I was once married to a Japanese woman. Before we got married, I had to figure out what to call her.
I mean, I knew my wife’s name. (I may be a man, but I’m not a total idiot.) The question was: what do I call her when I’m talking to others?
Table of Contents
ToggleHistorical assumptions

The various levels of politeness in the Japanese language mean that how you refer to someone in conversation is determined by two principal factors: your relationship to the subject you’re speaking about, and your relationship to the person you’re speaking to. For spouses, this means you use different words depending on whether you’re talking about someone else’s spouse versus your own.
The problem for modern Japan is that most of the terms used for spouses – in either direction – are laden with vestiges of sexist assumptions.
Take, for example, some common terms for referring to one’s husband or wife.
For husband, there’s 主人 (shujin). (The term ご主人 is used to refer to someone else’s husband.) Taken literally, shujin means “primary person,” and implies that a husband is the family’s primary breadwinner – while subtly reinforcing that a woman’s “place” is in the home.
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An even more popular way to refer to one’s husband is 旦那 (danna). This term has an interesting history. From the Sanskrit danna, under another spelling (檀那), it refers to the giving of alms (檀家; danka) to the priest of one’s local Buddhist temple. Over time, it came to refer to patronage as such (such as a regular customer to a geisha), and then, by extension, to the “master” who generally takes care of the people in his house[1].
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For women, the word for wife or “bride”, 嫁 (yome), carries similar baggage: the kanji for this word is literally the kanji “woman” (女) and “house” (家) slapped together.
“If Men Are The OS, Women Have an App-Like Existence”

This issue sparked a lot of discussion two years ago when Japanese author Kawakami Mieko (川上未映子) called for changing the way spouses referred to each other (JP) – particularly in their homes in front of their children. Kawakami recounted the instances of sexism she’s encountered since primary school, and how ingrained the attitude of female inferiority appeared to be in Japanese society:
If men are the OS (base software) of Japanese society, then women have an app-like existence. We’ve been conditioned to such a construction since were were little[2].
As an adult, Kawakami saw her own son internalizing the notion of men as “strong” and women as “weak.” Correcting this trend was “like playing whack-a-mole,” and drove home the need to change the way spouses treat and talk to one another:
「呼び方なんてたいした問題じゃない」と言う人もいる。でも言葉って本当に大事。男性でも女性でも、配偶者を「これ」とか「おまえ」とか呼ぶようになってきた時から、DVとかそういう関係が作られていくんですよ。主人とか嫁とか呼ばれていると、そういう関係性が内面化されていく。だから言葉の力を馬鹿にしてほしくないんです。
もう2017年なのだから、これまで当たり前に使われてきた言葉の賞味期限を見直していかないと。「女子力」なんかも、女性を都合よく扱うための言葉としか思えない。
Some people say, “Forms of address aren’t a big deal.” But words are very important. A relationship more akin to domestic violence is created when someone starts referring to their spouse as “a thing,” or “you there.” Calling someone “shujin” or “tsuma” internalizes such relationships. That’s why I wish people wouldn’t dismiss the power of words.
It’s 2017 already, and we need to give these words that people use as a matter of course an expiration date. Words like “femininity” are nothing more than words for mollycoddling women.
In Search of a Replacement
But if existing terms aren’t adequate, what should replace them? That was the dilemma that Huffington Post JP writer Murahashi Goro found himself in when debating this question[3].
Yome (嫁), Murahashi admits, sounds “musty” and “old-fashioned.” But he also runs through a whole list of other terms he finds to be lacking:
- 奥さん (okusan; usually used to refer to someone else’s wife “with respect”, though is also used by some to refer to one’s own wife) – “feels distant”
- 上さん (kamisan) – “it’s old-fashioned and no one uses it”
- 妻 (tsuma) – “flat”, but probably the word that comes closest to “expressing equality”
- 家人 (kajin) – literally meaning “person you live in a house with,” Murahashi praises its sense of strict equality. However, he admits that “absolutely no one uses it”
- 相方 (aikata) and パートナー (pa-tona-) – both mean “partner,” but Murahashi feels both feel somewhat “out of place,” with パートナー lapsing into outright comedy.
When I put this same question to a wider user base on Twitter, it invoked a wide variety of responses. Most folks go with the traditional appellations, with only a few opting for terms such as aikata, and LGBT couples seeming to prefer loan-term words like “partner” or “husband.” I was surprised to see that even some of my most liberal, feminist followers still used traditional terms such as danna.
Granted, this loose polling of a handful of people isn’t anywhere near scientific. However, other articles, such as this write-up in Excite, document similar feelings that most of the potential replacements just don’t have the same feel, and that danna, tsuma, okusan, etc.are fine. As one reader put it, “They come with historical baggage, but whatcha gonna do?” Still other readers were dead-set against ditching the traditional terms, noting that they took pride in being called okusan or yome.
So it seems there’s little interest – at least for now – in Kawakami’s appellation revolution. Indeed, one can argue that – between unfairness in employment, unequal dress codes, and the slew of not guilty verdicts in slam-dunk rape convictions – Japan has much bigger feminist fish to fry.
Still, I’ll be interested to see where the next generation of Japanese land on this issue. Will the language shift as the country’s attitudes toward women change?
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The Absolute Worst Thing to Call One’s Wife: “Mommy”
In the course of writing this article, I was contacted by Allison Alexy, an anthropologist who specializes in Japan. Dr. Alexy, who’s done extensive fieldwork in the country, wrote a paper called “Intimate Dependence and its Risks in Neoliberal Japan” that examined the changing concept of “interdependence” in Japanese society in the past several decades.
While Dr. Alexy’s paper touches on many subjects, she has a section devoted to what Japanese men call their wives at home. One of the more popular choices is oi (おい), which is an abrupt way of saying “hey, you!” The women Dr. Alexy interviewed were emphatic that such forms of address were “evidence of the inherent problems of dependence and disrespect in Japanese marriages and the necessity of men changing their attitudes toward women.”
Some men, however, have an even worse appellation for their wives. As Osada-san, one of Dr. Alexy’s interviewees puts it:
Allison: Did you want kids?
Osada-san: I wanted kids.
Allison: Did your husband?
Osada-san: Yes, he did… But he said that until we have children he said, “I can be your baby.” I don’t want such a big baby, I thought. A dependent child… There are lots of Japanese men who think like this, you know? Men who want to exchange their wife for their mother. Men who want their wife to be like their mother. So, after marriage, I was called “Mommy.” I was called “Mommy, Mommy!” I am not your mommy!
Osada-san argued that this extreme co-dependence is not uncommon among Japanese husbands. (Not surprisingly, Osada-san’s marriage ended in divorce.)
Dr. Alexy’s paper concludes that many Japanese women appear to struggle with the concept of dependence – simultaneously chafing against it as they also, in other ways, glean a type of pride from caring for these man-children who can’t care for themselves. On the other hand, the interview subjects recognized how problematic such “terms of endearment” were – something that subjects in similar studies 25 years earlier were reticent to call out.
Like Kawakami Mieko, they, too, seem to recognize the power of words. Perhaps name changes will come first, not to the public sphere, but to the inner sanctum of the Japanese home itself.
What to read next
Many Words for Husband in the Japanese Language: Which is Right?
Sources
[1] 旦那/だんな. Gogen Yurai Jiten
[2] 「主人」や「嫁」という言葉は賞味期限 川上未映子さん. Asahi Shimbun
[3] 嫁さん、奥さん、妻…。呼び方を見れば、パートナーから自分がどう思われているかが、見えてくる. Huffington Post JP
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