Comment by patrickscoleman
1 day ago
Even as a foreigner who speaks Japanese, I frequently got the "we're closed" and crossing the hands in an X response while locals continued eating. Sometime they'd laugh and I'd hear "gaijin" (rude slang for foreigner) as I walked out.
But plenty of places were super warm and friendly after the initial apprehension if you speak Japanese and read some kanji. Worth the effort!
"gaijin" (rude slang for foreigner)
I think this is a misconception spread by people who get mad about being laughed at by locals, including kids, and have insisted on being called gaikukojin (foreign-country person) instead over the last 20-30 years.
The reason I say so is that Japanese is full of abbreviated words like this; gaijins literal meaning is 'outside person' and the koku part is redundant. You see such abbreviations in the written language too. For example 友人 (yuujin) and 友達 (tomodachi) both mean 'friend' but as you can see the latter kanji is a lot more work to write as well to say.
The real reason (in my view) is that this word 外人 has the same pronunciation as 害人 and the same slang meaning, but 害 carries an implication of harm or injury. Japanese has a small number of sounds compared to other languages so homophony abounds and double meanings like this are very common, both for humorous effect or for making veiled negative comments.
Switching a character around is a normal Japanese way of dealing with meaning clashes. For example 和 (wa) means harmony, but also refers to Japan: 和食 (washoku) is Japanese food, 和服 (wafuku) is Japanese clothing etc. etc.. This word is ancient, going back ~1800 years to when Chinese & Korean explorers first had contact with Japan and called it the 'Kingdom of Wa'. However the Chinese used the character 倭 (also wa) which means distant, but can also mean dwarf (as in stature) or submissive. The Japanese used the same character for about 500 years but eventually decided they found the double meaning offensive and switched to 和. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_(name_of_Japan) is a great deep dive into this if you're interested in etymology.
I get why some people take umbrage at the use of words like gaijin, but to my mind if you don't like such things you don't really like the language, and if you make an issue out of it people will just find more subtle ways to express their negative (and possibly escalated) sentiments and might start to view you as 害虫.
If I remember correctly, gaijin is just how you say 'foreigner' in standard Japanese. The rude slang is jingai.
And I also have the experience of people really appreciating it if you actually speak and read Japanese. Which makes sense, I can easily imagine it being a relief to find that you can just speak with someone normally instead of having to struggle with this absolutely bonkers weird language that one may be only vaguely familiar with.
I can imagine that people in, say, the United States wouldn't be very happy if I went around and only spoke Dutch.
> And I also have the experience of people really appreciating it if you actually speak and read Japanese.
100%. You don't even need to know that much. Even if you have to switch to English, showing respect by demonstrating some effort to learn the local language and culture goes a long way.
> If I remember correctly, gaijin is just how you say 'foreigner' in standard Japanese.
I think this depends on tone. It is a literal translation, but I don't think you have to call someone non-human for it to be rude.
> I can imagine that people in, say, the United States wouldn't be very happy if I went around and only spoke Dutch.
We do have a large amount of people (and an increasing number of businesses) who think it's fine to only speak Spanish.
Gaikokujin is the correct way to say it. Gaijin is slang but I'm not sure how rude it would be considered.
I never got this, but at busy times it was not uncommon to get a super apologetic "we're full" when there were clearly a few seats available. Honestly I get it, foreigners are higher effort to deal with and if you're already busy you might not want to deal with that. Or they could be holding seats for regulars, etc.