With over 70 people responding (thank you all!), the following is the most popular answer to the question of whether or not adding -san to foreign names should be the default as it would be with Japanese: “When speaking Japanese, follow the norms of Japanese (use suffixes like -san) when addressing the foreigners / 日本語で話している場合には、日本語の慣例に従って「さん」などの敬称を名前につける.”
I was moved to do this little survey because I have been unable to convince a local television personality to abandon her “foreign = yobisute (no -san, etc)” approach to interviewing expats living in Kumamoto. I wanted to see if I was unusual in objecting to this and, judging by the survey results, I’m not. I’ll write up the results in more detail later and convey them to the TV personality in question. I’m hoping to get her to adopt an approach that the majority of foreigners (and Japanese for that matter) seem to view as preferable. If she changes her approach, she’ll be a better model of how to interact with foreigners to the young TV audience her program is targeting.
– Kirk
P.S. If you’d like to respond to the survey, please click on the following link: