Itadakimasu: A word you say to the food, not the cook | Hacker News Reader

Itadakimasu: A word you say to the food, not the cook

thetokyohermit.substack.com

114 pointssurprisetalk79 comments

Claude, pick an arbitrary Japanese word that shows up often in anime and write a blog post about how deep it is.

They’ll report you for this!

Fun trivia: the greeting only started to become a thing during the Meiji era as part of moral and ethics education. It may be argued that it has its roots in Buddhist teachings, but there's a theory that the drive to make it a common household practice may have come from the envoys who came back from western countries and saw the Christian prayer and thought it was a good thing to imitate. It's quite a stretch, but personally I find it quite interesting given that it was an era where Westernization was the craze.

If true, kudos to them for shrinking it all down to one word. Saying "grace" can be an event to itself at some meals.

Good food, good meat, good god, let's eat!

Its really not that far fetched. Japan has quite a history of copying the aesthetic of things the west does while changing the meaning completely. Christmas is a romantic holiday in Japan, and it is considered fashionable to get married in a church, even though only about 2% of the country is Christian.

Article falls flat, there’s more,

https://cotoacademy.com/itadakimasu-and-gochisousamadesu/

I could write it up, but this article explains it more. You should really be learning Gochisousama Deshita (ごちそうさまでした) too.

I feel the article is flat because normally you learn both expressions at the same time because it completes a small ritual to, literally thank the cook.

Also em dash galore.

I’m not sure how true this is but a Japanese friend said Gochisousama Deshita means something slightly different along the lines of “thank you for your lives” and you’re saying that to the food as well as the chef.

ご馳走 (gochisou) means feast. 様 (sama) is a highly honorific suffix. でした (deshita) it was.

Basically literally saying "that was a great feast", as it is said after eating the meal and leaving the establishment. Not sure why the Japanese friend would say that.

I feel like this is intellectualizing something that isn't that deep. It's a word you say, not think about. Why do English speakers say "excuse me" after a sneeze? The answer is apocryphal and uninteresting.

Where I’m from, the person who sneezes often says nothing, unless they’re accidentally sneezing near someone else. Strangers nearby however will say “bless you!” or occasionally “gesundheit!” But yes, I think people who utter the words do so as a quick reaction without much forethought.

Haha, I think it's more like an article about "Goodbye" originating from "God be with ye". That part is interesting - a curiosity. However, I do wish there was more about the history of the term, especially that it's a 20th Century national formalization of meal ceremony that was one of many practices of the time. It seems that one particular school of Buddhism won this memetic war and the structures of formalization took it on and thereafter it is now Japanese Culture with a capital C.

The closest analogue I can think of is diamond engagement rings. Doubtless they were given out prior, but they became formally 'normal' for a while. Of course, one was orchestrated and the other was perhaps just the effect of picking some formal culture to teach and so on. But it is similar in recency of popularity.

now _that_ would be more interesting, but it would also be a completely different article

You can make anything shallow by just not thinking about it.

Conversely, the way things become deep is because we intellectualize them.

Sure but while studying the etymology of words can do a lot to help you understand them (particularly from a linguistic perspective), its really more important to consider what people mean when they use a word, not where it came from. "Howdy" comes from "How do you do?" and yet nobody treats "Howdy" as a question. If I say "Howdy" to you (which is something I do often), and you answer "Good, how are you," I'm going to give you a weird look.

Actually, funnily enough. I grew up in Texas and customarily say "howdy" as a greeting, and I grew up using it just as you say. I found it confusing for a while that coworkers who weren't native English speakers, particularly those I hadn't met in person, would reply to my Slack "howdy" with something like "oh, I'm good, thanks for asking". It was very jarring, like I said "hello" and they said "banana"; took me longer than it should have to figure out they were parsing the full "how do you do" since I'd never encountered that growing up. It became a pretty common experience at work.

Sure, sure; an unexamined life is not worth living, yadda yadda

I just take issue with this type of analysis for trying to generate that depth - as an etymological lesson, it's minimally interesting, but as far as it tries to "say something" about Japanese culture, it can't.

Probably has something to do with the fact that the blog post is not human-written.

It is nice to acknowledge someone’s or something’s existence/work/troubles/etc. through words. Think about all the gratefulness stuff that circulated around the western media in late 2010s.

Similar to a lot of other Japanese phrases out there - "ikigai", etc. It's quite uninteresting as someone who's Japanese or lived in Japan, but an extra level of meaning is attached when projected outwards

> The gloss is not wrong. But it has quietly relocated the word.

