In September 2013, a customer at the Naebo store of the clothing chain Shimamura in Sapporo made a female employee kneel in dogeza, the deepest bow of apology. She posted a photo of it on Twitter. On September 21, the image spread widely.
On October 7, after the employee reported the harm to the police, the customer was arrested on suspicion of kyōyō, coercion.
The inn Kagaya at Wakura Onsen ranked first for 36 years in a row in an annual ranking of Japan’s hotels and inns chosen by professionals. In the ranking announced in December 2016, it fell to third.
Its idea of service is egao de kibataraki, a smile and quick attentiveness. Kagaya tells its staff that guest satisfaction is half the manual. The rest should be brought to 100 by their own sense and their work on the spot.
Kagaya has been closed since the earthquake on the Noto Peninsula on January 1, 2024 damaged it. It is building a new building.
A well-known story tells how Ishida Mitsunari entered the service of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi stopped at a temple and asked for tea. A temple boy first served a cup almost full of lukewarm tea. Hideyoshi asked for more. The boy served less tea, a little hotter. The third time, he served a small amount of quite hot tea in a small cup. Hideyoshi was impressed by the boy’s attentiveness and asked the abbot for him.
The story is known as sanken no cha, the three offerings of tea. It first appears in Bushō kanjōki, published in 1716, and was later retold in Ehon Taikōki and Meishō genkōroku. It is most likely a later invention.
Sontaku (忖度) means to infer what is in another person’s mind. In 2017, it shared the grand prize of the annual buzzword award, the Shingo Ryūkōgo Taishō, with insuta-bae, looking good on Instagram.
For the award, the word stood for the Moritomo and Kake Gakuen issues, in which officials were said to have anticipated the wishes of the prime minister’s office. Testifying in the Diet, the chairman of the Moritomo Gakuen school operator said: Sontaku shita no deshō. They probably showed sontaku. The prize was accepted by the president of a company that sold sontaku manjū, sweet buns.
Seven rules for the tea ceremony are traditionally attributed to the tea master Sen no Rikyū. They are known as Rikyū shichisoku. Make tea so that it is good to drink. Lay the charcoal so that the water boils. Arrange flowers as they grow in the field. Make it cool in summer and warm in winter. Be early. Have an umbrella ready even when it is not raining. Be mindful of the other guests.
A children’s tea ceremony leaflet from the town of Chikujō in Fukuoka explains each rule. The first teaches kikubari, attentiveness. The rule on summer and winter teaches omoiyari, consideration for others.
In Makura no sōshi (The Pillow Book), Sei Shōnagon recalls a day of deep snow at court. Empress Teishi asks: Shōnagon yo, Kōrohō no yuki ika naramu. Shōnagon, how is the snow of Xianglu Peak? Sei Shōnagon has the lattice raised and lifts the blind high. The Empress smiles.
The question quotes a line by the Chinese poet Bai Juyi: the snow of Xianglu Peak, I lift the blind to see. The other ladies admit that they knew the line and had even used it in poems, but it had not occurred to them. The Empress had not asked for the blind to be raised.
In 1982, Kōdansha published Kikubari no susume (Advice on Consideration) by Suzuki Kenji, a former announcer of the public broadcaster NHK. Kikubari means attentiveness to others. The book became one of the great bestsellers in the history of Japanese publishing.
It also drew criticism, because it treated kikubari as a technique.
After the 2011 earthquake, Toyota built a database of its supply chain with Fujitsu. It shares the information in real time with its first-tier suppliers and uses it only for disaster response and prevention.
A case study published by the Cabinet Secretariat says that Toyota can obtain this information because of mutual trust built up over many years.
The film Shazai no ōsama (The Apology King) opened in Japan on September 28, 2013. Abe Sadao plays Kuroshima Yuzuru, who runs the Tokyo Apology Center and helps clients out of trouble by apologizing. In the end, he saves Japan with the ultimate apology, one that goes beyond dogeza, kneeling with the forehead to the ground.
The film was directed by Mizuta Nobuo from a screenplay by Kudō Kankurō. It earned 2.18 billion yen.
In Japanese baseball, a pitcher who hits a batter with a pitch takes off his cap to apologize. The newspaper Nikkan Gendai describes this as what is taken for granted in Japan.
In August 2024, after a brawl in a game of the Lotte Marines, the former star hitter Ochiai Hiromitsu spoke about it on television. The pitcher probably believed he had apologized, he said, but the apology had not reached the batter.