Call Her Name
October 9, 2014 1:11 AM   Subscribe

Japanese women, when they marry and have children, often are no longer called by their given names. Instead they are addressed as Okaasan "Mother, Mom," Okusan "Mrs," or Mama. This video shows the reactions of several women when they are once again called by their first names. (SLYT)

(click the cc button in the lower right for subtitles)

Background article.
posted by kadonoishi (64 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
pepsi blue, etc., butI don't care because it was still a fairly sweet thing, leaving aside entirely the cosmetics promotion angle.

DULL, SELF-AGGRANDIZING LINGUISTIC STUFF FOLLOWS

It's worth noting, especially for people who have only ever had experience with Western European languages, that names in particular behave kind of oddly in Japanese. There's really no word for "you" (the dictionary translation あなた you'll see is really more for a general sort of "please type in your user name" sort of "you" — pronouns don't actually meaningfully exist in Japanese other than just not saying the antecedent), so when you'd use "you" in a sentence, you generally wind up saying someone's title (i.e. "teacher" or "president" or "department chief"), using people's actual names (and even then, family names rather than given names) as a last resort when there's either no hierarchy difference or when there's a need to be specific about which person of a given title you're referring to.

This goes together with the fact that, yeah, when Japanese couples have kids, they actually start referring to each other as "mom" and "dad" even in private (coupled with the previous thing, this means that even in private conversations, you'd say things that literally mean "what does mom think?" instead of "what do you think?"), and when people get married here, 90+% of the time it's the wife whose name changes in a very conspicuous way that everyone who knows or meets her has to learn. If nothing else, for reasons of linguistic vagaries, it's completely possible for a Japanese woman's name to essentially become "mom" for all practical purposes other than legal identification.

Referring to someone by just their given name is something that's basically done primarily by family members and kids, and maybe very close friends who have known each other for a long time. You know that group of friends from high school who refer to each other by nicknames so consistently that, if pressed, they might not be able to actually remember that one person's name? It's sort of like that.

In other words: This video is about the linguistic version of mom and dad dressing up and going on a date, the way they did back when the world was young.
posted by DoctorFedora at 1:32 AM on October 9, 2014 [191 favorites]


DULL, SELF-AGGRANDIZING LINGUISTIC STUFF FOLLOWS

No that was very informative. Thanks.
posted by clarknova at 1:46 AM on October 9, 2014 [9 favorites]


Also, just to head off a bit of misconception (DoctorFedora mentioned it too, and it's in the background article link, but I just want to head off potential misunderstandings), it's not that women stop being called by their names but men keep getting called by their names. It's that women start being called "mama" or "okaasan" and men start being called "papa" or "otoosan". It's a mutual thing. (According to the company doing the ad, 77% of families do this, which means, knowing ad companies, it's probably around 66% or so, so 2 out of 3 households).

Also, luckily, my wife finds it kinda creepy, so we don't do that.
posted by Bugbread at 1:56 AM on October 9, 2014 [10 favorites]


Around here it usually defaults to 'babe' or 'baby', on both ends. I feel that same 'heart twinge' when I hear my name, so I totally get it.
posted by DriftingLotus at 2:08 AM on October 9, 2014 [2 favorites]


The strict codification of all aspects of life in the Edo period included what clothing people wore, what manner of speech they were permitted to use and even what presents they gave their children, AFAIK. Like Victorian Britain taken to it's logical extreme. Enforcing roles and power dynamics is not limited to these societies, but it is interesting how much of this remains in Japanese society today.
posted by asok at 2:37 AM on October 9, 2014


FWIW, here in the US, I've encountered more than a few non-Japanese couples (generally older) who call each other variations of "mom" "dad" "mother" "father" etc.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:09 AM on October 9, 2014 [6 favorites]


My wife is Japanese but doesn't have to deal with being called "Mom" by me--I would never call her that, so she gets her first name only. I usually even forget to put the -chan at the end, which is a diminutive for girls and women (and often men).

When you learn Japanese you soon come to realize just how overly pronoun-heavy the English language is. Pronouns all over the place! I was explaining to my wife the other day why I refer to her as "your mother" when talking to my son. Using just "mother" seems weird and old-fashioned, somehow, in English, but it's natural in Japanese.
posted by zardoz at 3:16 AM on October 9, 2014 [3 favorites]


I was aware that this is a cultural thing in Japan, but I thought that non-Japanese couples do it as well so that their kids learn to call their parents "Mum" or "Dad".

