A Jackson, Mississippi, woman who used to work in Japan says that each day as she left the office, her colleagues would say Otsukaresama desu, which means something along the lines of “Thank you for your hard work.” Although its literal translation suggests that the hearer must be exhausted, it’s simply understood as a polite, set phrase with no exact equivalent in English. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Japanese Professional Farewell”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Esa, and I’m calling from Jackson, Mississippi.
Esa from Jackson.
Hi, Esa. Welcome to the show. What’s up?
Hey, I was calling because I moved back to the States last August after living in northern Japan for two years.
And I found that there’s this Japanese phrase that you usually say at the end of work, after you’re working on a project with other people. If someone else tells you that they’ve been working on something, I guess it has a variety of applications.
But for me, I found myself stopping from saying it, of course, here where people don’t know what it means.
Usually when someone else was leaving or if someone, like I said, was telling me about projects they were working on to kind of express, I don’t know.
I guess we used it to thank people for working hard.
The literal translation is sort of like saying, I know you must be exhausted,
But contextually it kind of meant thank you for your hard work.
And Esa, what’s the phrase again?
Can you say it slowly for us?
O tsukare samade.
O tsukare samade.
Something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah, it sounds pretty good.
And so it sounds like a type of ritual thanking more than, you say it to someone else that basically says you must be tired from all the hard work that you did, right?
Right.
I guess that’s like the literal translation, but usually it was meant to like thank people for their effort.
So now it just basically feels like a thank you without any other connotations about tiredness or anything like that.
Yeah, and it’s strange because I was trying to think if there was possibly something that we say in English that could replace it.
We do have similar kinds of formal or ritual things that we say at the end of work across the full spectrum of informal to formal.
But none of them are quite the same as this.
Most of the ritual exchanges that we know in English are about greeting and leave-taking, and those are all really comfortable.
But they’re really good to look at when we think about when I say you’re welcome to someone,
Do I actually mean that they’re welcome so much anymore? No, not really. These days,
I mostly just mean, oh, that’s the thing I’m supposed to say when you say thank you.
And it feels like that’s what’s happening here with this particular expression.
Right. That’s a really good point.
Yeah, I’m interested that this is ritualized. So every day when you left work, somebody would
Say this to you or you would say it to somebody? I mean, it’s a regular thing. Thank you for your
Hard work? Oh, yes. I mean, people would say it when I left the office. Students would say it
Instead of a greeting. So I guess there’s sort of a presupposition that I’m working hard.
This is interesting. You know, I Googled around and there’s an article about this on a site
Called Japanese Intercultural Consulting by a woman named Rochelle Kopp, K-O-P-P,
And she talks very much about this phrase. And she talks about how hard it is to translate it
Into English because if you said to an American, boy, you look tired from all your hard work,
They might take that as an insult.
Right.
Yeah.
So you can’t take it literally.
Yeah.
And isn’t there also a ritualized leave-taking where you say, excuse me for leaving first
If you’re the first person to leave the office?
There is.
That was the one that I would use more often.
Oh, really?
Slack American, leaving early.
What is that one?
Yeah.
That one is osakimishitadeishima.
Esa, thank you so much for telling us about this.
Take care now.
You too.
Bye-bye.
All right, bye-bye.
877-929-9673.
