Itadakimasu: A word you say to the food, not the cook(thetokyohermit.substack.com)
95 pointsby surprisetalk5 hours ago16 comments
  • rootsudoan hour ago
    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.

    • andy_ppp27 minutes ago
      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.
  • no_multitudesan hour ago
    Claude, pick an arbitrary Japanese word that shows up often in anime and write a blog post about how deep it is.
  • syockit4 hours ago
    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.
    • mindtricks3 hours ago
      If true, kudos to them for shrinking it all down to one word. Saying "grace" can be an event to itself at some meals.
      • kurthr3 hours ago
        Good food, good meat, good god, let's eat!
    • deaton2 hours ago
      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.
  • buildingsramen4 hours ago
    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.
    • arjie4 hours ago
      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.

      • an hour ago
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    • j2kun4 hours ago
      You can make anything shallow by just not thinking about it.

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

      • deaton2 hours ago
        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.
        • baronvonspan hour ago
          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.
    • cuoderan hour ago
      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
    • thegeomaster3 hours ago
      Probably has something to do with the fact that the blog post is not human-written.
    • tokioyoyo2 hours ago
      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.
    • mproud4 hours ago
      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.
  • ricardobeat2 hours ago
    Claude seems to be really into japanese customs.
    • numpad0an hour ago
      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.
    • dasyud2 hours ago
      I take a break from coding to browse HN, and, lo and behold, I'm greeted with some more Claude.
  • Michelangelo114 hours ago
    > The gloss is not wrong. But it has quietly relocated the word.

    Thanks, Fable

    • asgraham4 hours ago
      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.

      • no_multitudesan hour ago
        It fits into the overall aesthetic of the article because the overall aesthetic of the article is "an unedited claude response"
    • weiliddat4 hours ago
      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.

      • astrobe_3 hours ago
        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.

        • wavemodean hour ago
          > 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.

        • StilesCrisis26 minutes ago
          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.
        • twister2920an hour ago
          that's a true positive
      • asgraham4 hours ago
        How good are these detectors? (Serious question— I’ve never had a reason to use one)
        • no_multitudesan hour ago
          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.

  • dllu5 hours ago
    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.
    • stevefan19993 hours ago
      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
      • fluoridation3 hours ago
        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".

        • stevefan19992 hours ago
          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...

    • charcircuit3 hours ago
      There's also a word you say when food is brought to you, ありがとうございます.
      • deaton2 hours ago
        Thats just a very general thank you.
        • charcircuit2 hours ago
          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.
  • stevefan19993 hours ago
    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

  • ASalazarMX3 hours ago
    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.
  • orangebread3 hours ago
    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.
  • tekla4 hours ago
    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.
    • mortenjorck3 hours ago
      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!
  • itpragmatik3 hours ago
    अन्न हे पूर्णब्रह्म
  • waffletower4 hours ago
    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.
  • timetraveller264 hours ago
    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.

    • jolmg3 hours ago
      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.

      • StilesCrisis21 minutes ago
        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.
  • acchowan hour ago
    [dead]
  • bitwize5 hours ago
    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.

    • LargeWu4 hours ago
      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.

    • newfriend3 hours ago
      >big-sky-daddy myth

      tips fedora