Bureaucratese in Japan
A gentleman on a mailing list once wrote of Japanese bureaucratese, “it has been rumored that top American officials can read Japanese government documents without translation because they speak the same language.” But us ordinary folks must puzzle it out.
The Japanese dialect of this international language has a funny word called seibi. Seibi means anything at all and is vaguely like the English “maintenance”. Here are some lovely examples of seibibun, or 整備文 “maintenance literature”, from a mysteriously undocumented and unknown Canadian named Iain Arthy:
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地下の情報整備 Underground information maintenance |
土壌の調査 Soil survey |
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事業整備 Business maintenance |
事業を推進する Promoting business |
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パソコンの整備 Computer maintenance |
新しいパソコンを買う Buying new computers |
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街路樹の整備 Roadside arboreal maintenance |
道端に木を植える Planting trees on the road |
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就業機会の整備 Job opportunity maintenance |
働き口を増やす Hiring people |
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特定商業集積 Specific business accumulation |
オフィス街 A street of offices |
As you can see, seibi is a word you can’t do without when you are trying to make your ordinary action look very official and important.
Someone wrote an article about this in English a long time ago but I’m afraid I can’t find it. I guess these things disappear from the Internet sometimes.
Posted: September 5th, 2012 | Japan 1 Comment »