# In Japan, "It is not impossible" means "no chance in hell"? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 10, 2009, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-japan-it-is-not-impossible-means-no-chance-in-hell/492678 "2009-04-10T19:45:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2009, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-japan-it-is-not-impossible-means-no-chance-in-hell/492678/21 "2009-04-11T13:35:21Z")
> [@sailor](#): > > I am mildly shocked that someone would not understand that other languages and cultures are different and label a whole country and culture as beling passive-aggressive. I lived in Japan for seven years and am fluent. I didn’t say that the country is passive aggressive, nor was I saying anything about the definition of “muri” when I mentioned passive aggression. In regards to the subject of “face”, I was saying that a better term for such a thing is passive aggression. “Face” is a term that, to me at least, sounds far more racist (culturalist?) since it applies to an entire people and treats it like its something that’s not understandable to people outside that culture. I’d argue that you’ve seen “face” any number of times in your daily life in the USA or Europe or wherever, but you were calling it by a different term. I don’t know if Japanese people have a greater number, per capita, of people behaving in passive aggressive manners. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is greater though. But again, that’s a _ratio_. At the individual level, you’ll see all the varieties of personality as you’ll see in any country–just at different ratios to one another. ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2009, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-japan-it-is-not-impossible-means-no-chance-in-hell/492678/22 "2009-04-11T17:32:00Z")
> [@Isamu](#): > > I suppose this book is written for people who will be conversing in English with Japanese people. In that case, Japanese are more likely to be direct in what they say. Brutally straightforward in some cases, because of language limitations, or because that’s how they think business negotiations in English should be conducted. > > [snip] > > So it works both ways. Westerners expect to be confounded by Japanese inscrutability and Japanese expect to be assaulted with Western directness. When both parties try to acommodate the other based on their own expectations of the other, hilarity ensues. I was an English teacher in Japan (I mostly taught adults), and I was sometimes surprised by students who asked me very direct and to my mind inappropriately personal questions, like “Do you have a boyfriend?” or “Are you divorced?” I also had some students who used what I considered excessive for-emphasis swearing in English (“We were so fucking excited!”). Mostly I think they were just trying to talk like Americans and taking it a bit too far. If you’re not fluent in another language then it’s also difficult to phrase things indirectly and so one might easily wind up being more blunt than would be considered polite in either language. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2009, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-japan-it-is-not-impossible-means-no-chance-in-hell/492678/23 "2009-04-14T02:38:14Z")
> [@sailor](#): > > Personally I’d call it “speaking Japanese”, which is what they’re doing. They’re not speaking English. I agree. the nature of the japanse language really does force you to think differently about your relationships with everything and everyone if you want to understand or be understood. That is why, when Japanese people are speaking English with me, I take great pains to decide if the are really speaking in translation, and hence “speaking Japanese in English”. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2009, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-japan-it-is-not-impossible-means-no-chance-in-hell/492678/24 "2009-04-14T02:42:23Z")
> [@jovan](#): > > I > However, the OP asked about “it is not impossible”, which is a rather odd turn of phrase. I have never really encountered this exact phrasing either in English or Japanese. If could be a mistranslation of “chotto muzukashii ka na”, thinking it was “chotto muzkashikunai” ths first being “I think it would be a little difficult” i.e. “let’s talk about something else now :)”, the second being “It is not a little difficult” per the OP. ---
**Author:** ![Revenant\_Threshold](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f1d935/32.png) [@Revenant\_Threshold](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revenant_Threshold)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2009, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-japan-it-is-not-impossible-means-no-chance-in-hell/492678/25 "2009-04-14T16:58:39Z")
> [@Lamia](#): > > I also had some students who used what I considered excessive for-emphasis swearing in English (“We were so fucking excited!”). Are there many words of comparative gravity in Japanese? It might just be a misunderstanding as to how strong the word is. ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-japan-it-is-not-impossible-means-no-chance-in-hell/492678/26 "2009-04-15T00:10:56Z")
