Sumimasen for Everything
Sumimasen is probably the most useful word in the Japanese language if you’re a foreigner who doesn’t speak Japanese. It means excuse me. It means I’m sorry. It means thank you, in certain registers. If you’ve bumped into someone: sumimasen. If someone has helped you: sumimasen. If you need a waiter across a crowded restaurant: sumimasen. One word, every social situation, maximum flexibility. There’s something almost philosophical about a language that resolves all contact between strangers into a single, resonant syllable.
Japan has the reputation of being easy to navigate as a foreigner, and in a narrow sense that’s true—signage in Tokyo and Osaka and Kyoto carries English translations, and the major rail networks are legible to outsiders. But step outside those cities, or into neighborhoods that don’t appear on tourist maps, and the English disappears fast. And even in places that should be English-friendly, you encounter what’s called wasei-eigo—the Japanese version of English, absorbed and adapted and often transformed into something that leaves you thoroughly lost despite the theoretical shared language. Japanese speakers who technically know English may be speaking a dialect of it that doesn’t connect.
Which is why a small vocabulary of actual Japanese matters more than loud, slow-spoken English. Arigatou for thank you. Ikura when you need to know what something costs. Sumimasen for everything else. It’s a short list, but the small effort of trying in someone’s language is noticed in ways that don’t need translation—the recognition in someone’s face when you reach for the right word, even clumsily.
The places that feel most linguistically overwhelming are usually the ones most worth navigating. The electronics floors of Akihabara. The backstreets of Harajuku that don’t appear on maps. Shibuya after midnight, when the crossing is still full and everything is noise and light and nobody is going the same direction. That’s when a few words become small anchors. Sumimasen. Someone turns. You point. They nod. Whatever needed to happen, happened.