Hello,
Odd question that popped into my head. Back in 2019, I was visiting Kobe and was in a store. I was bending down to look at a product and accidentally bumped into an elderly lady slightly.
I immediately said “sumimasen” to her. She responded by saying “…sumimasen???? HA!” and walked away.
Would it have been more appropriate to say “gomenasai” in this scenario? To this day, I have still been dumbfounded by this scenario.
4 comments
すみません would be the appropriate thing to say, perhaps she just wasn’t expecting you to say that or something
From my understanding, sumimasen is more appropriate when drawing people’s attention like ‘excuse me for interrupting, but…’ whereas gomen nasai is closer to ‘I apologise for my rudeness, please excuse me’
sumimasen os appropriate for small accidents like that. Her suprise was probably not the word choice but you saying to her (in a good way 🙂
Two other comments seem to disagree, but at least while I was living in Kansai, 100% of people bumping into me would say “gomenasai” and I would always feel silly if I instinctively said “sumimasen” in a case like this.