With the holiday season in full swing, season’s greetings are being exchanged en masse. Now whether your greeting is heartfelt, politically correct, or required by your employer, the fact remains that sooner or later, we’re going to get tired or hearing them. My solution? Throw in a little Japanese! It’s fun to say and will probably confuse the hell out of other people; both of which constitute entertainment in my book.

 

So now I give you the Japanese Word of the Week Holiday Edition! The word of the week is omedetou. Not a particularly pretty looking word, but a vital one for conveying all of your holiday greeting and well-wishes (whether sincere or otherwise).

 

This is the first JWOW that isn’t a kanji. In fact, I’m not sure that omedetou has a kanji. It’s written out in hiragana, which looks a little something like this:

 

 

Omedetou doesn’t have an exact English translation, but it often carries the implication of “congratulations.” When your friend graduates from college, you can toss them an informal sotsugyou omedetou, meaning “congrats on graduating.” An easy recipe for creating congratulatory sentences is as such: [occasion/event] + [omedetou]. Simple as that! If there was a Japanese word for Bar Mitzvah, you could tack on omedetou and voila, congrats on turning thirteen! Now all you need is to find a Japanese person who also happens to be Jewish. A very tricky search, that is.

 

More often, omedetou translates closer to the “Happy” we insert in front of special occasions and holidays. Tanjyoubi omedetou is a casual way of wishing someone a happy birthday. We get the most use out of omedetou around this time of year. New Year is a very important religious holiday in Japan, and properly wishing everyone a happy new year is customary. When you run into people you know after New Year, the first thing you should say in Japan is akemashite omedetou, “Happy New Year.” Any letters or emails that you write should start with wishing the recipient a Happy New Year. Yeah, it’s that important! It can also be annoying if you run into a big crowd of people you know and you all have to greet one another separately. For an American, it’s a little strange to think that while the Western world is getting drunk and partying hard on New Year’s Eve, the Japanese are at praying at shrines and spending time with their families.

 

Conversely, while Westerners are in their Churches praying on Christmas, the Japanese are on romantic dates. There’s no official Christmas holiday in Japan, given the distinct lack of Christians. But the Japanese have adapted the basic commercialized concepts, and made their own version of Christmas, which includes the exchanging of gifts with close friends and significant others. My dictionary tells me that the following is one way of saying Christmas:

 

 

The kanji there reads as kirisuto no koutansai and more or less mean “Nativity Festival of Christ.”  This is a surprisingly appropriate term, but I’m not sure it gets used terribly often. Most Japanese are content with plain old “Merry Christmas.” Like many other foreign words and phrases, the Japanese simply took the words “Merry Christmas” and pronounced it their own way. Written, it looks like meri- kurisumasu (the dash indicates the i should be held out).

 

Something important that I haven’t really touched on is the casualness of omedetou. In case you haven’t heard, the Japanese are pretty big on being polite. Casual speech is fine between close friends and family, but with everyone else, the word gozaimasu should be tacked on omedetou to make it polite. Gozaimasu looks a little something like this:

 

 

So for you practitioners of the Japanese language, take omedetou out and peddle it. This holiday season, you shouldn’t lack for opportunities.