By way of anecdotal example, my cousin's wife always referred to him by name and had to relent after their oldest daughter also started calling him by his name. It was odd but strangely cute at the same time. :)
posted by Lal at 3:18 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


I was watching a drama the other day, and the couple in it, despite not having any kids, called each other "mama" and "papa". I didn't even realize that was a thing.

Also, none of this is as weird as the English-speaking country thing of calling the person you are dating/engaged/married to/otherwise having sex with "baby". That's...just kinda gross.
posted by Bugbread at 3:30 AM on October 9, 2014 [4 favorites]


Oxytocin ... the beauty hormone??
posted by ChuraChura at 3:47 AM on October 9, 2014 [8 favorites]


> "Around here it usually defaults to 'babe' or 'baby', on both ends. I feel that same 'heart twinge' when I hear my name, so I totally get it."

Huh. Thinking about it, I call my partner sweetie, cutest, love, etc. far more than I call her by her actual first name. Although I do use it on occasion. And I almost always call my parents "mom" and "dad". On the other hand, I wouldn't think of introducing them to someone else that way, that would be a major difference, culturally. Although there have been times in the past when my mother was introduced to someone as "[kyrademon's] mom", without an accompanying name, and it pissed her off mightily.
posted by kyrademon at 4:01 AM on October 9, 2014


Also, never forget that oxytocin is also the nipple clamp hormone.
posted by kyrademon at 4:09 AM on October 9, 2014 [7 favorites]


My partner weighs in on my comment: "I think I understand why they liked it so much. You call me by pet names all the time ... But it would be more as if you always referred to me as 'wife'."
posted by kyrademon at 4:55 AM on October 9, 2014


A recent conversation...

Devonian: This 'authentic' name you ask for in your 'universally applicable' policy...
Facebook exec: Yes
Devonian: Do you mean you expect people to be known by just one name, in all cultures?
Facebook exec: Yes
Devonian: How's that going to work in places where people aren't?
Facebook exec: We're just asking people to use their authentic name
Devonian: Where people have many authentic names?
Facebook exec: We're just asking people to use their authentic name

It was impossible to get FB to admit either that there was any cultural variation, or that people may in fact have more than one authentic name. It wasn't denied, just ignored. One of the more surreal conversations I've had with a company, in a life where I've had a few such.

As an example of Silicon Valley tech company cultural blindness, it's a good one. But this will not end well.
posted by Devonian at 5:17 AM on October 9, 2014 [15 favorites]


My wife's family refers to each other as (Family Name)-san. All the time. No matter how many people are in the room. Although I do hear my mother-in-law call my father-in-law 'oto-san' (father) from time to time. My wife usually refers to me by my (now our) family name, too, though she will yell my given name if trying to call to me across a store. More often than not, though, there is no real use of names, especially if it's just the two of us, other than me, being non-Japanese, calling her by name all the time, because that's just how I grew up.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:25 AM on October 9, 2014


CALL YOUR WOMAN BY HER FIRST NAME BECAUSE THEN SHE'LL GET MORE HORMONES THAT MAKE HER PRETTY.

(don't mind me, I might just be allergic to the "inspirational" music)
posted by chrominance at 5:46 AM on October 9, 2014 [3 favorites]


DoctorFedora: "
DULL, SELF-AGGRANDIZING LINGUISTIC STUFF FOLLOWS
"

No, dude, that was cool.
posted by notsnot at 5:53 AM on October 9, 2014 [2 favorites]


I enjoyed the women's reactions, but was dismayed by the explanation that it increased their "beauty" hormones. No, it increases their happiness. She should be called by her first name for the sake of her own happiness, not for the sake of those viewing her as an object that exists for their pleasure. Once again, the patriarchy manages to frame even good things to serve its own purposes.
posted by marsha56 at 6:07 AM on October 9, 2014 [24 favorites]


Bear in mind that it is a commercial for cosmetic products.
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:11 AM on October 9, 2014


marsha56: "I enjoyed the women's reactions, but was dismayed by the explanation that it increased their "beauty" hormones. No, it increases their happiness. She should be called by her first name for the sake of her own happiness, not for the sake of those viewing her as an object that exists for their pleasure."

