Types of Friends in Japan
It’s funny how how tenuous the meanings of seemingly basic words can be. In English, the word “friend” is pretty straightforward, meaning someone you are somewhat well acquainted or friendly with.
Most of my English-speaking “friends” are close in age to me, but I certainly could have a friend who was 25, or 45, or 75 if I wanted to. It’s not uncommon for someone who is only a passing acquaintance to be labeled “friend,” too, for the sake of convenience or to avoid being rude.
In Japanese, however, the word tomodachi (which literally means “those who you go with”) and it has a more “close” feel to it than the English word friend. Tomodachi in school years are almost always the same age; otherwise you’d use the term senpai (for upperclassman) or kouhai (for underclassman), which are quite different concepts in Japan’s vertically-oriented society.
Once, my son was playing dodgeball with a boy he’d known since preschool — they’ve played together for years. I talked about the boy with my wife, using the word tomodachi to refer to my son’s friend. My wife corrected me, saying the boys weren’t friends in that sense, but were instead osana-najimi, translatable as “childhood friend,” a concept that comes up in anime and bishoujo games quite a lot, referring to someone you’ve been very close to since childhood, and it seems to be both more and less than the English word friend. “An osana-najimi is different from tomodachi,” my wife explained to me. “They’re always there, and you don’t even notice them after a while. You get so used to being with each other, it’s like air.”
Awesome article. Words can be so complicated in Japanese…it’s cool to see the differences in culture via the language.
August 14th, 2008 at 1:02 pmTo confusing for me.
August 14th, 2008 at 1:32 pmkoichi and riki and Peter.
yes,it is a complicated and confusing term to me as well.
The Highest Honour that I have been accorded in Japan is to have slept with my 日本語..the acknowledgement of sukinshippu and a friendship that extends beyond a mundane kinship relationship to the extent that he cared about my health and wellbeing during a bitterly cold winter that we slept side by side…well! if it wasnt so ironic.. “Leaves me lost for words..”
But,to the word/term friend..
…Take, for instance, the group of words meaning ‘friend’, of which there are about 30 or 40. None is exactly interchangeable. Many have undergone osmosis even in our own lifetime. Some are mysterious in origin and malleability. Crony, for instance. The word became pejorative in the 19th century, first in America (I think) in the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–37), which also gave rise to the related ‘spoils system’. The implication is that there is something financially improper about the relationship, a whiff of jobbery. The big OED is unsatisfactory on this term: ‘an intimate friend, an associate, a “chum”’. It does say ‘formed first after 1660… a term of university, or college slang’. It says it has nothing to do with ‘crone’. Well, obviously. The root must be Greek, cronos, time. A friend who has a gift for words says it was indeed university slang, but much earlier, Athenian, cronios, ‘long-continued’. A crony was someone you knew from schooldays or undergraduate frolics. Significant that the word is never used of female friendships. Queen Anne and Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, were in fact for a time cronies, but that is not the word one would use. There is no female equivalent. Nor is there much prospect, now, of the term being decontaminated and restored to its original, innocent meaning.
Various words for friend have been downgraded morally. ‘Familiar’ became pejorative during the witchcraft craze. In the 20th century ‘comrade’ was ruined by the communists, ‘collaborator’ by the Nazis and their Quislings, ‘brother’ by the trade unions. ‘Confidant’ has always been a bit suspicious, like ‘colleague’ in Scotland. Some words imply an inferior status in the relationship, ‘side-kick’, for instance, like confrère in France. ‘Intimate’ is tricky, rather like the American ‘bunkie’, but that is obsolete. ‘Soul mate’ is fey. ‘Mate’ itself is a lower-order term, like ‘buddy’ and ‘pal’; upper-order is or was ‘fellow’…..”
Splendours and miseries of the Queen’s English in the 21st century by Paul Johnson
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/columnists/880486/part_2/and-another-thing.thtml
thanks
remora
August 16th, 2008 at 12:16 pm