Techo Kaigi
Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, linguist, teacher, slacker. This week, we're making plans.
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Every Autumn, my wife and I have a major decision to make: which planners should we buy for the next year? This decision, and the associated shopping trips, can take hours for just one of us. God forbid we try to go shopping together. But, a couple of months ago, decisions got made. We bought our planners. And over the new year's holiday, we engaged in a little bit of techo kaigi.
Language changes sneak up on you. You're just moseying along in your own lane and suddenly, someone has put old words together in a new way for a new circumstance, and you must either adapt or get left behind. As we get older, getting left behind becomes more common and, frankly, easier as the changes we're expected to keep up with begin to piggy-back on each other, accelerating until we're too far back to catch up. It happens. Even to me.
Techo kaigi means to review your previous year's planner and journals and to plan your next year's diaries. As with anything journaling related, this is a highly personal process with different people applying their own creativity and ideas to the process. It can be a useful and effective way to analyze and assess goals and progress and, well, everything. It is also something I was prepared to dismiss out of hand.
I first stumbled across the phrase techo kaigi back in November while researching commonplace books and filed the phrase away to look into later. What usually happens in cases like this is, I save the phrase until I can talk to my students about it. It inevitably leads to an interesting discussion about what the phrase means, how it's being translated and used, and whether that usage is "correct." Only, in this case, by the time I remembered the phrase and wanted to look into it, my students were all on their winter break. So I asked my wife and her friends.
None of them knew what I was talking about. I figured it was another kakeibo - a somewhat egregious example where several recent headlines use the word to talk about "the Japanese art of budgeting" and every Japanese person I know says it means "a notebook for detailing household expenses" - and moved on. But the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon struck again and I kept seeing the phrase everywhere I looked. Time for more research.
The initial problem was one of vocabulary. There are two words in the phrase, each quite common. Kaigi translates very easily as meeting. As in, "There is a board meeting tomorrow." Techo is a little harder to translate. In English journaling circles (read: blogs and social networks) it's being translated as planner. And that's...not wrong, but not quite right either. See, I have several techos in my house. There's the one the pharmacist writes my prescriptions in. And the one my optometrist records my glasses prescription in. And the one the vet uses for Lucy the dog's yearly vaccines. And the one the mechanic keeps my car's maintenance record in. You see the problem. Techo is more similar to logbook than it is diary. So, planner - not wrong, but...
The bigger problem is that for myself and the Japanese people I spoke to, the words did not mean anything together. And this remained the issue until I had the brilliant idea to look on YouTube and Instagram. The problem, it seems, is one of relative culture; I suspect that if I had asked a classroom full of 19-year-olds, I would have gotten a much different answer than when I asked a bunch of 40-somethings.
Now, I haven't done any more research than that. I haven't looked into who coined the phrase or when, nor if it had a different interpretation that has shifted over time, or any of the really key data points. In fact, at the moment, all we have is circumstantial evidence - here's a Japanese phrase that is becoming popular with a subset of English speakers that is unknown to one subset of native Japanese speakers and yet is a (relatively) popular tag on Japanese social media, an area where users trend towards the younger end of the scale.
But that's how language change works. One set of speakers introduces a phrase that has a specific meaning in a given context and, over time, that phrase propagates and spreads to other genres, sub-cultures, and even languages. And all we can do is jump on the piggy's back, and try to hang on.
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Happy new year! Stay strong, stay curious. Learn something.
Joel