The commercial has a kind of disjointed message, but I didn't see anything in it about "the sake of those viewing her as an object that exists for their pleasure". Which part of the commercial are you referring to?
posted by Bugbread at 6:36 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


It was a long time ago, but when I lived as an exchange student in Japan I'm 99% sure that my Japanese host mom called her husband あなた ("anata"/you) as a term of endearment. She would draw out the vowel sounds, but when she was calling him for dinner or whatever that's what she would call out: "anataaa!" It was also her response to him yelling (for no reason, it was a tiny house) ただいま ("I'm home!") when he got home in the evening.

Can any native speakers confirm if this is a thing? (My wife and I call each other -- and ourselves, when in conversation with each other -- "her" and "him" so I can't possibly point the finger at anyone else's odd terms of endearment.)
posted by The Bellman at 6:56 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


Yeah, Bellman, that's a very common thing.
posted by Bugbread at 7:01 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


Actually, one of the interesting things about family culture (or group culture) in Japan is the use of nicknames. Everyone has a nickname, including one's mom.

In my wife's family, her nickname is Makko (it's a pun as a matter of fact based on different character readings for the characters that make up her name).

So while my sons usually call her "okaasan" or "mama", sometimes they may use her nickname, or even her real given name. And occasionally I will refer to her to my sons using her given name.

But there's no doubt that when you're a mom you're a mom in Japanese culture. There are upsides and there are downsides obviously.
posted by Nevin at 7:05 AM on October 9, 2014


This reminded me of how in Chinese culture, there's a taboo against calling any of your adult relatives their given name, and instead, you use descriptive names of their position in the family: "Third Aunt" 三阿姨, "Youngest Uncle" 小叔, etc. It's a bit similar to how calling one's parents by their first name in most Western cultures is usually perceived as rude (or at least unorthodox), but it's a strong enough custom that calling your relatives "Aunt Martha" or "Uncle Bob" is just not done.

This is to the point where I actually don't know the Chinese given names of any of my uncles, aunts or grandparents, who all largely live in Taiwan or Southeast Asia. The only given names I know are the English first names of my aunts who happen to live in the States. I can tell you exactly who is older than who because I reference that information literally every time I talk to or about them.
posted by andrewesque at 7:36 AM on October 9, 2014 [14 favorites]


I thought that non-Japanese couples do it as well so that their kids learn to call their parents "Mum" or "Dad".

In the parts of the US where I've lived, most parents refer to their spouse as "Dad" or "Your Dad" / "Mom" or "Your Mom" when speaking to their children, but almost never when speaking to each other or anyone else. I'd never address my wife directly as "Mom"; I'd only address my own mother that way.
posted by straight at 8:30 AM on October 9, 2014 [2 favorites]


What straight said; same here in the UK. You might kind of speak for the kid at times, saying like "mummy, come see what {kid} has drawn!". But the idea I would be having a normal grown-up conversation with my wife without the kids around and call her "mummy" is just... it would be super-weird.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 8:36 AM on October 9, 2014


andrewesque, your post reminds me of the way I call my cousin (my mom's older sister's youngest daughter) -- since everybody in her family calls her 'little sister' (meimei), I call her literally 'little sister big sister' (meimei jiejie.) Nowadays, since I'm in my 30s, I get to refer to her just as 'little sister', but if I greet her in person I'd probably call her 'meimei jiejie'.
posted by of strange foe at 8:51 AM on October 9, 2014


In the parts of the US where I've lived, most parents refer to their spouse as "Dad" or "Your Dad" / "Mom" or "Your Mom" when speaking to their children, but almost never when speaking to each other or anyone else. I'd never address my wife directly as "Mom"; I'd only address my own mother that way.

It's certainly a movie and novelistic convention that you see for frontier and rural families in the C19th and early C20th US, that husband and wife will address each other as "Father" and "Mother" or "Pa" and "Ma." Whether it was, in fact, widespread I don't know.
posted by yoink at 9:06 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


straight: In the parts of the US where I've lived, most parents refer to their spouse as "Dad" or "Your Dad" / "Mom" or "Your Mom" when speaking to their children, but almost never when speaking to each other or anyone else. I'd never address my wife directly as "Mom"; I'd only address my own mother that way.
It definitely occurs in modern couples with children. I think it tends to be a family tradition, but I've known men that never seem to refer to their wives as anything other than "Mother". It's certainly an exception to the norm of all families, everywhere I've lived.
posted by IAmBroom at 9:36 AM on October 9, 2014


