A gentleman on a mailing list once wrote of Japanese bureaucratese, “it has been rumored that top American officials can read Japanese government documents without translation because they speak the same language.” But us ordinary folks must puzzle it out.
The Japanese dialect of this international language has a funny word called seibi. Seibi means anything at all and is vaguely like the English “maintenance”. Here are some lovely examples of seibibun, or 整備文 “maintenance literature”, from a mysteriously undocumented and unknown Canadian named Iain Arthy:
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地下の情報整備 Underground information maintenance |
土壌の調査 Soil survey |
Business maintenance
Promoting business
Computer maintenance
Buying new computers
Roadside arboreal maintenance
Planting trees on the road
Job opportunity maintenance
Hiring people
Specific business accumulation
A street of offices
As you can see, seibi is a word you can’t do without when you are trying to make your ordinary action look very official and important.
Someone wrote an article about this in English a long time ago but I’m afraid I can’t find it. I guess these things disappear from the Internet sometimes.