Thanks, Fable

https://www.pangram.com/history/c837bbcb-4aed-43e1-987c-afe2...

I know you're being downvoted, because people are tired of hearing "this is AI".

But I think your comment "this is AI" is warranted. This content, explaining something of cultural, personal significance (instead of the typical technical explainer) should really be written by a human.

How good are these detectors? (Serious question— I’ve never had a reason to use one)

Pangram's actual classifier model is really strong. It has an incredibly low false positive rate. Whenever people complain about it, I ask them to provide verifiable non-adversarial long-form false positives, and nobody has done so yet. False negatives are more common (as they should be -- it's better to let an AI article through than to false accuse someone.) Their frontend is often misleading, though, for these reasons:

- 100% means that it thinks 100% of the article is AI, not that it's 100% confident the article is AI. It's very easy for people to get this confused.

- It is much less accurate on shorter text, and doesn't advertise this fact clearly enough.

- It works on chunks of text (I think they're like 100 tokens) and can't identify within that chunk which parts are AI and which parts are human.) This should be more clear in the UI, I think.

Possible false positive because of the text was translated from Japanese to English with AI?

I don't see the point of starting a newsletter written by AI.. But I don't understand the point of cheating with a computer on lichess.org either.

that's a true positive

> Possible false positive because of the text was translated from Japanese to English with AI?

People say this a lot, but I've never seen Claude or any other LLM insert clichéd LLM-isms into translated text.

There's obviously a degree of interpretation and "smoothing" that goes into translation, but it doesn't rise to the level of making the entire thing sound like an AI's voice. This blog post was prompted, not translated.

A Japanese blog wouldn't discuss this. It'd be like an American blog with an article about "what does thank you mean." We already know.

> But I think your comment "this is AI" is warranted.

Clue: it's never warranted.

Nobody wants to hear it. Even when it's true. Even when it's evident (actually less so when it's evident).

Why?

If I have read the article, then reached the comments sections, it's because I have found the subject interesting. It's like watching a movie and someone trying to tell me unsolicited news about the director's private life. I don't care: tell me about the movie, instead.

Comment about the content, not the form.

In the case of a blog that purports to be personal reflections, commenting that it is actually AI output is a comment on the content, not merely the form.

The topic is the expression "itadakimasu". What the blog purports to be, belongs in the boundary. Who wrote it belongs in the boundary. Whether the syntax is correct, contains em-dashes, uses nice colors and fonts, belong in the boundary. Comment about "itadakimasu" are on topic, others are off topic.

I think someone else wrote it better than I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49080703

This is worthy feedback to the author (and others), that writing with clear AI tells/register is so distracting that it takes away from the spirit and content of the writing.

Perhaps this is just the zeitgeist and in 20 years this is irrelevant. It’s relevant for whoever is writing now.

> This is worthy feedback to the author

You can say the same about detecting grammatical mistakes: it's nice to warn the author, but please send them a private message, don't pollute the comments section.

Out of context it does sound like AInese. I think that’s largely because AI has a tendency to use location in very metaphorical terms that don’t quite read, and usually the idea of “relocating” a word would be exactly that kind of vaguely weird metaphorical use of location.

However in the context of this article “relocated the word” is both literal and precise. The word’s target is in a different physical location.

“Quietly” is also AI-coded but does fit in the overall aesthetic of the article.

It fits into the overall aesthetic of the article because the overall aesthetic of the article is "an unedited claude response"

As a non-native English speaker I am both astonished and terrified. Astonished that you people hear or see this difference, which is undetectable for me. Terrified that people learn English from the internet, and soon these unnatural constructions will become mainstream for us.

EDIT.

Also by using and contacting with AI won't English native speakers get accustomed to that AI-speak?

Japanese also has a word you say to the cook, ご馳走様でした (gochisousama deshita) but that's said after the meal as thanks.

I used to hear that when you finished eating ramen and you should say this as a replacement speech of "thank you". It basically means "It must be tired of you to go around to design and prepare for the meal" which implicitly implied an appreciation

You can look it up, it's in online dictionaries.

gochisou: "feast"

sama: honorific

deshita: past conjugation of "desu", meaning "is"; thus, "was"

In other words, "[that] was a feast".

語源は、食事の準備のために駆け回ることを意味する「馳走（ちそう）」という言葉にあります。そこに、敬意を表す接頭語の「ご」と接尾語の「様」が結びつき、「ご馳走様（ごちそうさま）」という表現になりました。現在では、食事を用意してくれた人や、ごちそうしてくれた人に対するお礼の言葉として広く使われています。

from https://jp.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/thank...

