How do you say ‘thank you’ in Japanese?

Look in any dictionary and you’ll find the phrase ‘arigatō’ （ありがとう), or ‘arigatō gozaimasu’ （ありがとうございます）. So, simple. Problem solved. It’s like saying ‘cat’ is ‘neko’ (猫), or ‘book’ is ‘hon’ （本）: there is a clear and well-defined correspondence. Isn’t there?

Well, in fact, no. It’s not quite that simple. In fact, Japanese has a whole range of idiomatic expressions to express thanks; ‘arigatō’ is merely the most simple to list in a dictionary (and, of course, given that you’ll almost never be misunderstood when using ‘arigatō’, the most useful to learn when beginning Japanese study). And in many cases ‘thank you’ can be, and in fact is, expressed by ‘arigatō’. Here, though, let’s look at some of the places where it isn’t.

Having said this, it is perhaps helpful to begin by looking briefly at what ‘arigatō’ actually means. It is a form (in fact, the same slightly archaic form as seen in the ‘ohayō’ of ‘ohayō gozaimasu’, or ‘good morning’) of the adjective ‘arigatai’, which means ‘grateful’. Therefore ‘arigatō’ essentially means ‘(I am) grateful’. Of course, ‘grateful’ covers a multitude of situations; hence ‘arigatō’ is a widely-used expression. ‘arigatō gozaimasu’, ‘dōmo arigatō’, ‘dōmo arigatō gozaimasu’, and just ‘dōmo’, are all variations on the basic form. The levels of politeness and formality differ; but the basic meaning doesn’t.

Now, let’s move on to looking at the other ways in which thanks are expressed in Japanese. Perhaps the most common alternative to ‘arigatō’ is a word which many learners of Japanese associate with saying sorry or ‘excuse me’ rather than with an expression of thanks: ‘sumimasen’. This word can indicate a feeling of indebtedness to someone, though, so it is used to express thanks in many situations, perhaps in even more situations than ‘arigatō’ itself. Listen to what a Japanese speaker would say to someone who held a door open for them, for example, or to someone who helped them when they’d dropped something: ‘sumimasen’, rather than ‘arigatō’. We could say that ‘sumimasen’ has a narrower focus than ‘arigatō’: it expresses a specific type of thanks, namely ‘thanks for your kindness’, ‘thanks for putting yourself out for me’, or ‘thanks for the favour’. Or, looking at it in another way, we could say that while ‘arigatō’ expresses gratefulness (we might in some situations even call it ‘happy thanks’), ‘sumimasen’ expresses indebtedness.

It goes without saying that being grateful and being indebted are not mutually exclusive, and indeed, there is a degree of overlap between the situations in which ‘arigatō’ and ‘sumimasen’ are used. Indeed, they can even be used together. The other day, letting an elderly lady on to the escalator in front of me in a department store, I was thanked with ‘sumimasen, arigatō’. Let’s try and make the difference between the two a little clearer by looking at a specific situation. Let’s imagine that a friend gives you a book, out of the blue. Which word would you use to express thanks? Well, here ‘arigatō’ would be appropriate: you are happy, and grateful, that your friend has given you a book. Now, what if your friend gives you a book that you’ve asked him to pick up from the bookshop for you? What would be appropriate in this situation? Well, here ‘sumimasen’ would be more appropriate: your friend has done you a favour in fetching the book, and you are indebted to him for this, more so than being happy to have received the book. Finally, what if you mentioned that you were looking for a particular book, but that you were having trouble finding it, and a few days later your friend arrived with the book for you, having taken it upon himself to find it for you? Here, both expressions would be appropriate: you are happy to have received the book, and at the same time indebted to your friend for having done you a favour by finding the book.

Anyway, let’s go on to another alternative to ‘arigatō’. After ‘sumimasen’, there is ‘yoroshiku o-negai shimasu’, or versions of this expression, such as ‘o-negai shimasu’, or even just ‘yoroshiku’. ‘Yoroshiku o-negai shimasu’ is difficult to translate directly into English, but fundamentally, it is used in situations when thanks are being offered in advance. Even the use of this phrase commonly introduced in textbooks for learning Japanese- at the end of a meeting (often a first meeting), or of a conversation- is fundamentally an expression of thanks: something like ‘Pleased to have made your acquaintance. Thank you in advance.’ The object of these thanks, of course, is not made clear, but we can easily work out what is implicitly being referred to. These are thanks in advance for a productive relationship, for cooperation, help and advice, for support and for a certain intangible something that might be called ‘the benefit of the doubt’. So, in a similar way, in a situation where, for example, a request is being made, the expression of thanks most appropriate is not ‘arigatō’, but ‘yoroshiku o-negai shimasu’. It may turn out that the request cannot in fact be granted; but in using this expression, the speaker is expressing hope that it will be, and thanks in advance on the assumption that it is. So ‘yoroshiku o-negai shimasu’ is in fact something close to ‘Thank you in advance’.

