I first posted this on Reddit, but I thought this would fit perfectly on my blog.
I am currently unemployed so I’ve been catching up on a lot of anime. At the same time, I’ve been studying for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test N1 (the highest level) so I’ve been watching all of my anime without subtitles as part of my listening practice but I digress.
Before I go on, I wanted to talk about keigo, honorific speech in the Japanese language. The language uses honorific constructions (such as verb endings) to emphasize social rank, social intimacy or similarity in rank.
Here’s an example
Normal Polite Sentence:
田中さんは映画を観ました。Tanaka-san watched a movie
Keigo Sentence:
田中さんは映画をご覧になりました。Tanaka-san watched a movie.
While the above sentences both mean the same thing and are both polite, the Keigo sentence uses ご覧になりました the past tense of ご覧になる which is the keigo version of the verb “to see/watch”. This implies that the speaker who is talking about Tanaka is a much lower status than the speaker in most likely the work setting.
Keigo is used when you talk to people of higher status or when you work in customer in service or even when you’re talking about a person of higher status in the work place.
With your friends though, you can use the casual forms of Japanese. In fact, when I lived in Japan, my friends often told me “you don’t have to use polite language with me anymore, we’re friends” whenever I spoke with them.
So as we all know, Tohru speaks in keigo as her default speech like her father. She even uses it with her friends (I believe Uo pointed this out in the first or second season). But that doesn’t mean that they’re not close even though she addresses them by their last time. Why is this interesting? Because in Japan, it’s polite (and socially expected) to call people whom you’re not friends with/close with by their last name + an honorific like san unless they tell you you can call them by their first name. You can call your friends by their first name though. There was an episode of Fruits Basket that actually utilized the idea of being on a first name basis as a way to depict how two characters have become closer.
Remember that episode where Hatsuharu was introduced and he convinced Tohru to call Yuki by his first name. I’m not sure if anyone noticed, but at the beginning of the series Tohru addresses Yuki as Soma-kun (as I mentioned above, it’s polite to address someone by their last name and not their first). But since Tohru and Yuki have become closer, the former has been calling the latter by their first name ever since. The latter still addresses the former as Honda-san since idk that’s just part of his character despite him using the casual speech pattern with her.
Anyway, in this last season, as we see Tohru go through her struggles she’s actually been dropping the keigo speech pattern. I first noticed this in her inner monologue in episode 6 of the Final Season. It’s an inner monologue, so why does she have to be polite? Well, I went back and watched episode 1 of Fruits Basket and saw that she still uses keigo even in her inner monologue.
To confirm that it wasn’t just me, I read the interview with Manaka Iwami (the voice of Tohru) and she confirms it herself.
透くんは、敬語で話すことが多かったですが、The Finalは敬語じゃないセリフが多かったり、気が動転して敬語じゃなくなるシーンが多いんです。
Tohru-kun often speaks in keigo, however, in The Final (season) there are many scenes where she doesn’t speak in Keigo, there are many scenes where she loses heart and drops keigo.
Anyway, I just thought it was something worth pointing out as her speech pattern is such a big part of her character.