I was in Japan for a week at the beginning of 2003. One day we went out for lunch in a cheap diner-style restaurant in a shopping arcade. While we waited for our food, I noticed a sign on the wall next to us and asked our host, Kuwahara, to translate. He told us it said you should ask the waitress if you wanted more rice.

Being a curious type when it comes to languages, I asked him which symbol represented rice. He hesitated for a moment before pointing out two characters. They looked like this:

(Thanks to this site for the Kanji.)

I told him I was amazed that Japanese has to use two characters to write “rice”. I’d just assume that Japanese, with its complicated and expressive writing system, would cut right to the chase when talking about rice at least. It’s a bit like the old line about eskimos having seven different words for snow.

Kuwahara then indicated the second character and said: “This character means rice, but it is very impolite. We say…” – and at this point he cast a glance around the restaurant and lowered his voice to a whisper – “meshi“. He raised his voice again. “But this is impolite. Very rude.” He then pointed at the preceding character. “This one, we say go. This is polite prefix.”

“Ah, got you,” I said. “So the polite phrase is go-meshi?”

“No,” he replied blankly, as if I’d missed something glaringly obvious. “Not go-meshi. Go-han.”

We were all so thrilled by this – both the pronunciation oddities, and the fact that the legendary Japanese courtesy extended to alternative rude and not-so-rude words for “rice” – that he offered to write it down for us. And so here it is, complete with Kuwahara’s annotations. I count this scrap of fax paper as my most treasured possession from abroad.