{"id":1322,"date":"2025-07-01T20:00:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-02T03:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/?p=1322"},"modified":"2025-07-01T20:00:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T03:00:09","slug":"hachiji-juppun-mae-a-japanese-phrase-that-even-japanese-people-cant-agree-on-the-meaning-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/?p=1322","title":{"rendered":"Hachiji juppun mae \u2013 A Japanese phrase that even Japanese people can\u2019t agree on the meaning of"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Survey results show big gap in how younger and older respondents interpreted this seemingly simple phrase<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Japanese is often described as a \u201chigh-context\u201d language, meaning that things are regularly left unsaid but still expected to be understood. Those unsaid things aren\u2019t all veiled emotions or relying on some nebulous set of assumed shared cultural values, either. Especially in spoken conversation, subjects, verbs, and objects are frequently dropped from sentences if the speaker thinks the listener can tell what they are from context.<\/p>\n

That might seem like madness if you spend your days speaking a low-context language like English, where if you want to tell someone that Brad Pitt likes ponzu, you have to say exactly that: \u201cBrad Pitt likes ponzu.\u201d<\/a> In practice, though, Japanese speakers simply get used to having to make a steady stream of judgement calls when they\u2019re talking with someone, and believe it or not, it rarely causes confusion between proficient speakers.<\/p>\n

However, there are times when the context bar can get too high even for two native Japanese speakers to understand each other, as demonstrated by the phrase \u201chachiji juppun mae.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u25bc That\u2019s right, it\u2019s linguistics time, and today\u2019s topic is time linguistics!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

On a recent episode, broadcaster Fuji TV\u2019s Mezamashi TV<\/em> morning program conducted an on-the-street survey of 100 people in Tokyo, asking them what they think hachiji juppun mae<\/em> means<\/strong>. None of those words are particular advanced vocabulary; they\u2019re all vocabulary any Japanese kindergartener knows. And yet, while all of the respondents were certain that hachiji juppun mae<\/em> is referring to some time on the clock, there wasn\u2019t anything close to a consensus as to what time they thought it indicated, with some saying it means 7:50, and others arguing that it means some time between 8:00 and 8:09<\/strong>. What\u2019s more, there was a pretty wide gap in opinions between older and younger people.<\/p>\n

\n

Hachiji juppun mae<\/em> means 7:50<\/strong>
\n\u25cf Chosen by 36 percent of respondents age 10 to 25<\/strong>
\n\u25cf Chosen by 84 percent of respondents age 40 to 59<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hachiji juppun mae<\/em> means sometime between 8:00 and 8:09<\/strong>
\n\u25cf Chosen by 64 percent of respondents age 10 to 25<\/strong>
\n\u25cf Chosen by 16 percent of respondents age 40 to 59<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So how did such a big split happen, and which answer is correct?<\/strong> To answer those questions, let\u2019s take a look at what the components of the phrase mean individually.<\/p>\n

Starting with hachiji<\/em>, hachi<\/em> is the Japanese word for \u201ceight.\u201d Ji<\/em> on its own means \u201ctime,\u201d but when it comes directly after a number, it refers to a time of the clock, making hachiji<\/em> \u201c8 o\u2019clock.\u201d<\/strong> Juppun<\/em> is another number\/time compound, with juu<\/em> meaning \u201cten\u201d and pun<\/em> \u201cminutes,\u201d so after crunching their pronunciations together you get juppun<\/em>, which by itself means \u201c10 minutes.\u201d<\/strong> That just leaves mae<\/em>, which means \u201cbefore\u201d<\/strong> or \u201cin front of,\u201d and can be used for talking about both physical locations and temporal relations.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s there to stumble over with such simple, mundane vocabulary? If hachiji<\/em> means \u201ceight o\u2019clock,\u201d juppun<\/em> means \u201c10 minutes,\u201d and mae<\/em> means \u201cbefore,\u201d hachiji juppun mae<\/em> must mean \u201c10 minutes before eight o\u2019clock,\u201d i.e. 7:50, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u25bc It\u2019s so simple that it seems like we could have had this all sorted out with 10 minutes to spare before breakfast.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the thing: in addition to meaning \u201c10 minutes,\u201d as in a 10-minute amount of time, juppun<\/em> can also mean \u201c10 minutes of the hour.\u201d<\/strong> So if you want to indicate the time \u201c8:10,\u201d you say \u201chachiji juppun<\/em>,\u201d and that\u2019s where the potential for confusion comes in for hachiji juppun mae<\/em>. If you parse the phrase by linking juppun<\/em> and mae<\/em>, you get \u201c8 o\u2019clock + 10 minutes before,\u201d which would be 7:50. If you mentally attach juppun<\/em> to hachiji<\/em>, though, you get \u201c8:10 + before,\u201d which feels like \u201cbefore 8:10.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

