Re: Yu Suzuki : a new interview about Shenmue III incoming !
Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 5:32 pmGameinformer in their playthroughs want to know what Yu Suzuki thinks about Peter Jackson ripping off Chai for Gollum 
kuwakodono wrote: I thought of a comment/question that I'm not sure has been addressed in the past. Chinese is like Japanese in that people are usually addressed by their family names unless they are exceptionally close, family, or much younger. Heck, Ryo and Nozomi only call each other by their family names in Japanese in Shenmue I. Thus, I found it a little bit jarring in Shenmue II where Ryo would call folks like Xiuying, Jianming, Guixiang, and even Delin by their first (given) names. Not sure if there was a reason for this that Suzuki-san can comment on.
I can answer this one, it's normal for Japanese classmates to call each other by their last names, especially if not super close, and Ryo is kind of conflicted and obviously very restrained about his feelings for Nozomi and doesn't want to admit to her that he wants to be close, especially once he's focused on finding Lan Di, so he continues to call her Harasaki like when they were classmates. With Naoyuki on the other hand, he's more casual because there isn't romantic tension between them and feelings that Ryo is unsure how to deal with, and that's reflected by the fact that he calls him by his first name with no honorific even in the Japanese version (his last name is Ito)
Ryo is close to Nozomi, he just doesn't show it. Nozomi shows it more than he does. Hence they address each other by last name despite actually being close enough to use first names, using last names to address each other doesn't necessarily make people not close anyway.
He doesn't address Fuku San or Goro or Tom by last name, for example. The last name without an honorific thing is really only for school/college/army contexts. Fuku san is like family and there's respect as training partners, so he uses his first name plus the honorific. Goro and Tom were met informally, not through school. Gui Zhang is also not a classmate he met through school, so he calls him by his first name. They have a slightly teasing/trolling friendship/rivalry dynamic so neither use honorifics with each other, plus people generally don't use them with people of their own age and similar status anyway, unless it's a formal context.
The last name thing is also used with elders whom it is customary to greet in a more formal context. He doesn't do this in hong kong for various reasons, because Jianming, Guixiang etc. introduce themselves by their first names and meet Ryo when he's an adult, while people like Yamagishi san in Dobuita has known Ryo since he was kid and it's common even in Western cultures to call such people Mr. so and so. Also, despite the fact that they speak Japanese, the characters in Shenmue II are Chinese, hence almost none of them are addressed as "san". Some Shenmue II characters speak Japanese with a Chinese accent as well. Although in Cantonese the word "saang" means pretty much the same thing as san, san is still used differently in a Japanese cultural context, and not using san would emphasize to a JPN audience that the setting is a foreign country.
