Itadakimasu いただきます: Thank you for letting me eat you
10 life-changing Japanese sayings
This series introduces poetic Japanese sayings which inspire life. And the Japanese word today:
いただきます
Itadakimasu
Thank you for letting me eat you
Every culture has its own way to appreciate the feast. The Japanese version of ‘Bon Appetit’ is ‘Itadakimasu’, literally meaning ‘receiving from you with gratitude’. Who is the ‘you’ here?
Not The God. Unlike the prayers we do before a meal, the Japanese say thank you to the cow, the chicken, the radish and the rice for sacrificing their lives to sustain our kinds. Imagine a winner say thanks to a dead loser with gratitude, ‘ thank you for sustaining my life with your sacrifice.’ Japanese, traditional ones, don’t waste food. Not only because they have experienced poverty before, but also they respect food a lot.
Respecting the loser, namely the one you crushed, is somehow perplexing. It’s too hypocritical to say one never makes others’ lives miserable and one never makes someone else a loser. Unequivocally, you have crushed someone. The moment you got into University, someone lost that place. Your victory of winning that job is at the expense of another candidate’s disappointment. Your lover ended up being with you and dismisses another admirer. Does that make you feel better? You must have won something. Even if you have bought the last cheeseburger of the day, you top the one queuing after you.
Do I feel gracious towards the losers? Why should I? Not like I have owed them anything. What I achieved is what I fought with blood, sweat, and tears, even if my victory is just that last cheeseburger.
I deserve the victory. Be that as it may, that social resource could have been utilized by someone else for another purpose. Even when the losers are not as philanthropic as the steak on your plate, your gratitude with respect for those who have been unwillingly sacrificed, will make you value what you have.
On the other hand, one should not lose the winning attitude, the very core of evolution: survival of the fittest. Otherwise, you will be deprived of what you deserve in the first place. Competition makes one fulfill one’s potential, which I still firmly believe in. If you don’t break your own record, you may not have run fast enough to get that last cheeseburger. However, you don’t have to trash your trophy.
If you don’t need what you win, give it back. That doesn’t stop you from honing your winning mindset. The bigger the winner you are, the bigger a philanthropist you can be, and the more philanthropic you are, the more motivated you get to win the resource to make the world a better place.
Unfortunately, not that I have not encountered some pretentious freaks who submit themselves to brutal acts out of so-called love and empathy which legitimize their superiority over other forms of lives. If you are not genuine about this, why say ‘Itadakimasu’?
Say ‘Itadakimasu’ with all your heart when you have your sushi and ramen when traveling in Japan.
Follow me if you would like to see things a little differently from the lens of the Japanese culture.
In the series of “10 Japanese sayings, 10 life lessons”, I would like to share classy and beautiful selections of Japanese sayings that may change life perspectives. Language is the mirror of culture and philosophy. Through the lens of Japanese, we may see a different color in life.
Read my other posts in the same series:
Cut off, let go and leave behind 断捨離
Written by Rex Lam K.M.
Someone who tries hard to love the saddening life a little bit more, and happens to see the light through the lens of Japanese philosophy.
