The Strange Thing About Writing ‘Thank You’ in Japanese
When life is full of good miracles
It never occurred to me before, but the Japanese characters for “thank you” are composed of two unlikely words:
有: To have, possess
難: Difficulty, hardship
有難う: Thank you
What a strange combination of words.
Why the characters for ‘thank you’ is ‘difficult to have’
While many Japanese words directly come from Chinese, such as weather (天気) or emergency (緊急), this is not the case for the term arigato, or ‘thank you’. Instead, the characters for the term were thought to be developed by Buddhist linguists, based on their beliefs toward gratitude.
Arigato means that good things in life are never obvious or a natural human right, but to be able to say thank you is actually a miracle in life. There are so many things that can come in the way of something not happening or manifesting — wrong place, wrong time, wrong person, wrong words — and consequently everything good that happens to us is a combination of many miracles. The ability to say thank you is in fact, something difficult to have.
Arigato (有難う) = thank you
