Enryo (遠慮) is one of the most quintessential Japanese concepts. Japanese dictionary Kōjien provides the definition “restraining speech/actions towards people” (「人に対して言語・行動を控え目にすること」). Enryo is central to the image of Japan as a passive society, where people work to avoid conflict through self-restraint. Enryo means not using your mobile phone on the train, not throwing out all of your trash in one big bag, and recently, not lighting up that cigarette wherever you want.

In everyday language, enryo is often used to avoid an unpleasant linguistic phenomenon — the dreaded negative form. Japanese verbs come in four basic varieties: present/future, past, present/future negative, and past negative. Here’s a quick example how this works with the verb taberu, “eat”:

Present/future	taberu
Past	tabeta
Present/future negative	tabenai
Past negative	tabenakatta

Those bolded endings on the negative verbs are the offenders: nai, nakatta, and their more polite distal cousins masen and masen deshita. Shiver when you hear them, for they mean no. Not only are they negative in meaning, they also tend to have negative connotations, especially when combined with directness and applied to a topic brought up by the other speaker.

But then, how do the Japanese talk about avoiding things? Are they constantly accepting invitations to boring events? (”Yes, I’ll go see a Noh play with you, darling.”) Eating things they don’t want to eat? (”Yes, raw horse sounds lovely.”) And drinking things they don’t want to drink? (”There is a venomous snake in that distilled liquor? Fantastic.”)

No, in fact, they have very little difficulty in refusing to do these things, and it’s all thanks to enryo. Through enryo, they are restraining themselves from doing something else (i.e. not doing it). Enryo shimasu is the ultimate refusal: it allows the speaker to admire the offer as a tempting one while regretfully declining it for the sake of some implicit greater good, all without any negativity whatsoever. For this reason, it also works great as sarcasm: “Will you sing ‘Country Roads’ for us at karaoke?” Enryo shimasu.

Similarly, go-enryo kudasai (”Please enryo”) is the polite way to keep people in line. Rather than telling them not to do something, which would involve mucking around with nai (e.g. Tabako wo suwanaide kudasai, “Please don’t smoke”), you can appeal to their higher nature and ask them to proactively refrain from it (e.g. Kitsuen wa goenryo kudasai, “Please refrain from smoking”).

This concept is not totally foreign to the English language. Rather than saying “I can’t,” people (often very annoying people in service positions) use “I am unable to,” and “please refrain from” is a useful alternative to the negative imperative. The ultimate example comes from Pirates of the Caribbean, where Captain Barbossa denies Elizabeth Swann’s request for parlay with “I am disinclined to acquiesce to your request.” Very much like enryo shimasu: “IT MEANS NO!”

The first in a series of visual excerpts from the out-of-print book 和英文字レタリング (Japanese and English Lettering) by Tsunetoshi Hurusawa (古沢恒敏), a collection of assorted lettering styles culled from history.

Originally published in 1978, the book is a great study of the types of lettering used by typical “fancy”/ファンシー businesses (many cafes, snacks, cake shops, and assorted post-WWII through pre-1990s service-oriented businesses). A number of the lettering styles within are the blueprints for these types of businesses’ lettering.

和英文字レタリング helps explain much of the Tokyo letterscape of recent history.

Benesse has published the results of their annual baby-name survey. Yui and Yūto are the top names for girls and boys respectively, just as last year, but since there are so many ways to spell both names, they do not actually top the “name + kanji combination” chart. That honor goes to Hiroto (大翔) and Aoi (葵), the latter most likely thanks to actress Miyazaki Aoi — inescapable star of Atsu-hime.

2ch nerds are basically OK with the kanji for Hiroto 大翔, although they don’t like the pronunciation to for 翔. For the record, however, it comes from tobu, “fly, soar”, and it dates back to a poem about Mt Fuji in the Man’yōshū: 飛鳥母翔毛不上 → tobu tori mo/ tobi mo noborazu → “Even the soaring of birds in flight does not reach [its peak]“. Suck it, haters.

And now the news for Kingdom Hearts fans. Sora as a boy’s name has risen in popularity for the fifth year running, up to #5. Meanwhile, Riku peaked at #4 in 2006 and has been falling since, and no-one ever liked Kairi.

Oh… and Saaya has also enjoyed a huge jump in popularity, from #141 to #76. I know someone who’s going to love that.

The Japan Kanji Proficiency Examination Association (日本漢字能力検定協会) have announced their 2008 Kanji of the Year: 変, meaning both “strange” and “change” (and even “rebellion“).

I had high hopes for this year after the sneering cynicism of 2007’s winning kanji, 偽 (fake), but KotY voters clearly aren’t yet prepared to abandon basket-of-puppies territory. Not that they aren’t representing some sort of Zeitgeist — @nifty got exactly the same results polling bloggers — but when both Obama and Aso qualify as examples of the same phenomenon, it’s clearly “change” defined extremely broadly.

Tansho Miki (丹所美紀) observes [and Scilla Alecci translates], 変 by itself feels much closer to “strange” or “mistaken” than “change,” which, she argues, applies to Aso perfectly.

Runners up included 金 (money), 落 (fall), and 株 (stock), for obvious international reasons; 毒 (poison) and 食 (food), reflecting ongoing popular anxiety over food safety; and 不 (un-), which is straight-up nihilism — those who selected it invoke compounds like 不安 (uncertainty), 不幸 (misfortune), and even 不気味 (creepy).

Related: Pink Tentacle’s essential annual rundown of the year’s top 60 Japanese words.

Ōno Susumu (大野晋), Old Japanese specialist and one of Japan’s best-known linguists, passed away in a Tokyo hospital at the age of 88 on July 14 this year.

Ōno made his academic name with important work on early Japanese writing and phonology in the 1950s, and his subsequent publications include new scholarly editions of various classics, Iwanami Shoten’s early Japanese dictionary, and popular bestsellers like Nihongo renshū chō (『日本語練習帳』, “Japanese exercise book”). He also famously testified during the Sayama Incident trials, voicing his doubt that the defendant had written the (orthographically bizarre) ransom note.

You can view Ōno’s œuvre as a marvelous reef accreted during his lifelong attempt to answer the question which, he occasionally observed, had driven him since his undergraduate days: “What is Japan?” However, unlike similarly-motivated nihonjinron authors, Ōno believed that the best way to address this issue was to examine Japan’s historical relationships with other regions and cultures, searching for connections and similarities. If that occasionally led him to see things that other academics generally agree weren’t there — like his infamous support for the Dravidian hypothesis, with particular reference to Tamil — well, it didn’t diminish the value of his other scholarship. And hey, it’s always good to be reminded of the need to read academic work critically.

Of course, Ōno was also a popularizer. Despite his personal dislike of modernized kana and similar philologically unsound post-Meiji developments, when he wrote for non-academic readers it was always in a clear and unpretentious modern style. The Q-and-A format of Ōno Susumu no nihongo sōdan (『大野晋の日本語相談』, “Ōno Susumu’s answers on Japanese”), a collection of newspaper columns in which Ōno answered readers’ questions on the Japanese language, is a showcase for the Ōno approach: patient, generous, and always eager to show people the cabinet of wonders that Japonic linguistics can be.