Japanese Military Honorifics

May 14, 2012 12:44

I currently am writing a piece that's set in the Japanese after world, so the time period of the honorifics isn't as important. However, the characters all take place in a military setting, so I was wondering what the honorifics would be for the various ranks. The only anime/manga that had military ranks being used that I've seen or read was Bleach where they address captain as -taichou and assistant captain as -fukutaichou, but I wanted more than one series for basis of my characters' honorifics towards each other.

The honorifics that I'd like to know are mostly, "general", "captain", "assistant captain", "___ seat" (ie 1st seat, 2nd seat, 3rd seat, etc. Up to 10th seat is needed.). I'm assuming that after a certain amount of familiarity with each other, the ranked members who see each other often enough might start addressing each other as -san, but correct me if that's wrong. I'm also assuming that a higher ranked member might use -san as well, such as a 2nd seat to a 5th seat. Would an unranked member of their division address a 4th seat in a different way than a 9th seat, assuming that the 9th and 4th ranked member were not on a -san level of familiarity yet?

I've tried to look up 'Japanese Military Honorifics', 'Japanese "Military Honorifics"', '"Japanese Military Honorifics"', 'Military honorifics in Japanese' and a plethora of other ways, but most of the sites that I come across are general honorifics or they have some mention of the military in it, like in a description of -kun. I also found about 50 results for a book called "Language and Gender in the Military: Honorifics, Narrative..." but it's about western military honorifics in English and French. I did find one source that listed -taichou as an acceptable way to address a captain, but that was the only one that I found so far and it came from an anime's forum so I also don't know how legitimate it is. I also tried using an online translator (because those work so well), but it literally gave me "Kyaputen Miyagi" and I decided that was all of the information I needed to invalidate instant translators for this.

~languages: japanese

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