That’s probably what it says on his ATM machine card.
Can I still call the boy Tommy-kun?
Fuck if I know. To me he’s just some guy with a Japanese name who calls to bug me once a month.
I see where you’re coming from, but for me it feels awkward and a little bit silly to switch from one form of address to another for the same person depending on whom I’m talking to.
If you’re in an office full of gaijins and dealing with Japanese clients or whatevers only occasionally, then yes, I agree. When the situation’s reversed, however, it feels like an awkward affectation to switch between Mr. and -san.
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If you’re in an office full of gaijins and dealing with Japanese clients or whatevers only occasionally, then yes, I agree.
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Well, yes, that’s the situation I describe.
Then we are in perfect agreement and our wa (or kibun) is restored.
It could be even worse than that. I had a co-worker who would introduce himself to our Japanese business associates with the -san honorific: “Hi, I’m Smith-san”. Yikes!!!
But when I was doing lots of business with Japanese, we just always refferred to them as Whoever-san even when they wern’t present. It was easier to keep it straight so you didn’t slip up in a meeting.
I have been working with several Japanese companies for +12 years and this is how we address each other:
If my counterpart addresses me directly, I am Toad-san because in the USA, we use our first, or given names. If he refers to me indirectly, then he is formal and refers to me by my last name, “Mr Bufonidae, or Bufonidea-san“. If I hold a very high rank or status, then I am Bufonidea-sama.
Because the Japanese are more formal, we use only their last
name. When I speak directly to my counterpart, Mr. Sato, I call him Sato-san. In a group, when I refer to him indirectly, I call him Mr. Sato.
I don’t know if the Japanese do this, but I know the Chinese often use the surname first, and given name second. Is it possible that they are calling you by your first name-san because they believe it to be your surname?
Most Japanese are aware of the switch for surname and given name in English. If they speak enough English to communicate, then they definitely know about it. They’re probably just trying to politely imitate our customs, same as an American using last name and -san to imitate theirs.
It’s a little silly to refer to someone who isn’t there as “Fujimoto-san” when talking to another English speaker, but I can see how it’d be a hard habit to break.
When we lived in Japan, my husband was universally called Dean-san by the Japanese he dealt with, both at work and at banks and such. We assumed it was because of the name reversal switch, especially in the case of non-coworkers.
There are some people we still refer to with -san today because that’s how we met them and always called them. Sometimes it’s easier not to try to do the mental gymnastics to think of them as something else after calling them one thing long enough.
I used to work in an office with a large amount of contact with Japan, and I found that if you’re talking to a Japanese person a lot and referring to them by their face as Whatever-san, it becomes a bit weird to switch to Mister Whatever when talking to English-speaking people and then switching back to -san again. Similarly, Herr Whatever or Monsieur Whatever.
Which would be doubly amusing, since “Tornado” has only one “r” and is thus not rolled in Spanish.
Back in the '80s, when the Sandinistas and the contras were still a big issue, you could generally tell people’s political view by how they pronounced the word “Nicaragua”.
Most people in the US pronounced the word more or less as written, but the real hard-core lefties allways pronounced it with a grossly affected accent (far more so than native Nicaraguans) as “NicaHRUAGGGUA”, hawking up a real wet one in the process.
“Well, that’s not true, I do judge people, how are you gonna know if you like someone or not? Like when some white woman suddenly develops an accent in the middle of a sentence when talking about some Central American country: ‘My girlfriend and I are going to Neecarahwa.’ ‘OK, I don’t like you.’”
- Maggie Cassella
That reminds me of a friend of mine who’s a linguist. She finds that one of the challenges to her profession is that everyone expects her to pronounce all foreign words like a native, no matter whether it’s Spanish, Russian, Sanskrit, or whatever. Even though her specialty is Cherokee.
Am I the only one that almost bust a gut when I read this?:
Shaka Washington
I like that!
In German class in high school, all the students referred to the teacher as Frau Heckert. Once I was asked to deliver some paperwork from Frau Heckert to the main office. When I got there, I found it unbelievably hard to say, “Mrs. Heckert asked me to bring you these papers.” By that time, using the German form of address for her was so ingrained in my mind that it sounded awkward to refer to her using the English “Mrs.” Therefore I can sympathize with those who deal regularly with Japanese business contacts and have a hard time switching between Fujimoto-san and Mr. Fujimoto depending on context.
Will have to agree with amore. It’s hard to refer to my language teachers anything other than Mme. Allard-Coutu, Sra. Walzer, Prof.ssa Picciano, Frau Goldsmith.
Yeah…it’s German CLASS. When I’m out with my pal from Duetche Bank in the real world, his coworkers don’t all refer to each as Herr zis and Frau zat.