The other night I was doing my physical therapy and watching Close Up Gendai, a daily news show on NHK which typically features one in-depth story on some current topic. They do all different kinds of stories, from international and very local news, society and culture, and science. That night's story was "Whither keigo?"
Keigo is the Japanese system of honorific language, which doesn't have any exact parallel in English. Compared to keigo, formal English and casual English sound identical. Go ahead and read the wiki. It's quite interesting. Really.
The theme of the keigo story was that no one knows how to use keigo properly anymore, especially those young whippersnappers. Why? And what can be done about it?
There are a few reasons why. The principal reason is that interpersonal relationships have become less formal. For example, family members use the same register with each other as they do with their friends, whereas in the olden days, children would have used keigo when speaking with their parents. Since kids aren't picking up keigo at home, they're learning it in the streets. And fast food joints and coffee shops, from service industry workers who have to be trained in "service keigo" by their employers.
Anymore, the only place most people hear extreme keigo is on samurai dramas, where, between internecine warfare and ritual suicides, the female characters speak in ultra-flowery language, while the male characters use manly keigo (butch, yet still flowery).
As a result, keigo is getting weird because people don't have a good grasp of it. People are making it up as they go along and throwing in the service keigo, which is what they hear most on a regular basis. And the service keigo is not correct. Whose fault is that?
At this point in the show, the camera zoomed in on the sign of a fast food restaurant. The camera stayed out of focus and moved pretty fast, but not so fast that we couldn't all get a glimpse of the golden arches. Yes! The adulteration of the proud Japanese language is all the fault of the McDonald's employee manual! The set phrases to be used by employees speaking to customers were translated from English into incorrect keigo because there are no corresponding correct keigo phrases. Hence the introduction of the bugbear (to Japanese language purists) "yoroshikatta deshou ka" which is wrong keigo, but which is supposed to stand in for "Will that be all?" or "Would you like [fries with that]?"
Can keigo be saved? Language is a viscous system and these trends are hard to turn around. This isn't a new trend either. When Princess Diana and Prince Charles visited Japan back in the 1980's, it was scandalous how the Japanese newscasters reporting on the story stumbled horribly over their keigo, wrongly using super-humble forms for the royals.
Nowadays companies are holding keigo seminars for new hires to prepare them for properly polite client interactions. An employment agency is offering keigo classes for their job-seeking clients. The show dropped in on one of these classes where a group of young men were trying to un-learn their bad keigo and learn proper keigo. They all passed the written test, but failed in ad lib dialogs. The instructor corrected one student and told him the proper phrasing. The student said, "Ah, samurai poku." ("Sounds like a samurai.")
I think that's the crux of the matter right there. If proper keigo is something one only hears on TV in costume dramas, one feels pretty silly talking like that in real life. How would you feel if you had to speak Elizabethan English in order to be considered mannerly?
Keigo, use it or lose it. I bet keigo could be saved if it could be spun into a pop culture trend. Consider the staying power of Hello Kitty. All keigo needs is a pink bow and some glitter.
663 words | March 3, 2007 10:53 AM | Lost in translationI wonder if there's some way in which keigo could be integrated with the anime/manga otaku culture: perhaps an interactive video game series in which your progress through the levels is marked (and controlled) by proper use of keigo....
Posted by: Jonathan Dresner at March 3, 2007 05:01 PMAh, but would that be text- or speech-based? In general, people seem to have a good passive knowledge of keigo and understand spoken keigo (correct and not) just fine. Written output is also okay, judging by how the guys at the employment center all passed the written test. (Why, yes, that is an overgeneralization based on a small sample size. Thank you for noticing.) Your game would have to have superb speech recognition capabilities in order for it to have any improving effect on its market.
I wouldn't be surprised if keigo ends up like the metric system here in the U.S. Here, children learn to use metric units in science class, and continue to use them if they pursue scientific and technical specialities, but for general purposes the entire population uses the English system. (In fact, and totally not applicable to the discussion of keigo, if children try to carry metrics outside the classroom, they get forcibly corrected. Another overgeneralization from a small sample: one of my stepbrothers, who was perhaps 11 years old at the time, said metric units made more sense to him than English units and he felt more comfortable using them, and my father said, "No, you don't.")
Anyway, point? Keigo is becoming less and less a part of the living language. That kind of linguistic change is probably impossible to reverse. I wouldn't be surprised if someone who used keigo correctly and in all the contexts they were "supposed" to would probably be regarded as rather odd. Well spoken, maybe, but odd.
Posted by: 100wordminimum at March 3, 2007 06:06 PMSo, if 'yoroshikatta deshou ka' is wrong, what SHOULD the young McD employees be saying?
Just wondering...!
Oh! You got me! I should have made a note of it. Either they said the correct phrase or the guest linguist threw up his hands and said, "You don't say that in keigo."
Posted by: 100wordminimum at March 5, 2007 09:52 PM