20 May 2022
Today we’re going to start talking about names and nicknames in Japan.
Most people are aware of the formality in the Japanese language. With multiple levels of politeness that allow you to address everyone from the Emperor to your cat with the right verb, even terms of address also contribute to politeness.
Add 様 (sama) to a family name to accord someone a lot of respect.
Speaking to a teacher, a doctor, or a politician? Add 先生 (sensei) after their name.
Are you apprenticed to a master artisan? They’ll want you to pick the 師匠 (shishō) suffix for the master’s name.
Use the 君 (kun) suffix to address your male inferiors (and yes, social hierarchies can be rigid in Japan).
Speaking of social hierarchies, you can use 先輩 (senpai) to address older classmates.
Feeling cute, or perhaps you have a class of kindergarten girls? The ちゃん (chan) suffix is at your disposal.
Trapped in a samurai drama and need to address your lord? Try the 殿 (dono) suffix on for size.
Feeling nostalgia for the ‘00s or maybe just addressing a business letter? The 氏 (shi) suffix awaits.
Are you a tout outside a nightclub and looking for customers? Use the 社長 (shachō) suffix to make everyone feel like a company president.
But for most of the time, people append a さん (san) after a family name. It’s polite (without being excessive), but it’s also hard to translate perfectly into English. We use Mr., Ms., and so on, of course, but here in North America, that level of formality is increasingly rare. Even at my office, for example, executives ask to be addressed with their given name.
Politeness in Japan serves many a social end (and multiple books have already been written on that subject), but foreigners in Japan experience confusion sometimes trying to fit in.
When I arrived in 1988 to teach at a senior high school, a special surprise awaited me. Because signatures were not legally binding, people in Japan had chops, a name stamp referred to as 判子 (hanko), to seal agreements.
When I arrived in 1988 to teach at a senior high school, a special surprise awaited me. Because signatures were not legally binding, people in Japan had chops, a name stamp referred to as 判子 (hanko), to seal agreements.
But my new colleagues wouldn’t settle for an easy option. They took out a map and looked for a combination of Chinese characters, 漢字 (kanji), which are also used when writing Japanese, that might work as a homophone.
Not ten miles from my new high school in a city called Okegawa was a little village called 和戸村 (Wado-mura, the last character identifies the first two as a village). 漢字 are amazing flexible when it comes to pronunciation. All 漢字 have a way to read them if the character has a corresponding Japanese concept. This is called the 訓読み (kun-yomi), and the 訓読み for 村 is mura.
漢字 also have at least one 音読み (on-yomi) to represent the sound of the character as it was pronounced in Chinese back when the character was introduced (or reintroduced) to Japan in the first place. The 音読み for 村 is son.
和戸村, normally read as wado-mura, could also therefore be read as watoson. (to is the unvoiced variant of do, a linguistic topic for another newsletter if I ever want to delve that deep into linguistics.)
My 判子 was therefore 和戸村. I still have it, in fact.
And my new colleagues addressed me as Watoson-san (but I always accorded them proper respect by using -sensei for each of them).
My students, however, called my name without any suffix. This is ordinarily either very rude or very intimate (and the practice is referred to as 呼び捨て (yobisute) in Japanese, literally meaning ‘throwing away a name’), but I suspect that my students thought they were being cool and address me without a suffix because that’s what they saw people in English-language movies do.
Fast forward six months, and I have found a gay bar that I want to visit. A bar that doesn’t specialize in foreigners who don’t speak any Japanese. When I walk in, shocking the bar’s master—this is not an S&M reference; any man who runs a bar in Japan is referred to as a master and any woman who does so is referred to as a mama—and patrons alike until I let them know I spoke Japanese, one of the first things the master wants to do is build me a cute nickname. Watoson-san is nice and all, but it’s not very cuddly.
And because the master is a big old queen, like me, he tests out a girl’s name based on Watoson: Wako. And to make it all that much cuter, he adds the -chan suffix. Wako-chan.
The last time I visited that neighborhood in Shinjuku where the gay bars are, back in 2016, I still heard people call out to me: Wako-chan! It’s been an enduring nickname, despite my having left Japan in 1998.
But a better nickname was waiting. I’ll save that for the next issue, but rest assured, it’s peachy!
