Iima, a word hunter, talks about the “expression of a bewildering politician”: “I should reflect on what I should reflect on,” “If I have misled you,” and so on.

Since when and how on earth have they been used?

Many of us have probably been bothered whenever we hear politicians say, “I regret what should be regretted,” or “If I have misled you,” etc. “I don’t know if there is anything that should be regretted, but if there was, I would have been very disappointed.

The phrase “should reflect on what needs to be reflected on,” sounds like a recognition that “I don’t know if there is anything to reflect on, but if there was,” is about the same as “I don’t know if there is anything to reflect on, but if there was…. In the case of “If I have misled you,” it is a “misunderstanding” rather than the truth, and even though it is possible that the wording was not appropriate, it sounds as if the problem lies with the one who “misunderstood” the situation.

How and when did these words, which politicians today tend to use as an escape, come into use? We asked Hiroaki Iima, editor of a Japanese-language dictionary and editorial board member of the Sanseido Dictionary of the Japanese Language, to explain, based on his research of the minutes of Diet sessions.

“I should reflect on what I should reflect on”: Decreased during the second Abe cabinet, then increased again during the Kan and Kishida prime ministerial administrations.

First of all, “反省すべきは反省し” first appeared in the minutes of the Diet session in 1948. There are a total of three instances of the same kind of phrase, such as ‘Reflect on what should be reflected on,’ ‘Reflect on what should be reflected on,’ and so on. Thereafter, the number of such phrases increased and reached a peak in the ’70s.

In the 1970s, for example, the phrase is often used in the years 1973 and 1974: 1973 was the year of the oil crisis, and 1974 was the year of Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka’s money-linkage problem, which led to the resignation of Tanaka’s cabinet in December of that year. Prime Minister Tanaka himself stated in a speech on January 24, 1974, “I have reflected on what I should have reflected on, and I will change what I should have changed.

The number of oil shocks decreased for a while after that, but began to increase again in the 1990s. The most notable year was 1995, the year of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. Immediately after the earthquake, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama repeatedly used phrases such as “We must humbly reflect on what we should reflect on in light of the experience of this disaster relief mission” (January 24, 1995). The Minister of Finance has often used the same phrase in reference to the situation after the bursting of the bubble economy, and it seems to have become a habit of his.

Surprisingly, however, he seems to have calmed down recently.

There were many years when there were more than 20 cases of “I should reflect on the situation,” but the number has been decreasing again since around 2001. Just around the second The second Shinzo Abe cabinet was inaugurated. In 2004, when the Security Law came into effect, the number was particularly low, with only two cases appearing in the questioner’s remarks.

Although it is impossible to judge only by the frequency of the phrases, it appears that the Abe Cabinet did not “reflect on what needs to be reflected on” during this period. Has the Abe administration stopped fudging the “reflect on what needs to be reflected on,” or was it a period of reopening the door to “there is nothing to reflect on”?

On the other hand, in the era of Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, there is again a slight increase in the kind of “should be reflected upon.

I’ll leave it to your interpretation, but in any case, it means that the “should reflect on” kind of expression was not born yesterday or today. At least as far as the Diet proceedings are concerned, it was already in use after the war, and especially from the end of the 20th century to the present century, it is a word that has come into common use.

It may be said that there have been more and more occasions when people want to show that much remorseful pose. If you are asked, “Are you sorry?” the answer should be either “Yes,” or “No,” but if you use the hypothetical form, “If you should be sorry,” you don’t have to say whether you are or are not sorry. People must have realized this and came to love it.”