In his latest article Allan Richarz explains how the changing demographics and influx of immigrant workers affects “manual keigo” – the scripted polite language used of service industry workers in cafes and convenience stores.

Japanese customer service is generally great and being addressed politely obviously if part of it but after a while it loses its value when you hear that the employees, native or not, just go through their script. We use polite language to express our respect for the other person but what’s the point if people just say it because they have to follow the script? In addition, a lot of those scripts are simply grammatically wrong – as pointed out by Richarz too.

The future of “manual keigo”

While, yes, having way to express respect towards the people around you is great and there’s a lot of social capital in here. At the same time it’s not only the foreign workers who struggle with it. From talking to my fellow Japanese students back in the day and also my younger co-workers now, even they struggle and find it cumbersome to use keigo.

Keigo is also something a lot of Japanese learn when they join their first company after university as part of their shinnyushain kenshu (新入社員研修) but that doesn’t apply to everyone. If you join a big organization after university or a company that has a well established training concept for new-hires, there is no problem but if you join a company that doesn’t you’ll never learn proper keigo and it will follow you throughout your career (unless you make an effort and learn it through books and seminars etc.).

However, there are also fully bilingual Japanese partially who studied and then worked a bit overseas who come back to Japan and never received any form of new grad training. When you look at foreign companies in Japan though, these bilingual professionals are key for the success of their business in Japan and while they are capable of communicating in English, they struggle to communicate in “proper” Japanese as they never learned it and might even feel it more restrictive especially coming from an English speaking country.

Change will be driven therefore not only by the foreign workers but also overseas educated Japanese. It will hopefully lead to a point where the language is still polite but also sincere. This is certainly not mutually exclusive but it does take time to find the right balance. Will this upset some of the conservatives? Yes, definitely but that is true for every form of change. And while not all change is good just because it is change, not changing is not an option for a country that faces a labor shortage and overaging society.

Familymart relaxing their keigo policy is fantastic and welcome change. Let’s see how long it takes until other convenience stores follow.

Improvise – adapt – overcome