Arigatou (2x)
Before I first arrived in Japan nearly 20 years ago, I had been told by many that the Japanese people are so polite. Well, I must say that in my experience, they certainly have lived up to the stereotype. Naturally, I've met a few rude ones over the years, and I've met some who thought they were being funny, but from my own cultural perspective were being downright rude. However, those disappointing encounters have been few and far between and essentially all of the people I have interacted with over the years have been exceedingly polite.
There has in fact been one particular form of politeness that has been so systematic and almost formulaic across so many people and so many places that it is quite striking. This is the custom where Japanese people say Thank You twice. I don't mean that they say Thank you, thank you! as an expression of gratitude. Rather, they are sure to say thank you in each of two independent and successive encounters.
What I mean is this: Imagine I do a favor for a Japanese acquaintance—not just any favor, like loaning someone a pencil, but rather a favor of some consequence, like spending a couple of hours helping them do some domestic chores. Of course, when the favor is completed, the acquaintance will say thank you and I will leave and that will be that. However, the next time I meet the acquaintance, they will invariably thank me again. And it will be the first thing they say after we meet in this subsequent encounter. And they will most likely use a fixed expression for this as in (1).
- この間はどうもありがとうございました。
Thank you for what you did before.
Of course there may be a few emphatic modifiers thrown in, or they might be more specific about the actual favor they received, but this expression is always at the core. I find two things remarkable about this. First, although there surely are people in the US who customarily do this, and no one would find it strange if someone offers a second, independent expression of gratitude, it is not a common occurrence and it is certainly not expected either (at least not in the midwest where I grew up: perhaps other regions have different cultural values where this is concerned). So for me, this was quite a surprising difference in cultural customs.
The second thing I find remarkable (well, used to find remarkable—I think I understand it now) is that people all over the country seem to use the same formula down to the very syntactic structure. I guess it can be attributed to the cultural attitude against deviation from the norm but I didn't really expect that that attitude could be strong enough to cause an entire nation of people to adhere so strictly to a particular script for such a modest social event. But perhaps I underestimate the influence of social forces.
Anyway, I have been so impressed by this particular feature of Japanese culture that when my son's school asked me to contribute a short article about anything, I decided to focus on this. Here's the article as it was printed in Japanese. I did write it myself, but my wife cleaned it up considerably. If you don't read Japanese, don't worry—it basically says what I have written here so far.
先日職場である人を手伝いました。手伝いを終えた時その人はすぐにお礼を言ってくれました。次の日職場に着くと、その人は「昨日はどうもありがとうございました」と、言ってくれました。
日本で育った皆さんには多分これが当たり前の事に思えるでしょうが、私のようにアメリカで育った人間には、こんな風に思えるかもしれません。「なぜ二回もお礼を言うんだろう。一回で十分なのに。」。英語では「Thank you」を一回だけ言えば十分です。何度も言うことはめずらしいでしょう。でも、よく考えたら何か物足りない気がします。もちろん、その場でお礼の言葉を言えば感謝の気持ちは伝わります。しかし、時間がたったら、その気持ちを忘れる場合もあります。だからちょっと物足りないのかもしれません。お礼の言葉を繰り返す事によって、その感謝の気持ちを持ち続ける事ができます。つまり、自分の生活の中にその人のことを考える時間を持つ事ができるという事です。それが人間関係をより深くしてくれているのではないでしょうか。
私が日本の文化で好きなことは、このお礼の習慣です。日本の任天堂のゲームボーイといっしょにこの習慣も世界中に輸出してほしいです。
When living in a foreign country, one must adapt to and adopt some of the cultural practices of the host culture in order to survive. This is one particular cultural practice that I have not yet mastered. There are times when I successfully remember to say a second thank you, but there are times when I forget to say it at the very beginning of the next encounter or not until a later encounter. I'm not sure how people see me when I fail to do this properly. On the one hand, they might regard me as not showing proper gratitude and thus may feel less inclined to do me a favor later. On the other hand, I may benefit from another aspect of the politeness of Japanese culture: being forgiving of foreigners who aren't fully familiar with Japanese cultural practices (but are conscientiously trying…).
Over the last three decades, Japan has become particularly well-known for its exporting of a wide variety of consumer goods: cars, tvs, stereos, walkmans, portable games, animation, and sushi. And yet it seems that Japan has had far less success exporting certain social values. It may be but a small thing, but I would really like to see Japan somehow export the custom of saying thank you twice together with all those Nintendo game units.