So now that we\u2019ve seen how the two groups arrived at their differing opinions about the meaning of hachiji juppun mae<\/em>, which interpretation is correct?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Neither of them\u2026and both of them<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Remember how we said Japanese is a high-context language? You\u2019ll sometimes hear armchair sociologists attribute this to Japan\u2019s strong sense of humility, emphasis on harmony, and penchant for avoiding overly assertive direct statements that could lead to conflict, and those do, in some ways, contribute to how language and communication has developed in Japan. But there\u2019s another reason Japanese is a high-context language: it takes a long time to say everything in Japanese<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It may be a high-context language, but Japanese is also a sound-poor language, in that there\u2019s a relatively small pool of available sounds for forming words. Most famously, Japanese lacks an L, but it has very few consonant blends, and the resulting high volume of vowels cranks up the syllable count for Japanese vocabulary. Because of that, there\u2019s a temptation to trim parts of a sentence as long as it\u2019s still understandable. If a Japanese person says \u201cI ate some really good ramen,\u201d for example, their friend might then just ask \u201cWhere did eat?\u201d trimming the \u201cyou\u201d and \u201cit\u201d since those can be safely assumed from the flow of the conversation.<\/p>\n

Hachiji juppun mae<\/em> is trying to do something like that. If you wanted a precise, air-tight way of saying \u201c10 minutes before 8 o\u2019clock,\u201d you could put the preposition no<\/em> in front of juppun<\/em>, and say \u201chachiji no juppun mae.\u201d<\/strong> And if you wanted to leave no wiggle room for any meaning other than \u201cbefore 8:10,\u201d you could say \u201chachiji juppun no mae.\u201d <\/strong>But in omitting the no<\/em> in order to save a syllable, hachiji juppun mae<\/em> can\u2019t be definitively said to mean either 7:50 or 8:00-8:09, and it also can\u2019t be said to not<\/em> mean either of them.<\/p>\n

\u25bc No, no <\/em>is not always a problem, but in this case, yes it is.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This still leaves us, though, with the question of why younger people in the survey were so much more likely to take the stance that hachiji juppun mae<\/em> means sometime between 8:00 and 8:09<\/strong>. Yohei Harada, a professor of design at Shibaura Institute of Technology, theorizes that smartphones<\/strong> are the reason. With today\u2019s teens and younger 20-somethings having grown up using online maps and train navigation apps, Harada believes they\u2019re grown accustomed to down-to-the-minute precision when it comes to setting schedules. Since they\u2019re so accustomed to using directly numeric expressions of time, they\u2019re quick to mentally connect hachiji juppun<\/em> as \u201c8:10\u201d when they hear hachiji juppun mae<\/em>, and the possibility of phrasing such as \u201c10 minutes before 8\u201d instead of \u201c7:50\u201d doesn\u2019t come to mind.<\/p>\n

However, it\u2019s hard to reconcile Harada\u2019s explanation that smartphone use has made young people more accustomed to precise expressions of time with the younger respondents interpretation of hachiji juppun mae<\/em> as being a vague nine-minute span from 8:00 to 8:09. In fact, one could argue that it\u2019s the exact opposite psychology that\u2019s at play here<\/strong>, and that the older respondents, by nature of having more adult life experience, are more attuned to the value of precision and punctuality. In terms of scheduling personal or professional meetings between busy grown-ups, there\u2019s far more use for a phrase that indicates a specific time, 7:50, and being so loosey goosey as to use hachiji juppun mae<\/em> to mean sometime between 8:00 and 8:09 likely feels inconsiderate and irresponsible.<\/p>\n

It should also be pointed out that hachiji juppun mae<\/em> cannot be used to mean \u201cby 8:10.\u201d That has to be hachiji juppun made<\/em> or hachiji juppun made ni<\/em>. So if one were to say hachiji juppun mae<\/em> to mean \u201cbefore 8:10,\u201d it wouldn\u2019t just mean sometime between 8:00 and 8:09, but any time prior to 8:10, including 7:59, 7:58, and so on, presumably all the way back to at least the start of the day.<\/p>\n

Taking all this into account, you could build a pretty solid case that hachiji juppun mae<\/em> should mean \u201c10 minutes before 8 o\u2019clock\u201d\/7:50, since the alternate interpretation would have it mean something very vague and not particularly useful. But while we\u2019re on the subject of time, no one who was late to a meeting or missed their train managed to turn back the clock and have a do-over by winning a linguistic design debate. And on the subject of survey design, with Mezamashi TV\u2019s<\/em> street survey having a sample size of only 100 people, the takeaway probably shouldn\u2019t be so much \u201cyounger people think one way and older people think another\u201d so much as that there are definitely two schools on the matter. So if someone says hachiji juppun mae<\/em> to you, you might want to double-check exactly what time they mean.<\/p>\n

Reference: Mezamashi TV<\/a> via Hachima Kiko<\/a><\/em>
\nTop image: Pakutaso<\/a> (edited by SoraNews24)<\/em>
\nInsert images: Pakutaso (1<\/a>, 2<\/a>, 3<\/a>)<\/em>
\n\u25cf Want to hear about SoraNews24\u2019s latest articles as soon as they\u2019re published? Follow us on Facebook<\/a> and Twitter<\/a>!<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Survey results show big gap in how younger and older respondents interpreted this seemingly simple phrase. Japanese is often described as a \u201chigh-context\u201d language, meaning that things are regularly left…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}