Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

The empty sense of fame derived from having your picture in a regional Japanese magazine is something that is both enjoyable and short-lived.

After hearing the news from the other JETs in this region that the interviews we did a while ago had made their way into this months issue of “dougyan”, I rushed down to the convenience store and snapped up a copy. To my silent chagrin, the old lady at the checkout didn’t gasp in amazement at the Z-list celebrity that was buying a magazine from her and chose only to utter the standard preset phrases of any given shop employee.

The extent of the vocabulary of a shop employee in Japan stretches only to “irrashaimase” and “arigato gozaimashita”. Employees who say anything other than these two phrases are immediately discharged.

“Arigato Gozaimashita” is obviously used after your purchase transaction is completed, and is your cue to leave the shop.

“Irrashaimase” is used when someone enters the shop. Whilst it does have an actual meaning, for shop employees it has become more of a knee-jerk reaction to the door opening or a customer walking past you, rather than a genuine greeting. The first employee who says “irrashaimase” might be the one who actually sees a customer enter a shop. This however, starts a chain reaction of unflinching robotic imitation, as one by one every employee utters the phrase as if to themselves, from the guy halfway up a ladder fixing a light, to the woman in the back, bending over whilst doing a stock-take. After several years of this, usage of the phrase becomes bastardised to the point where staff just shuffle around groaning “eeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEE” at random intervals.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 27th, 2002 at 2:15 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.