Yubaba...Chihiro and Kohaku
A theme in Spirited Away
Names are equally important in the characters’ quest for freedom. After Yubaba steals part of Chihiro’s name, Haku warns Sen not to forget her former name or she will be trapped in the spirit world forever. Sen must remember the qualities that make her who she is and remain true to them, even though her name, the one word that defines her, has changed. Sen succeeds in keeping her identity and also helps Haku regain his, ultimately freeing them both. Haku is living proof of the dangers inherent in forgetting one’s true identity. Names are of fundamental importance in the spirit world, and those in power keep their control by stealing and changing names. Only those characters with the inner strength to hold onto their names and identities can free themselves.
posted by Emor at 9:45 AM on October 9, 2014 [2 favorites]


This reminded me of how in Chinese culture, there's a taboo against calling any of your adult relatives their given name, and instead, you use descriptive names of their position in the family: "Third Aunt" 三阿姨, "Youngest Uncle" 小叔, etc.

How does that work out when both sides of a family are together for some event or holiday or similar? I assumed it would be something like "Third Aunt [husband's family surname]" and "Third Aunt [wife's family surname]" but now I'm wondering if the wife would refer to her third-aunt-in-law as "Husband's Third Aunt" while still calling her own third aunt simply "Third Aunt," because what if both third aunts are married to uncles-in-law with even more surnames to add to the mix?
posted by poffin boffin at 9:59 AM on October 9, 2014


My grandparents always called each other Mom and Dad and my married aunts and uncles do it too. When I asked them why when I was little they said it was because they spent all day calling each other that to the kids and it just kind of stuck. I don't think I ever call my hubby by his first name, and he only calls me by name when he's making A Serious Point to the point where I really don't like it when he does call me that. In conclusion, families are a land of contrast.
posted by bleep at 10:04 AM on October 9, 2014


My husband and I usually address each other as "Guy." When we talk about the baby in the third person, he's "the guy," and the cats are "the guys" or "guys," depending on whether we're talking about them or to them.

"Hey guy, can you hold the guy so I can feed the guys?" is a pretty typical sentence in our house.
posted by Metroid Baby at 10:20 AM on October 9, 2014 [17 favorites]


Love it. Then when someone asks who smeared your work outfit with yoghurt that morning without you noticing you can reply with "ugh, I dunno, some guy".
posted by EndsOfInvention at 11:03 AM on October 9, 2014 [2 favorites]


Bittersweet. I knew my fifteen year relationship was finally over when we stopped calling each other "babe" and started using proper names again.
posted by roger ackroyd at 11:20 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


How does that work out when both sides of a family are together for some event or holiday or similar?

I can't go too deep into the specifics of (presumably Han?) Chinese kinship terminology (for anthropologists, it's of a Sudanese type), but its terminology distinguishes between matrilineal and patrilineal relatives--so the term for father's brother is going to be different than the term for mother's brother, which is probably also different from the term for mother's sister's husband. That Anglo-American kinship terms do not directly distinguish patrilineal/matrilineal kin ("Eskimo" class system) is actually somewhat unusual.
posted by drlith at 12:01 PM on October 9, 2014 [7 favorites]


When I lived in Japan (as a young dumb soldier) a close friend often called me an-ta or a-an-ta. In context I believe it would be fair to assume she meant this as some flavor of endearment, because she used other expressions when she was pissed off at me.

Her mother referred to me as dat-to jee-ai. I'm confidant that it wasn't an endearment.
posted by mule98J at 12:53 PM on October 9, 2014


drlith: I was going to post on that, but I realized that I actually have no idea how to distinguish your aunt from your aunt-in-law.

For example, assuming they have the same relation:

Your mother's sister: you would call her 阿姨
Your spouse's mother's sister: (s)he would call her 阿姨

But I don't actually know what you would call your spouse's mother's sister? This is probably partially to do with the fact that I am not married...
posted by andrewesque at 1:17 PM on October 9, 2014


Wait, so your mother would call her sister "Second Aunt" and not "Eldest Sister" or similar? How does one decide which relationship to highlight when referring to family members?
posted by poffin boffin at 1:24 PM on October 9, 2014


No, your mother just calls her sister either "Older Sister" or "Younger Sister" (or numbered, "Third Sister," etc., if there are a lot of sisters); and there's less of a taboo, especially nowadays, toward calling people in the same generation, and your nuclear family, by their given name, so the given name is also a possibility.
posted by andrewesque at 2:22 PM on October 9, 2014


When you learn Japanese you soon come to realize just how overly pronoun-heavy the English language is. Pronouns all over the place!

