#Chirashi zushi pronunciation code

Japanese hotel staff use another handy English loan word to refer to the kind of dastardly scoundrel who skips out without even stopping to say goodbye to the friends they made on the front desk, let alone return their key and settle the check.Yahoo! It's the start of another series. Someone who sneaks out in the morning without paying the hotel bill. I guess “bucket” doesn’t really have wonderful connotations, if you think about it.

For some reason Japan has decided that it sounds more sophisticated and generally cooler to call an ice bucket an “ice pail”. When an item or product is introduced to Japan from abroad, instead of giving that word kanji characters, the original word is often imported too (albeit in Japanese pronunciation which may be amusingly incomprehensible to people who don’t speak Japanese). At wedding reception venues or during end-of-year party season, several groups will be using one venue in swift succession, so it’s “all change” as hotel staff work quickly to get everyone in and out as quickly as they can. This lovely-sounding word (try saying it out loud a couple of times!) comes from dondengaeshi, a complete plot twist at the end of a kabuki play. ▼ “Scattered sushi” didn’t sound too appealing either, so they named it chirashi-zushi instead.Īs soon as one party finishes, having to clean up the room and prepare for the next booking. Just like pamphlets that have blown away in the wind after some idling employee put them down instead of handing them out. Well, “ chirashi” (散らし) means a scattering of things: in this case, tiny tables sprinkled around a room.

“But I thought chirashi meant leaflet?!” I hear you cry. Small tables arranged around the main table at a buffet, usually for glasses or tableware. Pity the poor individual who thought a bunch of cute young singers in skimpy outfits were coming to entertain them for “idol time”! The Japanese, with their blissfully simple phonetic system, are not so lucky in this case.

#Chirashi zushi pronunciation code

Sounds like a Code 19 situation to me! In English we helpfully have a variance in spelling to help us differentiate between the two words “idol” and “idle”. Time spent hanging around when there’s nothing to do.

A customer who reserves a room but never turns up.Ī loan word that sticks with the original English meaning! A Ghost customer who turns up on the off-chance there’ll be a room available is also called a “go show” (“ go-shou” in Japanese). ▼ A customer without a booking is probably the best kind of ghost to find in your hotel, anyway. Sometimes, a Ghost might be just trying their luck or they might have actually made a reservation, but gone to the wrong hotel by mistake. Some of you may have guessed that some of those words come from English, but let’s begin with the spookiest and most exciting of the lot:Ī customer who turns up at the hotel insisting they have a reservation, although they haven’t actually made one. What would obake, nō-shō, aidoru taimu, chirashi, donden, and sukippā mean in a hotel context? Just like my clever supervisor, many service industry workers have developed their own set of code words that they use to communicate without letting the customers know too much about what’s really going on.īut thanks to this list of the secret keywords used by hotel staff in Japan, next time you’re in a Japanese hotel you can prick up your ears and listen out for any exciting gossip going on amongst the employees! Just for fun, have a look at this list first and see if you can guess what they mean. During my high school years, I worked in a supermarket, where an announcement over the loudspeaker system for “Code 19” always meant it was time to head to the staffroom for a cup of tea.