Talking about being "tired", the phrase お疲れ様でした (otsukaresama deshita) is commonly used to express "thanks for the hard work" and it's a catch-all greeting for coworkers now, but it literally means something like "o tired one" and the character 疲 still means tired.

There's also a word you say when food is brought to you, ありがとうございます.

Thats just a very general thank you.

And itadakimasu is general too. That doesn't mean there aren't contexts where it is likely to be said in relation to the process of eating food from others.

Its strange because I knew the point from the article already, but it kinda seems like some sort of strawman? I think many cultures have a way of saying "thanks for the food" in a universal way and not the cook. Even in western cultures there is "saying grace" and I don't think anyone would mistake it for it being aimed at the cook.

I had always assumed it was a sort of quasi-religious practice as the same gesture is typically seen at shrines. Not once in 30 years of consuming Japanese culture did I ever think it was directed at the chef!

Claude seems to be really into japanese customs.

I take a break from coding to browse HN, and, lo and behold, I'm greeted with some more Claude.

I guess Japan had become a safe default of an exotic foreign world in a lot of contexts, thanks to it requiring no audience profiling. Usually there are nobody from Japan around, and Japan is usually not so deeply involved in global politics, yet it's a country with global population share of >1% with plenty of topics to explore.

> There is a Japanese word that almost everyone reading this has already heard

I had never heard this word. It's the second time in a row that I encounter something unknown to me that is characterized as being universal. Curiously enough, both cases were related to Japan. So either I belong in a minority who ignores well-known elements of that culture, or someone overestimates how widespread such elements actually are.

Relevant XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/2501/

Thank you. Sometimes I forget that for each and every significant experience in life there's probably an XKCD page that captured its essence!

Here's another one:

https://xkcd.com/1053/

It pops up all the time in anime. Given the name of the blog, I'm guessing it's accurate to their normal audience.

Well the "this" in "almost everyone reading this" being a reference to an article in a blog called the Tokyo hermit makes it a pretty reasonable assumption.

This definitely feels like an overgeneralization. For what it’s worth, there are plenty of people who don’t say "itadakimasu" at restaurants but would say it when they’re invited to someone’s home as a guest, for example. More people, however, seem to say "gochisousama deshita" (thank you for the food) when leaving, whether at a restaurant or someone’s home.

Some people do say "itadakimasu" out of habit even when they’re eating alone. They may have grown up with stricter manners around meals, to the point where it’s simply baked into their routine. But it’s far from universal. Dramas and other shows may make it seem more universal than it actually is, partly because saying it out loud is more performative and works better on screen.

ごちそうさまでした。「gochisousama deshita」 This can be said to the cook. I heard "いただきます！"「itadakimasu」more frequently for a variety of reasons. But it is common to shout out to thank the cook when you leave a restaurant. I became comfortable doing it myself.

Another fun fact: itadakimasu is categorized as a keigo, or more specifically, kenjougo, an honorific expression that depreciates speaker itself. And since itadaku is an advanced version of morau to show that "I am of lower status", so the whole expression should be (from the gods/kamisama/the people above me who brings me here for the feast) I humbly receives.

This is also why you say itadakimasu even when alone, despite there are apparently no one superior than you exists, but no, it is now the gods you appreciate

Where I am from we say "Gracias a Dios" after a meal. Childs and even non-religious people say it as a reflex.

It's a common joke to question why we thank God instead of the person who actually cooked the meal.

From a non-religious view, God represents everything not in your control. You thank God for e.g. not having you or your guardian/provider be fired/laid-off or otherwise yourselves being put in a position where you can't eat (illness, etc.).

The person who cooked your meal isn't the only one responsible for your being able to eat. They need the ingredients and efforts of everyone making such ingredients and putting them in your home as well as luck for nothing going wrong (transportation, good harvest, etc.), generally most of it "by the will of God" / "under God's control" (i.e. outside of your control).

In Spanish, a maybe more common and culture-specific expression may be "Provecho" which is said to others about to eat (or that are currently eating and you're in the process of greeting). It means "benefit"/"utility" and is said in hope that the food is of usefulness to the health and well-being of the person(s) about to eat / currently eating.

No it doesn't. God isn't "the guy who made my cheeseburger." I can't control whether he does it right or not but it's not God.