(Continental derail upcoming)

Different cultures, different styles. My wife is South American. When she asks her brother about their mother, she says "How is your mother doing?" Which sounds exceptionally weird and distinctive, almost as if they were half-brother and sister. But they aren't. This extends to other members of family ("Your father", "Your aunt", etc.)

In person, senior relatives are their relationships: Tia, Tio, Abuela, Mami, Papi; equal and junior relationships are by name, nickname, general nickname ("pana", "chamo", etc.). Referred to in the third person, in their absence, the possessive again comes into play "mi tia", "mi mami". In the former case, I have to ask for clarification, as there are several tias, and everyone else seems to be able to pick up magically which tia is being discussed.

There is a little bit of title reference. Her father's an civil engineer of some prominence in her city and state. People will address him as "Ingeniero". Her mother is a retired pharmacist whom some people still refer to as "Doctor/a" depending. But nothing near the strictures of what Japan sounds like.
posted by aureliobuendia at 2:27 PM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


IME 阿姨 is more of a generic aunt/woman-around-your-parents'-age, and 叔叔 for men. You would call your parents' coworkers with that honorific. ("Call [coworker/friend] [honorific]!" is a thing Chinese kids hear a lot, and lemme tell you if you've largely grown up in the west it is fucking WEIRD to be introduced to someone and then have your parents say "call them aunt!")

It gets even more granular than that. (References for Mandarin Chinese, Wuhan dialect.)

Mom's older sisters: 大姨, 二姨 - oldest aunt, second oldest aunt, etc.
Mom's younger sister: 小姨 - younger aunt
Mom's sisters' husbands: 姨夫, 姨丈 - literally 'spouse of aunt' - can also be modified by oldest, second oldest, etc.
Mom's older brothers: 大舅, 二舅, 舅父 - oldest uncle, second oldest uncle, uncle (father figure)
Mom's younger brother: 叔叔 - younger uncle
Mom's brothers' wives: 舅母 - uncle (mother figure)

Dad's older sister: 大姑, 二姑 - oldest aunt, second oldest aunt
Dad's younger sister: 小姑 - younger aunt
Dad's sister's husbands: 姑夫 - literally 'spouse of aunt'
Dad's older brothers: 大伯, 二伯, 伯父 - oldest uncle, second oldest uncle, uncle (father figure)
Dad's younger brother: 叔叔 - (same as mom's younger brother)
Dad's brothers' wives: 伯母 - uncle (father figure)

(If your parents have multiple younger siblings the same ordinal numbers in terms of second/third aunt/uncles etc. can apply. The order refers to order within whole set of siblings, not relative to your parents. If your parent is 2nd in line, the 4th youngest would still be called "4th aunt/uncle".)

Those are it off the top of my head and are probably idiosyncratic to some extent or another to my family, but there are WAY more. How to refer to cousins on either side who are younger/older, second cousins/third cousins, etc etc. My family doesn't stand on tradition much and I frequently don't make the distinction between father's sister's husbands and mother's sister's husbands and no one gets on me, thankfully, but yeah, shit gets complicated.

My parents referred to their siblings as older/younger brother/sister when talking about them to each other or other adults, and called them aunt/uncle when speaking to me. YMMV, of course.
posted by Phire at 2:35 PM on October 9, 2014 [8 favorites]


It's certainly a movie and novelistic convention that you see for frontier and rural families in the C19th and early C20th US, that husband and wife will address each other as "Father" and "Mother" or "Pa" and "Ma." Whether it was, in fact, widespread I don't know.

My grandparents definitely do this. (Rural south/midwest, born in the late 20s and did most of their growing up in the 30s and 40s.)

My parents, on the other hand (suburban south, later edge of the baby boomers), never did this.
posted by Sara C. at 3:57 PM on October 9, 2014


It's certainly a movie and novelistic convention that you see for frontier and rural families in the C19th and early C20th US, that husband and wife will address each other as "Father" and "Mother" or "Pa" and "Ma." Whether it was, in fact, widespread I don't know.

