What's in a name? Wondering what to call my husband in Japanese

Disclaimer: This post mentions words in Japanese and uses romaji. I know this isn't ideal but it's not a language learning post so I don't want to give multiple versions of each word, and seeing as most people reading this wouldn't be able to read the Japanese, just stop complaining and read the romaji.

I have mentioned before that referring to my S/O as my “hUsBaNd” still makes me cringe, tie myself in knots and feel the need to immediately explain myself. However, since I live in Japan, a lot of the time when I am talking about him, I am talking in Japanese and not English. On the one hand, this extra layer of a second language removes the awkwardness. The words no longer have the emotion-laden connotations to me that they do in English. So speaking about him in Japanese doesn’t make me do the same shiver and grimace that it does in English. However, what it does do is make me puzzle and worry about what word to use so that I don’t devalue myself but somehow also don’t sound like a robot.

My Japanese is still very basic, but I did know before I got married that there were multiple terms for husband and wife. What I had learned from various textbooks and apps (I’m not the best self-studier, I flit from learning resource to learning resource like my dog does with toys) was that there were the basic terms (otto and tsuma) but there were others to use to refer to someone else’s or your own spouse. I think the one’s I remembered were okusan for someone else’s wife, kanai for your own wife, and goshujin for someone else’s husband. I don’t remember learning what to call your own husband, which is exactly what I needed to know to be able to have conversations about my new marriage, because that is now what most people use to make conversation with me (another topic for another blog). I didn’t know anything about where these terms came from, but I vaguely remembered hearing that some of them had very sexist connotations, so I decided I had to do some research.

Like the ball of social anxiety that I am, instead of asking some of the myriad Japanese people I am surrounded by on a daily basis, I turned to the Internet to answer my questions. It seems many foreigners also struggle with the same question as me: how to talk about yourself and your spouse in a way that isn’t sexist but also sounds natural. Because most of the terms that people use all the time have very outdated-gender-role based meanings. For example, kanai literally means “inside the house”, okusan also means “inside person”, while goshujin means “master”. These words all seem to have very particular connotations which probably differ across region, age and other factors.

To name one, About goshujin, one woman said that if someone called her own husband this with a straight face she would be like, "ummm are you ok? Do we need to get you help?"

According to one blog, aikata is “clearly the winner” because it means “companion”. While I adore this very sweet perspective, it doesn’t really help me practically. I can’t just use whichever word just seems best to me, because as a non-native speaker, I don’t call the shots. Whatever linguistic theories are now trying to deconstruct the myth of the Native Speaker, that doesn’t change the fact that as a second language speaker you are always in a position of being judged for what you say and you have to at least seem to be trying to Get it Right. So regardless of the fact that when I’m speaking English I feel no qualms about experimenting with whatever words I take a fancy to (right now I'm enjoying "my person"), when speaking Japanese I want to sound as natural as I can.

Most websites assured me that I could use the most “neutral” terms, otto and tsuma and I should run into no problems. These are the terms that are used in documents and any other written and official contexts. I had a hunch that they might not be the most natural terms in conversation, but I decided to sacrifice that in my quest to not refer to my husband as my “master”.

However, what you learn from textbooks (or as a millennial, from the Internet) and what you learn through interaction with speakers of the language, are two different things. Although my colleagues and acquaintances always understand me when I say otto, it’s not the word they use for their own husbands, nor for mine. Their term of choice is one I have not mentioned yet, danna (for their own husbands) and danna-san (with the respectful suffix, for the husbands of others). What I’m gathering through my extremely unscientific research online, by asking people, and my own hunches, is that this is becoming increasingly common, especially among younger people. Also, it seems to be especially prevalent and less age-based down here in the south. But interestingly, the people that I interact with seem to be aware that danna(-san) is not what we learn from textbooks. So, they will occasionally follow it up by “translating” for me and saying otto with a little laugh. However, it turns out danna(-san) isn’t really better than goshujin because it also means “master”. AAAhhh! So here I am feeling back at square one, faced with a choice: use danna and call my husband my “master” or use otto and sound stiff and awkward. After all that, I'm none the wiser and none of it has really helped my dilemma.

However, although this “research” may not have helped me decide which word to use, it has made clear what I have suspected for while: that the best way to find out about a specific term or use of language in Japanese is to ask a (young) Japanese person, or failing that, dive into the sub-threads of Reddit or other website (contributed to by young Japanese people). Either way, whatever you do, DON’T consult a textbook or Japanese teacher. Of course I’m being facetious, but it does hold that if you have an inkling that the way something is actually used is different to what you read in your textbook, do some digging.

Or maybe don’t… Because a lot of the time the digging reveals a multiplicity of variation that is interesting to language nerds like me but if you’re just trying to figure out what you should say can be a mindfuck. I have read comment threads where, on the same thread, people say danna-san is for your own husband, that it is for someone else’s husband, that it is used by young people and that it is old and stuffy. This probably speaks to both regional and age variation (plus more than likely a whole host of other things). While this variability would make a dialectologist quiver with delight, it makes a gaijin just trying to fit in scream in frustration. As someone who inhabits both these identities, everything I read on the topic makes me want to both throw my laptop at the wall and lean in to search more in fascination.

But perhaps I have been looking at this from the wrong angle. It’s true that being a non-native speaker makes people constantly judge your use of language, it can also give you something of a free pass (that trusty gaijin card) because you don’t know better. Maybe instead of agonizing over what sounds most natural, I should just go ahead and use otto and surrender to the fact that I’ll never really sound like a Japanese person so why turn myself in knots trying? I’ll still take the confusion in Japanese over the discomfort I feel with “husband” any day.

Or better yet, I can embrace the variability – use otto generally, danna when it just seems too unnatural in the situation not to, and okusan (generally housewife, but why not house-husband?) when I’m drunk and feeling extra confident at work parties.

#language #japanese #marriage #husband #wife #studyingjapanese #sexistlanguage #sexism