorific prefix o. A Japanese dictionary gives the meaning of motenashi as treating another person as precious, looking after them, and receiving them with care. An early Japanese-Portuguese dictionary glosses it as inviting a person and treating them generously.
Japanese has two respectful words for “your company,” onsha and kisha. Their meaning is the same. Onsha is used in speech, and kisha in writing.