Try not to see things too black-and-white. "God" isn't the guy who made your cheeseburger. The cheeseburger guy will have a great degree of control over himself, and you have some minor degree of control over him, but you both depend on a lot more than yourselves for that cheeseburger to happen. It's everything that's there, everything that's happened, and everything you're taking for granted. The point of being thankful is to not take your good fortunes for granted.

This description fails from either a secular or Christian view. Is this your actual belief system? It feels like vibes at best.

We've always thanked the cook, specially if it's a homemade meal. Sometimes I wish we showed some respect for the things that died so we could live, but food is so plentiful nowadays that we can't show respect to everything, and some things are so unnaturally ultraprocessed that they don't deserve any respect.

A grossly misleading article;

> almost everyone has misaddressed

Almost no-one, unless we are talking about LLMs and Google Translate users who could attempt map translations 1-to-1. Oh well, a new AI generated fake piece was published, see it soon in the "Did you know ..." section of enwiki.

Seems like a form of expressing gratitude for the food you're about to eat, and not an exclusive practice to Buddhism or Christianity. There is an intrinsic spiritual element to giving grace before eating.

good lord this is over-intellectualised nonsense. it's not complex or ancient, it's actually part of the meiji era aping of western cultural semiotics, and the OP seems to misunderstand the etymology. just say itadakimasu before a meal and gochisosama after. maybe a few days later, if someone else bought you the meal: 先日（昨日）はごちそうさまでした

That's really interesting. For example in Polish (and I'd say in French too, not an expert though), we say "smacznego" which means "may it taste good to you" which is yet another direction, not to cook, not to the spirits or God, but to y'all who eat with me. I'd say this is another cultural peculiarity. Other languages have similar phrases: "enjoy your meal". I'd say "bon appetit", or "buen provecho" is also directed on goods that flow from the food. This is man-centric. Wishing well all the people because we're having a wonderful feast here.

What is really curious is how we take this food "greeting" is somehow similar to how we take the article. When article was written by a human, an effort was taken and we are happy to accept it and we feed on it, we imagine the person writing, giving us the love (as similar to buen provecho), sending it to other people who will read it. I never thought about it this way until now. But when the article was written by AI we start to see the no-effort AI farm or company that tries to lure us to read it and probably earn money or respect. These assumptions may be truly mistaken, as sometimes this is a person writing but e.g. they asked AI to correct the text and the correction has been made inhuman.

TL;DR So eventually that's the author person good will we're seeking, when reading the article. The connection were striving for. Quite eye opening.

> when you find out who it is for

Whom it is for.

अन्न हे पूर्णब्रह्म

Slop

I always thought it was to the gods, spirits, kami, whatever "it" or "they" were that allowed you to eat. Though it could be either, or both at once; when members of Native American tribes would make a kill on the hunt, they would pay their respects to the spirit of the animal they just killed. Even if it was the spirit of a fish they had just speared, giving its life so they could eat another day.

I kind of admire the Japanese for their capacity to live humbly and gratefully without need for a big-sky-daddy myth. The world of the traditional Japanese is full of hidden wonders; indeed, it really belongs to them, and we just live in it.

This is a really bizarre take. Praying to the small, local spirits, like the one of the animal you are about to eat, is noble and beautiful, but praying to a universal god is worthy of mockery? ("sky-daddy myth")

I don't really care what people believe, but if you can accept and respect traditions that believe in the supernatural, which includes any spirit, surely beliefs centered around creator gods are no less plausible.

The trouble with monotheism is not the belief in the supernatural per se* but the totalizing nature of it. In polytheistic or pantheistic traditions, you're supposed to respect gods because they're more powerful than you and have the inclination and means to bring you low if you're not properly deferential. But they also have limited agency and purview, are understood to be capable of petulance and other chracter-limiting flaws, and relations with them are highly negotiable. Aven from an purely atheistic point of view, they're projections what's good and bad about humanity and its relations with the rest of the world.

Monotheistic religions ascribe creative power for everything that exists to their deity of choice, generally accompanied by total omniscience and absolute, unquestionable moral righteousness. You may or may not be able to propitiate or plead with such a god privately, but are almost certainly out of luck as far as dealing with said god's believers.

Not to say that polytheistic cultures are inherently placid and easygoing; you could point to anthropological examples of institutionalized human sacrifice or divinely inspired atrocities, feuds etc. However I think the inherent universalism of monotheistic religions gives rise to a higher overall cost function because such religions constitutionally reject the validity of other beliefs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism

>big-sky-daddy myth

tips fedora

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