> [@Revenant\_Threshold](#): > > Are there many words of comparative gravity in Japanese? Not really. There are are swear words in Japanese but the vocabulary is very limited. There is no real way to differentiate between “we were super excited” and “we were fucking excited” when translating to Japanese. It’s more than possible to have inappropriate language but it’s more a question of using the wrong level of speech than of adding specific words to your sentence. In the case of “fuck”, however, you need to blame certain Hollywood movies. It seems that if people here are going to pick up a word in the dialogue, it’s going to be “fuck”, hence it gets associated with “real” English. ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-japan-it-is-not-impossible-means-no-chance-in-hell/492678/27 "2009-04-15T01:47:49Z")
> [@Revenant\_Threshold](#): > > Are there many words of comparative gravity in Japanese? It might just be a misunderstanding as to how strong the word is. Although my Japanese skills are pretty weak, I don’t believe there are any Japanese obscenities that are also used as intensifiers like in English. I don’t think there’s a true Japanese equivalent to even something like “These are some damn good noodles!” Everyone seemed to understand that “fuck” was a bad word in English, but as **jovan** says, people hear “fucking this” and “fucking that” in movies and some conclude that’s the way they should speak if they want to sound like real Americans. The town I was in was also home to an American military base, and aside from my lessons then encounters with servicemen were the only exposure most of my students had to real live Americans. As you might guess many of these young servicemen used rather salty language, especially since they didn’t expect to be understood by anyone else when they went into town. (The base TV station actually ran PSAs trying to discourage swearing, but I don’t think it had much effect.) ---
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-japan-it-is-not-impossible-means-no-chance-in-hell/492678/28 "2009-04-15T02:41:01Z")
> [@Lamia](#): > > Although my Japanese skills are pretty weak, I don’t believe there are any Japanese obscenities that are also used as intensifiers like in English. I don’t think there’s a true Japanese equivalent to even something like “These are some damn good noodles!” At least one usage exists: くそ〜 (kuso~, lit; “shit”) stuck on to an adjective could be translated as “fucking~”. Example: くそ寒い！ “It’s fucking cold!” But in general you’re right, that kind of construction is rare. There are a lot of circumlocutions and outright lies that are expected in social interaction here. You have to pay attention to tone as well as the words. Maybe more than the words in some cases. They also do take ages to get to the point sometimes. Yesterday in a meeting it took one guy literally 5 minutes of digressions and sub-phrases to get to the main point. I’d practically forgotten what the hell he started talking about by the time he got to the end. You’ll get a lot of this when the person is trying to tell you no without actually saying, “no.” ---
**Author:** ![Zsofia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/7bcc69/32.png) [@Zsofia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zsofia)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-japan-it-is-not-impossible-means-no-chance-in-hell/492678/29 "2009-04-15T03:33:29Z")
To a Japanese person, saying “No, it is completely impossible to do that” may, depending on the situation, be the same thing as saying “What are you, a fucking moron?” Are you going to call your business partner a fucking moron? No? Then you’re not going to say that. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-japan-it-is-not-impossible-means-no-chance-in-hell/492678/30 "2009-04-15T03:43:19Z")
> [@Zsofia](#): > > To a Japanese person, saying “No, it is completely impossible to do that” may, depending on the situation, be the same thing as saying “What are you, a fucking moron?” Are you going to call your business partner a fucking moron? No? Then you’re not going to say that. Japanese just hates bad adjectives in general. English speaking people aren’t foreign to this concept. In polite conversation, if your friend gets an F on a test most people are much more likely to say “that’s not good” rather than “that’s very bad.” Because the latter pretty much implies “you suck” even if the two statements are logically equivilent. In Japanese you just generally do NOT use negative adjectives (at least from what I’ve learned) to begin with, and if you do you should probably pay more attention to the word used than the actual literal meaning of the sentence. So “that’s not likely” = “that’s not impossible I guess, but it will be difficult,” while “that’s not impossible” = “that’s not really likely, probably impossible.” (In fact, I’d wager these sentences would probably ring the same bells in English in practice, the Japanese may be a tad bit more stubborn in avoiding words like “no,” but that’s a very recognizable part of manners in America as well on a lot of occasions) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-japan-it-is-not-impossible-means-no-chance-in-hell/492678.md?page=1)