Linguistic rituals for thanking in Japanese: Balancing obligations

The paper investigates what can be described as a Japanese cultural way of thanking, o-rei (). The data of the investigation are naturally occurring telephone conversations which took place in the Japanese end-of-year gift-giving season, seibo. Sections of the conversations, which refer to favours or gifts that are given or received, are extracted and transcribed for a detailed investigation. This study reveals that conversational participants cooperate to achieve a mutual pragmatic goal of ‘debt–credit’ equilibrium. This is a symbolic settlement that is necessary to care for the conversational participants’ debt-sensitive face. The linguistic ritual of o-rei serves to achieve this temporary restoration of equilibrium, and thus o-rei does not free the debtor from debt. The data suggest that Japanese native speakers employ many means of indicating o-rei that are not predicted by most politeness and speech act theories. The prolongation of ‘acknowledging debt/benefit–denigrating credit’ between the beneficiary and the benefactor also suggests the importance of the mutual involvement of conversational participants in understanding the social meaning of o-rei. O-rei serves as a symbolic repayment of debt, and it is a common practice outside a family circle. In this paper I question the adequacy of the definition of thanking, ‘expressions of gratitude and appreciation’, which has been commonly used in cross-cultural and inter-language pragmatic research and suggest that the mutual and reciprocal aspects need to be taken into account.