黙殺

Japanese

Kanji in this term
黙 殺
もく
Grade: S		 さつ
Grade: 4
on’yomi

Noun

黙殺 (hiragana もくさつ, rōmaji mokusatsu)

  1. ignoring someone's suggestion, opinion, or report.
  2. keeping a contemptuous silence

Usage notes

  • At the close of World War II, Japanese Premier Kantaro Suzuki used this unfortunate choice of words in his reply to the U.S. demand for Japan's unconditional surrender (the Potsdam Declaration). The meaning has a more passive nuance than "ignore" into which it was translated, so it is theorized that the Allies took his response to be more assertive than he intended it to be, and that this translation error was responsible for events that followed.
  • The Japanese verb for withholding comment is mokusatsu(suru), which you could better understand culturally as, “We'll wait in silence until we can speak with wisdom.”

Verb

黙殺する (transitive, hiragana もくさつする, rōmaji mokusatsu suru)

  1. to take no notice of
  2. to treat with silent contempt
  3. to shut one’s eyes
  4. to ignore
  5. to withhold comment
  6. to cut someone dead
  7. to withdraw from discussion, a common practice to take pause and reflect on what has been discussed and what the next steps should be

Conjugation

References

  • 2002, Ineko Kondō; Fumi Takano; Mary E Althaus; et. al., Shogakukan Progressive Japanese-English Dictionary, Third Edition, Tokyo: Shōgakukan, →ISBN.
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