Seconding this, in the rural south (Ozarks/Mississippi Delta boundary) in the 80s. My parents were on the dissolving edge of this tradition--when I was really young, I only remember them using first names with one another when one of them (ok, my dad) was in trouble. I don't remember hearing my dad use my mom's name until I was 10 or so, and it sounded... weird. For a couple years in there, I remember it sounding weird. But the frequency kept decreasing through my teens.

The tradition picked up full steam when they became grandparents. For the last 15 years, they've almost exclusively referred to each other as "Nan" and "Pop."
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 4:57 PM on October 9, 2014


My grandma referred to my grandpa as "Father" in all circumstances. I don't think i ever heard him referred to by his first name by anyone. yet my mom and aunt and uncle all called them"mom" and "dad", and never " mother" or "father".

My son calls me and my husband by our first names, mimicking us, I guess, though we often called each other mom and dad when speaking to him when he was younger. Once when my son was young he called me "sweetie" (one of my husband's pet names for me) when he was trying to convince me to do something for him. But I laughed pretty hard and he didn't try it again.
posted by chapps at 5:07 PM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


I thought the video was sweet. There is something intimate about first names, especially if the tone is warm.
posted by chapps at 5:08 PM on October 9, 2014 [2 favorites]


I was raised by Korean immigrant parents in the U.S. and adults were generally referred to as "[eldest child's name]'s mom/dad". Mr/Mrs. Kim was a rarely used option. BUT, this only holds true for the people my parents met in adulthood. However, as DF noted, friends from middle/high school and college are primarily referred to by their given names, with a diminutive sometimes attached, and only sometimes referenced via their eldest child's name. This made me believe my parents had twice as many friends as they actually did.

Also Korean women in Korea don't change their family names upon marriage, so my mom is referred to as Mrs. Koh in the U.S. but [title of choice] Kim in Korea. You can use her last job title, "Director," her position in church "Deacon," or pick a more generic honorific like "Teacher" if you don't know enough about her.
posted by spamandkimchi at 6:34 PM on October 9, 2014


since we are now geeking out about kinship systems, I'll add that in some Australian Aboriginal languages, you have to refer to people by a specific term that encodes both their relationship to you and their relationship to the person you are talking to. It would be as though in English I am talking to my cousin about his father, and I'd have to refer to the father as "myuncleyourfather". Now imagine having to do that calculus in your head every single time you refer to anyone (and it's not just when we in English would use kinship terms, either, because in some languages they are used instead of pronouns, so you have to do these calculations any time when in English we would say"he" or "she", or "they".) dyads are particularly fun, because you have to encode the relationship between the two as well ("yoursistermother-daughtermother-mycousinaunt").

Oh and in case you are wondering, I SIMPLIFIED it in the above paraphrases, because the terms are not just combinations of simple terms: many of the cells in the matrix you would have to put together to represent the terminology are filled by unique items. E.g. There might be a special term for yourbrothermycousin that is not composed of the words brother or cousin.

Kids have to learn all of this, but they don't master it entirely until they are teenagers. Also, every person you ever meet gets slotted into the kinship system in a particular way depending on age, sex and marriageability. So the grocer you are actually not related to might have been deemed to be your mother's brother, and you have to refer to him by the correct terms as such.
posted by lollusc at 6:57 PM on October 9, 2014 [7 favorites]


In case anyone wants to read about that more, the term to Google is "triangular kinship terms".
posted by lollusc at 6:59 PM on October 9, 2014 [3 favorites]


Now imagine having to do that calculus in your head every single time you refer to anyone

This isn't that weird. It's the same thing we all do in the US when we refer to our own kinship relations. We're just used to our system.

The really interesting thing is that this basically reifies in all of our heads what family looks like, and what the important things about family are.

Kids have to learn all of this, but they don't master it entirely until they are teenagers.

This is also not terribly unusual. I was just commiserating with a friend about how awkward it is to talk about ex-step families. I also have a few kinda-sorta-family-ish people who I mentally think of as Aunt So And So or a cousin or whatever, simply because it's too complicated to relate how we're actually related in casual conversation.
posted by Sara C. at 7:06 PM on October 9, 2014


it's completely possible for a Japanese woman's name to essentially become "mom" for all practical purposes other than legal identification

What do women call each other when there is a group of friends who are moms getting together?
posted by yohko at 7:23 PM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


Oh, Moeko is my favourite, her reaction was so lovely!
posted by turbid dahlia at 7:27 PM on October 9, 2014


No, the point is that in English there are plenty of ways to talk about people without having to calculate kinship. You can use pronouns, you can use their names, etc. many languages don't have those options.

