Will There Be Keigo In Heaven?

Love it or hate it, keigo (Japanese honorifics) may have something to teach us about God and his designs in creation.

Socially required when meeting someone for the first time or when speaking to a superior, keigo is more complex than teineigo, polite language. Keigo includes both language for “honouring” the person you are speaking to (sonkeigo), and language for “humbling” yourself (kenjogo).

Coming from a highly egalitarian, efficient, and pragmatic culture, it has been a struggle for me to learn keigo. My cultural core rebelled against the very idea of it! Theoretically a language of respect, I suspected it was the cause of unnecessary barriers to communication.

Longing to be freed from keigo’s cumbersome rules, I asked a few Japanese university students if they too desired a keigo-less world. To my surprise, most of them said no. “You can’t separate keigo from Japanese. Japanese is keigo,” one friend insisted.

Recently, a wise missionary friend advised me not to be distracted by the forms of culture but to look deeper to understand their function. What function does keigo hold in Japanese culture?

Beauty not efficiency

The students valued keigo, considering it traditional. While accepting that Japanese language has changed, particularly since the post-war era, they would not trade in keigo’s intricacies for directness: “Keigo is beautiful,” they said.

Keigo makes writing letters and answering phones time-consuming, but is time spent on etiquette wrong? In my drive for efficiency, I had forgotten that God does not prize efficiency over all things. He delights in taking time to communicate with his people. Keigo encourages me to slow down and enjoy God’s gift of language rather than using keigo sparingly.

Respect not equality

“You mean God speaks the same way as humans?” Several students laughed at the thought of English Bibles without an honorific verb for God speaking. To them, keigo is a gift that allows them to reverently address God and others in authority. From my social background, where even pastors, lecturers, and teachers are called by their first name, this concept of reverent address is strange, but biblically it makes sense.

Christian author Akira Idogaki¹ suggests that keigo helps to delineate Christian relationships. He points to examples of husband and wife (1 Peter 3:1), parents and children (Ephesians 6:1), master and slave (Colossians 3:22), authorities and citizens (Romans 13:1), and elders and younger men (1 Peter 5:5). Although he admits keigo can wrongly segregate the “in” crowd from the “out”, when used rightly it upholds the order of God’s creation.

If I do not have love…

I eventually agreed with the students that keigo is a tool to show respect. It can be misused—to sound impressive, to mock others, or to distance others. However, when used rightly it reflects the beauty and order of God’s creation.

So as I look up an online keigo guide², complete with reasons for why I might refer to a senior colleague with kenjogo rather than sonkeigo, I remind myself that my goal in keigo is love.

“If I speak human or angelic languages but do not have love, I am a sounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”³

Will there be keigo in heaven? Who knows, but at least we’ll have eternity to master it! 

1 Idogaki, Akira, 1985. Kono kuni de shu ni shitagau (Following the LORD in this country). Word of Life Press.
2 The Agency of Cultural Affairs, 2010. Keigo omoshiro sodanshitsu. http://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/keigo/index.html
3 1 Corinthians 13:1