“Cheer Up!” in Response to a “Silent Return Home”: The Frightening Age of Failed Communication

The other day, I came across a rather startling story online.

It was about a person who had been missing for a long time and had finally returned home.

However, the post said that the person had made a mugon no kitaku, literally a “silent return home.”

In Japanese, this is a euphemism meaning that a person has died and their body has been brought home.

According to the story, however, the post received comments like these:

“I’m so glad they came home!”

“They may be too depressed to speak right now, but I’m sure they’ll feel better eventually.”

No, no. Wait a moment.

They are not going to feel better.

The commenters probably meant well and were trying to offer encouragement, but imagine how that must have felt to the bereaved family.

What is more, despite the superior tone I am taking here, when I asked AI to organize a draft of this article, it took mugon literally to mean that the person had returned home without saying anything and wrote the story on that assumption.

Are you bringing the person back to life too?

Apparently, humans are not the only ones having trouble understanding Japanese.

Knowing Japanese Words and Understanding Japanese Are Different Things

Recently, I have often seen articles claiming that young people’s Japanese language skills are declining.

People have been making complaints like that for generations, so it is easy to blame everything on the young.

Still, stories about people not understanding expressions such as mugon no kitaku give me pause.

Even elementary school students know the individual Japanese words for “silent” and “returning home.” Put the two together, however, and they take on an entirely different meaning.

Knowing the individual words is not enough. You need previous experience of encountering the expression.

And I believe the single greatest factor determining language ability is how much text a person has read over the course of their life.

Without Long-Form Reading, Your Repertoire of Language Does Not Grow

Today, we can obtain endless amounts of information through videos and social media.

But the quality of the information entering your mind is different from what you encounter when reading a book that is hundreds of pages long.

When you read a novel, you have to infer the meaning of unfamiliar expressions from a character’s state of mind and from the events that come before and after.

The same words can mean different things depending on the situation. Is someone being sarcastic or sincere? Are the words literal or metaphorical?

You cannot develop that kind of sensitivity by staring at a vocabulary list.

When I was in junior high and high school, I read a considerable number of books and magazines.

They were not all great works of literature. Popular novels, magazines—anything was fine as long as I found it entertaining.

Looking back now, I think all that reading built the foundation of my Japanese ability.

At the time, I was not trying to improve my language skills. I read simply because I enjoyed it.

As it turned out, that was what helped me most.

Studying English Makes Me Painfully Aware of This

This issue is directly connected to the English study I continue to pursue today.

Sometimes I read an English sentence and know every word in it, yet still do not understand what it means.

I can parse the grammar, but the sentence somehow makes no sense.

When I look it up, I discover that it is an idiom, a sarcastic remark, or an expression peculiar to English.

It is the same as the Japanese phrase mugon no kitaku.

An expression that a native speaker understands naturally can be difficult for a foreign-language learner.

In the end, the only way to acquire such expressions is to encounter a vast amount of English.

In Japanese, I accumulated this knowledge over decades beginning in childhood. In English, I have to build it all over again as an adult.

And to make matters worse, my memory is becoming less reliable with age.

It is hardly a fair contest.

Meaning Is Determined by Accumulated Experience

If you ask AI to summarize a text, you can understand the content without reading a long book.

But if you consume only summarized information, you lose the opportunity to encounter the subtle expressions and nuances contained in the original text.

Knowing what a text says and actually reading it are not the same thing.

Then again, in this case, even AI misunderstood mugon no kitaku.

Humans get it wrong because they have not read enough, while AI gets it wrong despite supposedly having learned from an enormous volume of text.

Seen that way, language really is difficult.

At the very least, I intend to keep reading books, studying English, and expanding my repertoire of words and expressions.

And if the day ever comes when I make my own “silent return home,” I can only hope that no one tries to encourage me by saying, “Cheer up!”