And in English we only have to calculate the kinship with regard to ourselves. In these languages with triangular systems you have to be able to do a two-way calculation of who the person is to me, and who they are to you. And if you don't know, you can't refer to them.

Finally, how many kinship terms do you know in English? Maybe around 20? How many do you use on a daily basis? Probably just seven or eight. I bet you rarely use terms such as "cousin once removed" even though you know it.

In a language with triangular terms let's say you start with the same number of basic terms as English (and we'll call it 20, which is not necessarily true, but it's easier to calculate this way). Then you have 190 possible combinations, if I remember my factorials correctly. That's leaving aside the extra dyadic terms which I mentioned above.
posted by lollusc at 7:47 PM on October 9, 2014 [3 favorites]


No, I get that the system you describe is different than the English system. There's just nothing terribly unusual about it. All of us are socialized to completely order our minds around certain types of kinship systems, to the point that people outside that system are difficult to even talk about.

It's a really interesting system and I don't mean to diminish it by saying "yeah that's basically all of us", but I'm sure you could shock people who grew up with a slightly different system by dropping some random factoid about how ours works.
posted by Sara C. at 7:54 PM on October 9, 2014


yohko: "What do women call each other when there is a group of friends who are moms getting together?"

Either by first or last name. There's a bit of overselling going on, that people are only called "mama" or the like. Doctor Fedora's first comment was excellent, but I strongly disagree with the sentence "If nothing else, for reasons of linguistic vagaries, it's completely possible for a Japanese woman's name to essentially become "mom" for all practical purposes other than legal identification." That's not the case. Store clerks, coworkers, friends, etc. aren't going to call you "mama".
posted by Bugbread at 7:57 PM on October 9, 2014 [3 favorites]


In fact, a better approach might be to list who would call you "mama" or "okaasan" (and help me out, Japan hands, if I've missed anything):

Husband
Children
Children's teachers
People dealing with a woman in her capacity as a mother (like if you go to City Hall to pick up paperwork related to your kid, or if you're talking to the dentist about your kid, or talking to a children's backpack salesman, or the like)

That's all that occurs to me off the top of my head.
posted by Bugbread at 8:05 PM on October 9, 2014


Sorry to do a three-comment-in-a-row thing. So the initial concept here wasn't so much "women only get called mama/okaasan" as much as "women get called various things but don't hear their first name as much". So more clarification of what women get called by various people (generally speaking, of course)

Boyfriend - First name/nickname
Husband - "Mama", etc. (especially if there are kids)
Children - "Mama", etc.
Parents - First name/nickname
Friends - First name/last name/nickname
Schoolmates - First name/last name/nickname
Coworkers - Last name/title (also, it's not uncommon for women to keep their maiden names at work, since its the main name they use, and it's a pain in the butt getting everyone to switch to calling you a totally different name)
Store clerks, etc. - "Okusan" (literally "wife", but by that token "goodbye" in English literally means "God be with ye". So literal interpretations can be kinda dumb. Practically speaking, I'd translate this as "ma'am")

So once you've gotten married and moved out of the family home, you're no longer being called by your first name by your parents, because you don't live with them so you don't talk all that often, nor by schoolmates, because you're no longer in school, nor by your boyfriend, because he's now your husband. So your first name is something you generally only hear being used by friends. The same is true for men.
posted by Bugbread at 8:21 PM on October 9, 2014 [3 favorites]


There's just nothing terribly unusual about it.

Actually there is. I am a kinship researcher, so forgive me for being pedantic. But triangular systems are rare and weird in the world's kinship systems, while the English (the "Eskimo" type, with no particularly unusual extra features) is super common. And Australian Aboriginal kinship systems in general are unusually rich in terminology, unusually tightly embedded into the grammatical systems of the language, and notoriously difficult even for native speakers to learn.

Yes, it is true that you could grab a fact about English kinship terms and tell it to a speaker of another type of kinship system and surprise them, but if you told that fact to a representative person from every language in the world, about 20% of them would be totally unsurprised because that's how it works in their language too. If you told every person in the world about triangular kinship systems, or even about any of the Aboriginal kinship systems, 99% of them would not have come across something like that before.

