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.<\/p>\n
The Japanese dialect of this international language has a funny word called seibi<\/em>. Seibi<\/em> means anything at all and is vaguely like the English “maintenance”. Here are some lovely examples of seibibun<\/em>, or \u6574\u5099\u6587 “maintenance literature”, from a mysteriously undocumented and unknown Canadian named Iain Arthy:<\/p>\n As you can see, seibi <\/em>is a word you can’t do without when you are trying to make your ordinary action look very official and important.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=875"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1433,"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875\/revisions\/1433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avery.morrow.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n \n\u5730\u4e0b\u306e\u60c5\u5831\u6574\u5099
Underground information maintenance\n<\/td>\n\n\u571f\u58cc\u306e\u8abf\u67fb
Soil survey<\/p>\n\n \n\u4e8b\u696d\u6574\u5099
Business maintenance\n<\/td>\n\n\u4e8b\u696d\u3092\u63a8\u9032\u3059\u308b
Promoting business<\/p>\n\n \n\u30d1\u30bd\u30b3\u30f3\u306e\u6574\u5099
Computer maintenance\n<\/td>\n\n\u65b0\u3057\u3044\u30d1\u30bd\u30b3\u30f3\u3092\u8cb7\u3046
Buying new computers<\/p>\n\n \n\u8857\u8def\u6a39\u306e\u6574\u5099
Roadside arboreal maintenance\n<\/td>\n\n\u9053\u7aef\u306b\u6728\u3092\u690d\u3048\u308b
Planting trees on the road<\/p>\n\n \n\u5c31\u696d\u6a5f\u4f1a\u306e\u6574\u5099
Job opportunity maintenance\n<\/td>\n\n\u50cd\u304d\u53e3\u3092\u5897\u3084\u3059
Hiring people<\/p>\n\n \n\u7279\u5b9a\u5546\u696d\u96c6\u7a4d
Specific business accumulation\n<\/td>\n\n\u30aa\u30d5\u30a3\u30b9\u8857
A street of offices<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n