Language
From July’s issue of Global Perspective
What makes a language perfect? Not its grammar rules, not its literary canon, but its capacity to help a community navigate the complexity of living together.
Japan has long been a society that manages human relationships through language with extraordinary precision. At the heart of this system is keigo, a formal and honorific register that does far more than signal politeness. It maps the distance between people, calibrates power, and holds the social fabric together.
But today, a growing number of young Japanese speakers are pushing back against it.
The question is: Why?
A Language Built to Navigate Proximity
While many languages possess honorific registers, Japanese keigo stands out for its highly systematic nature, utilizing specific pronouns, verbs, and morphological inflections that vary depending on the speaker’s social standing, their relationship with the listener, and the subject of the discourse.
Historically, keigo originated as a social mechanism to delineate hierarchy within communities. It officially comprises five categories, but two of them often become the primary points of contention: sonkeigo (respectful language) and kenjōgo (humble language). Sonkeigo elevates the status of the person being addressed or spoken about, whereas kenjōgo lowers the speaker’s perceived status relative to that individual. This system can become remarkably complex when a single conversation involves multiple individuals with distinct social roles.
The logic runs deep. Around the Middle Ages, teineigo (polite language, characterized by sentence-final particles like desu and masu) developed from the roots of kenjōgo. During the feudal period, a bushi (samurai) would refer to another high-ranking samurai’s mother as “haha-gimi”, but would address his own mother as “haha-ue”. This dual perspective persists today: when speaking to an outsider about one’s own mother, the correct term is the humble “haha,” rather than “oka-san” (where “-san” functions as an honorific suffix), which is the standard noun for “mother” and the term used when addressing one’s own mother directly.
Today, keigo serves less to enforce rigid hierarchies and more to express mutual respect, particularly in corporate environments. Mastery of keigo remains a cornerstone of professionalism with clients, and in private life, it is still viewed as a hallmark of a well-educated individual.
Gen Z’s Tameguchi Rebellion
Recently, however, sociolinguists have observed that Generation Z tends to bypass these established linguistic norms, opting instead for tameguchi (casual speech among equals) across all social interactions. As digital natives raised on instant messaging and social media, this generation prioritizes efficiency—often referred to in modern Japanese slang as “time performance” (taipa). For them, communication must be as concise as possible. They frequently criticize long, emoji-laden messages as obasan-ojisan kobun. Consequently, they omit traditional business greetings, such as yoroshiku onegaishimasu (Best regards), in favor of tameguchi. From their perspective, seniority and hierarchy are archaic feudal remnants; they view social flatness and egalitarianism as the true virtues.
This linguistic shift has real consequences. What this generation often overlooks is that keigo and teineigo do not merely reinforce hierarchy—they function as psychological buffers that maintain a comfortable social distance. Using casual language does not automatically foster genuine interpersonal closeness. Instead, polite registers preserve the necessary boundaries when interacting with strangers or within strictly defined professional relationships.
Many businesses now face significant challenges when onboarding new hires who dismiss traditional corporate etiquette as obsolete. This can lead to friction when new employees use tameguchi with clients, causing unintended offense. Furthermore, when managers attempt to offer constructive feedback or mentorship, these younger employees occasionally misinterpret the intervention as “power harassment,” leading to workplace disputes or abrupt resignations.
The Shadow Side of Hierarchy
Keigo works when the society around it works. But Japanese society still wrestles with the feudalistic vestiges that the honorific system has historically supported—and in some corners, the hierarchy it encodes has become less a tool for managing relationships than a justification for abusing them.
Seniority remains a dominant structural criterion in corporate pyramids, and it is particularly pervasive in the sports and entertainment industries. In these fields, newcomers heavily rely on their senpai (seniors) for training, guidance, and critical industry connections.
The distinction between senpai and kōhai (juniors) remains incredibly rigid. In many settings, social pressure demands absolute obedience from kōhai, even outside of professional hours. This cultural expectation is so deeply ingrained that even junior high-school students strictly employ teineigo or keigo when speaking to their older peers during extracurricular activities. Unfortunately, this extreme power asymmetry has historically created fertile ground for various forms of harassment and abuse.
When a Perfect System Meets an Imperfect Society
And yet, keigo is under pressure precisely because the society it was built for is changing faster than the language can adapt. Japan today is a society gripped by a loneliness crisis. In 2021, the government appointed a Minister for Social Isolation and Loneliness. By 2022, an estimated 1.46 million people—about 2% of the population—were living as hikikomori, withdrawn from social life for months or years. Two years on, it passed a law recognizing loneliness as a national emergency. But still in 2025, 76,941 people were found dead alone in their homes—a phenomenon called kodokushi.
What makes this particularly significant is where Japan is coming from. The mura-shakai—the traditional village community—was a society of obligatory proximity. Cooperation across families and generations was not a choice but a condition of survival. Thus, keigo was a linguistic technology shaped by that density of relationships, a precise instrument for navigating a world where everyone lived close together, and social hierarchies had to be managed without friction. The village did not need strategies for loneliness because loneliness, in that context, was barely possible.
In this sense, tameguchi is less a rejection of keigo than a mirror held up to a society in transition
That world is gone. The nuclear family has replaced the village; urban migration has dissolved the networks of relatives and in-laws that once made uchi (the circle of insiders) feel natural and populated. Gen Z has grown up in this social landscape, with fewer insiders to rely on and a linguistic system that, by design, keeps distance between people. Among young people, around 20% say they would not turn to anyone when facing difficulties—a higher rate than in the USA, South Korea, or the UK.
In this sense, tameguchi is less a rejection of keigo than a mirror held up to a society in transition. On one hand, it confirms what has already happened: The village is gone, and with it the fixed hierarchies that keigo was built to navigate. On the other, it shows something more surprising—that language doesn’t just reflect social change, it participates in it. A generation reaching for tameguchi is not simply describing a flatter world; it is trying to build one, word by word, conversation by conversation. That may be the most striking thing about the Japanese language right now: that in the middle of a loneliness crisis, it is already moving.
Sources: ModernGhana, OECD, Wikipedia, Medium, Nature