I promise I will stop with the derailing now. My original point was actually in response to the Japanese cultural custom of not referring to people by first name, and I was just trying to say that replacing names with kinship terms (like "mother" in the Japanese case) is something that can really tie you up in knots if your language has a complicated system.
posted by lollusc at 10:24 PM on October 9, 2014 [13 favorites]


My family doesn't stand on tradition much

My wife is Viet-Australian, and it's the same here: you reach a certain point, and suddenly everyone is "uncle" an "Aunty". It's like, you may not even be related to that person, not even in law, at all. But they're still uncle and aunty. Calling them by name (if you even knew it, which you totes don't, which makes big BBQ post mortems especially confusing as you're trying to describe some congenial old Viet person in funny retro clothes which captures >95% of both genders over 50 years of age.). It's similar with my Cantonese friends and their families, here, that I know of too.

I think a lot of Asian cultures/languages have a very different implementation of roles and status - the codification I think can seem quite stark to a lot of people from an Anglo background. The irony is, the very same codification often contains delicate subtleties that are often missed by outsiders. Uninformed Westerners may find the language/culture somewhat offputting or offensiven because it seems too un-egalitarian or stark to them, but the same westerners are often are viewed as blundering oafs themselves as they miss any queue that isn't direct.

There's just nothing terribly unusual about it.

Lollusc is definitely the expert here, but I will say when I was doing first year linguistics at university, this was a topic that came up. I understand it's popular in first year linguistics courses because it is indeed so interesting and unusual and illustrative (to be fair, the fact I was doing uni here in Australia probably helped, but I believe it is, regardless, canonical in the way that say, the films about Trobriand cricket or Arran Islanders are in Anthropology Documentary).
posted by smoke at 3:18 AM on October 10, 2014


Yeah, I oversimplified. I'd kind of meant it more in terms of family life and stuff — of course neighbors and such are going to refer to her by some name or other, but unless they've known each other since early times, it'll probably be by last name (and, thus, 90+% of the time, the husband's family name).
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:51 AM on October 10, 2014


the English (the "Eskimo" type, with no particularly unusual extra features) is super common

Out of curiosity, how common is it? The über-reliable Wikipedia says "10% of societies," which doesn't seem like it qualifies as "super common," but then again the reliability of the statistic is in question and I have no idea how they quantify societies (population?)
posted by andrewesque at 8:22 AM on October 10, 2014


andrewesque: I don't believe that's true about Chinese. I grew up calling uncles the equivalent of Uncle Bob or Uncle Tom, when there was no other way to differentiate. This is further compounded by the fact that people's titles are taken from the generation rather than closeness (for example, I call my parents' cousins aunts and uncles). For example, it is not possible (that I know of) to easily different between my father's father's father's second son's son and my father's father's father's third son's son. Assuming my father's father is the oldest son, it would be the same title for both of these uncles, so I would refer to them by name as well as title.
posted by ethidda at 9:38 PM on October 10, 2014


ethidda: I'm not actually sure which one of my comments you're responding to, and I certainly don't want to claim that every single Chinese person behaves like me; but I would stand by my belief that for most Chinese people, it's generally considered a taboo to address relatives by their given name at the least. (For instance, if my uncle's name is 王大中, I have to say that I would never address him to his face as 大中叔叔; it just strikes me as very strange.)

Also, I know Wikipedia is, well, Wikipedia, but it also agrees with me on this particular phenomenon.

It's possible that for relatives that are many degrees of relation away you can only separate them by name, but I think for closer relations (first and second cousins, immediate uncles and grandparents) it's easier to distinguish by kinship. And even in the case of actually addressing that particular father's father's father's second son's son to their face, I still think you would use the kinship term (or a generic 叔叔/舅舅) instead of their given name (大中舅舅/大中叔叔).
posted by andrewesque at 12:56 PM on October 11, 2014


andrewesque: Sorry, was responding to your first one up top.

Maybe this is a regional differences or because my family abounds with second cousins (or is it first cousins once removed? Possibly both) whom I see regularly. I do not call them by their given names, but by their nicknames (used by their elders) followed the kinship term. For closer relations where it is immediately obvious who you're referring to, we don't use names either, just the kinship terms.
posted by ethidda at 4:44 PM on October 12, 2014


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