Recently I heard about a term JBS in Japanese business culture. It said to stand for Japanese Bullshit and refer to small business business traditions, that are pointless from a European perspective. Young Japanese people call them JBS and find them repulsive.
I did a simple google search, which yielded nothing on the topic. So, my question is: does this term really exist/have you ever heard anyone use it IRL?
3 comments
Well, let’s see; an English-style acronym taken from an English-style turn of phrase for practices that are bullshit from a specifically European perspective and features precisely zero elements of Japanese (a language which, might I add, has an aversion to swearing to begin with).
Take your guess as to who probably invented that.
Still, for surety’s sake; I can’t find anything on the search engine, and wikipedia lists [6 possible entries](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBS) for JBS; not one of them is even close to matching that description, since they’re all various organisations.
I don’t know who told you that acronym, but I think they were fucking with you. Though you can certainly find them here and there, English-based acronyms just aren’t as catchy as colloquialisms in Japanese because they’re usually extremely clumsy.
Yeah seconding that it’s unlikely this is an actual example of Japanese slang. You do sometimes see those kind of abbreviations as slang, even ones that come from English– like NG for example. So it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility.
But this isn’t one I’ve ever heard and searching in Japanese doesn’t bring anything up that I could find.
I found one hit for ジャパニーズブルシットonline and it seemed to be referring to Graeber’s “bullshit jobs.” Don’t think this one is common, though of course Japanese people can and do gripe about their employers.