(The photo is of the center of CATANIA, Sicily. When you are with a baby, uncles and aunts dote on you immensely, without asking, lol. They touch the baby's face without hesitation. This wasn't the case in America. They are very kind people.)
Speaking of keigo, I was taught that it is a social tool that allows you to be polite, and that's the definition I learned... I was only taught the simplistic equation that people who can use keigo are polite people, but through my own experiences, there was a time when I learned a perception that overturned that idea.
What is it, you ask? It's from Italian. In Italian, there are two forms for the second person pronoun 'you': TU and LEI. TU is for close acquaintances, and LEI is for strangers, or a polite 'you', or so I initially learned. (The verb conjugation changes depending on whether you use TU or LEI, so you can tell from the context whether someone is speaking in the TU form or the LEI form.)
So, is LEI polite language? Certainly, it does sound like polite language.
However, I don't know if this is a general rule, but when I asked an Italian friend directly, they told me that using LEI (for strangers) isn't solely for the purpose of being 'polite'.
Huh???
It's a 'reverse-intimacy' social tool for 'when you want to create distance from someone'? Or rather, I heard that it is *also* a social tool for better maintaining personal space.
In Japan, when I was young, if I was polite, I would be patted on the head and told, 'Ah, you're so great for using keigo,' and I had experiences where my relationships with elders deepened. To me, this was an eye-opener.
I don't want to be close to this person, so I'll use keigo. I see.
And, while ruminating, I also think, 'Huh?'. That might be true!! At school, we were only taught the good aspects of keigo, but in Japanese society and in the Japanese language, we sometimes use keigo intuitively in that way. I see. Perhaps I just hadn't thought about it again.
Keigo can *also* be a social tool for securing personal space. When people are bothersome, or when social situations are troublesome, it's keigo ONLY. This interpretation is also good! It was a new reflection, or rather, a discovery, and I still think so today. Ciao ciao.