Yet another alternative to ‘arigatō’ is ‘o-sewa ni narimashita’. This could perhaps be considered as a counterpart to ‘yoroshiku o-negai shimasu’, in that while ‘yoroshiku o-negai shimasu’ is used to express thanks in advance, ‘o-sewa ni narimashita’ is basically used to express gratitude at the end of something. This ‘something’ could be a doctor’s consultation, for example, or a discussion between a customer and shop assistant regarding a potential purchase, or a stay at a friend’s house. The situations in which ‘o-sewa ni narimashita’ can be used are many and varied, but what they all have in common is that the speaker is expressing something along the lines of ‘thank you for your help’, or ‘thank you for your trouble’. In a way, ‘o-sewa ni narimashita’ is a little like ‘sumimasen’, in that the expression is one of thanks for something done, rather than for something received. While ‘sumimasen’ expresses thanks for a small, everyday action, though- we could almost think of it as a ‘throwaway thanks’- ‘o-sewa ni narimashita’ is used when the favour or help is bigger, and the feeling of gratitude more heartfelt.

Next, let’s look at ‘o-tsukare-sama deshita’, ‘gokurō-sama deshita’, and ‘gochisō-sama deshita’. While ‘sumimasen’ and ‘o-sewa ni narimashita’ can be used in a range of situations, these expressions are used only in quite specific settings. The first two are used to express thanks for someone’s hard work or effort, while the third expresses gratitude after food or drink. ‘O-tsukare-sama deshita’ and ‘gokurō-sama deshita’, translated literally, mean something along the lines of ‘it’s been a tiring thing’ and ‘it’s been hard work’, respectively. In terms of usage, though, they both roughly correspond to a feeling which in English might be expressed with an expression such as ‘thank you for your hard work’.

‘Gochisō-sama deshita’, meanwhile, literally means ‘it was a delicious thing’, but is basically equivalent to saying ‘thank you’ after food or drink. In English this might well be expressed by a phrase such as ‘that was delicious’, rather than by a direct expression of thanks; and this corresponds neatly to the literal meaning of the Japanese. A variation on ‘Gochisō-sama deshita’ is ‘Gochisō ni narimasu’, which literally means ‘it will be a delicious thing’. As implied by this English translation, this phrase is used before eating or drinking; in other words, it is a future-tense version of ‘gochisō-sama deshita’. However, it is generally only used when someone else has paid, or will pay. An English equivalent might be something along the lines of ‘Thank you for the treat’, or ’Thank you for paying’.

And let’s not forget one final alternative to ‘arigatō’: no words at all. Listen to shoppers at a supermarket checkout in Japan, or diners at a restaurant, for example, and you’ll soon notice that a large proportion of them say precisely nothing in the way of thanks to the staff serving them. When a waiter brings food at a restaurant, for example, he might be acknowledged with a slight nod of the head; but, as often as not, there will be no ‘arigatō’, and nor will there be any of the other phrases we’ve looked at.

Why is this? Well, perhaps a clue can be found in the Japanese for ‘customer’: ‘o-kyaku-sama’. In this expression, both the ‘o’ and the ‘sama’ serve as honourific markers; the customer is not just a customer, but an honoured, elevated customer. It’s not so much a case of ‘the customer is king’, so much as of ‘the customer is God’, which indeed is a well-known and well-used phrase in Japanese. In other words, the relationship between the serving and the served is nowhere close to being equal, and perhaps because of this there is no compusion to thank the person of lower status for doing his job. It is interesting to note, though, that even if words of thanks are not spoken to those regarded as just doing their job, thanks are often more likely to be forthcoming in a situation which would not be considered as a normal duty. As an example, in a restaurant, even if the waiter is not thanked for delivering food to the table- for doing his job, in other words- he would almost certainly be thanked directly if, for example, he brought a cloth and cleaned up after a spillage.

Perhaps the relative positions of the customer and the person serving him dictate that under normal circumstances, the action of being served is natural and self-obvious enough that no thanks are deemed to be necessary: service is just something that happens, something that is. However, actions which go beyond what is considered to fall into this ‘natural’ category override the customer-server relationship and the associated conventions, and then normal standards become appropriate.

So, there we are: a brief (not so brief, actually) look at some (just some, mind!) of the most common alternatives to ‘arigatō’ to express ‘thank you’. The vast majority of both Japanese speakers with a knowledge of English and English speakers with a knowledge of Japanese would almost certainly give ‘thank you’ and ‘arigatō’ as corresponding terms; but, as can be seen, this is not the whole story. There is a correspondence, but only a partial one. ‘Thank you’ cannot be translated into Japanese as ‘arigatō’ in all situations, and equally, the wide range of words expressing thanks in Japanese have to be distilled down to just one in English. In the end, what can be said regarding the link between ‘thank you’ and ‘arigatō’ is nothing more and nothing less than what can be said for any word, phrase or expression: namely, it is always probably best to think not in terms of correspondences, in terms of ‘A equals B’, but rather to learn words in their own right, without trying to link them to a roughly equivalent word in your native language. In a case such as ‘thank you’ and ‘arigatō’, though, where one word in your own language is expressed by a range of words in the foreign language you are learning, this approach is especially important.