It involves sharing, not owning, ideas at the very earliest stage. It’s a search for new insights, new ways of refining and improving the proposal.
Would simply adopting the word lead to a more inclusive, more consultative style of management in companies in the English-speaking world? Might it help the search for improved productivity in British industry? Those would be big claims for a single word. But the best reason for incorporating nemawashi into English is simply because of where it comes from. It’s a word that takes a centuries-old technique from the peaceful and relaxed world of oriental gardening and applies it to the hectic modern world of industry and manufacturing. Now that’s a good idea.
Andrapodismos
(Ancient Greek)
Brutal, systematic murder with no pretence otherwise
The ancient greeks gave us democracy, and philosophy, and drama, and mathematics, and the Olympic Games. They were, we’ve been told, a gentle, thoughtful and literate people who laid the foundations of Western civilization, engaging in deep intellectual and artistic conversation as they strolled around the agora in the centre of Athens.
If they needed any help with their public relations in a later, busier and noisier age, they could have called on John Keats in the nineteenth century, with his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, the ‘still unravish’d bride of quietness’.
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ he said, as he gazed in wonder at the handiwork of the Ancient Greek artist, ‘that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’[18] And we finish the poem in a warm, comforting glow, thinking fondly of the sensitive race of men who inspired such moving thoughts.
Well, yes. But the Ancient Greeks also gave us andrapodismos (AND-ra-pod-IS-mos). It’s a word they used to describe what they did sometimes when they conquered a city – killing all the men and selling the women and children into slavery. They weren’t always quite as gentle and cerebral as we like to think.
If you wanted to translate the word into English, then ‘ethnic cleansing’ might be as good a phrase as any with which to start. But andrapodismos is more specific and also less coy. Whereas the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ hides its brutality behind words that might almost suggest a harmless clean-up operation with mops and buckets, andrapodismos is quite clear about what it means. It makes, to use an unfortunate phrase, no bones about its murderous intent.
The historian Thucydides describes a warning in 416BC from the Athenians to the island of Melos in the Cyclades, which had challenged their authority. ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,’ they told them – and then proceeded to prove it with an andrapodismos. Grown men were put to death and women and children sold as slaves, and, a little later, five hundred Athenian colonists arrived to seize the island for themselves.[19] The Melians should have known better: a few years before, Athens had done much the same to the people of Skione, and the Spartans carried out an andrapodismos at the city of Plataea. Philosophical and artistic they may have been, but the Greeks could be as brutal and bloody as any soldier in any war.
Luckily, we don’t often need a word to describe such cold-blooded savagery. We know mass murder when we read about it and, God forbid, see it. And yet it’s still one that would be worth its place in the dictionary, if only because of what it reminds us about the Ancient Greeks and the way we often think about them. This is not to say that they were worse than us – and names like Srebrenica, Rwanda, Islamic State and Cambodia should stifle any tendency towards that sort of complacency – but it does suggest something that we should have known all along. Perhaps they were no better, either.
We often like to believe things that we know aren’t true – standing in a crowded bus or on the Underground with our faces pressed lovingly into a stranger’s armpit, we might entertain wistful thoughts about what a happy life our forefathers must have enjoyed. In the sunny, unstressed, rural days before the industrial revolution, we dream, how they must have relished the summer sun as they worked in the fields by day, sleeping the sleep of the just by night. And then we remember what a cruel life of unrelieved poverty and hard work it must really have been.
It’s easy to forget that humans are complicated creatures and always have been – that those we admire and respect are seldom angels and those we hate are less than the devil. Maybe ‘an andrapodismos moment’ would be a good phrase to describe those occasions when our fantasies bump up inconveniently and painfully against the truth.
Honne & Tatemae
(Japanese)
A person’s private and public faces – how we really feel, and the mask we show to the world
English likes to think of itself as a bluff, honest, John Bull of a language that says what it means and means what it says. Words that suggest that we may tell lies or misrepresent ourselves – ‘hypocritical’, for instance, ‘insincere’, ‘double-dealing’ or ‘duplicitous’ – all leave a sour taste in the mouth. Who wants to be thought a hypocrite?
And yet it doesn’t always reflect the way that we behave. We all occasionally sacrifice the harsh truth in favour of the kinder, gentler, or just the easier thing to say.
Pollsters’ surveys report that voters want one thing – high public spending, perhaps, even with the taxes to pay for it – but they regularly go into the privacy of the polling booth to vote for something completely different. Honesty and straightforwardness sound a much less attractive option to the man faced with the classic question, ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ ‘Delicious,’ we will say to a waiter, before smuggling pieces of inedible gristle into a paper napkin to slip into our pockets.
We have no word to suggest that there may be perfectly honourable reasons for being less than completely truthful – privacy perhaps, or a sense of decency, or an unwillingness to cause hurt. Kindness is a virtue just as much as honesty.
Japanese is possibly the only language with words to describe such behaviour. Honne (HON-NEH) is the way you really feel, the thoughts and feelings that you will only express to your closest confidants. For everyone else, there is tatemae (tat-eh-MY-eh), the face that we show to the public – respectable, polite, cool and revealing nothing about our true feelings. The Japanese business contact to whom you explain your proposals may nod and smile and say ‘Hai, hai,’ – but whatever the Japanese phrasebook may say, the words do not really mean ‘Yes, yes.’ They mean simply, ‘I hear you.’
‘We must do lunch,’ they may say, brightly, without intending any such thing.
Honne is to be kept carefully guarded. It might include your deepest dreams and wishes, your personal opinions and, crucially, your real emotions. It would take a long time and a lot of building of trust before foreigners – gaijin or gaikokujin, which literally means ‘outsider people’ – would be likely to share honne.
Learning to understand this difference between honne and tatemae, to adjust your speech to fit the person you are talking to, is one of the key lessons of social etiquette for Japanese children. The distinction runs through Japanese society, from the behaviour of politicians and government officials to relations between business contacts to daily social interactions.
18
John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, in
19
Thucydides,