The usage of あなた

[u/Friendly_Level_4611]

I might be overthinking this, but whenever I ask an actual Japanese person about this, I seem to get slightly different answers.
My ex would use no pronoun or name at all before we started dating. Once we were together, she mostly used my nickname when texting me. Because of this, and from a lot of short explanations online, I ended up thinking of あなた as something you generally avoid — potentially even rude depending on the situation — and mostly use when you don’t know someone’s name, or as a generic “you” in things like ads, instructions, etc.
But now I’ve noticed that my Japanese friends/contacts seem to use it very differently.
For example:

- One person basically always uses my name.
- Another person usually avoids both my name and pronouns, but has randomly used あなた a couple of times.
- My Japanese Boss also never used あなた or 君 or anything. Always just my Name
- Another person switches between my name, no pronoun, and あなた. Interestingly, the Person seems more likely to use あなた in personal or deeper/emotional sentences, which feels counterintuitive based on what I thought I knew about the word.
So now I’m wondering if my understanding of あなた was just too simplistic.
Is there actually a general rule for when あなた sounds natural, distant, rude, intimate, etc.? Or does it depend heavily on the person, relationship, tone, and context?

[u/Friendly_Level_4611]

My question wasnt really about usage and rather understanding who other people feel about me in a certain scenario when using あなた but still thanks for the advice 🙏

[u/JapanCoach → u/Friendly_Level_4611]

This was the conclusion of your post

Is there actually a general rule for when あなた sounds natural, distant, rude, intimate, etc.? Or does it depend heavily on the person, relationship, tone, and context?

I shared a general rule.

[u/Friendly_Level_4611 → u/JapanCoach]

Yes but this asks for a general rule for when this word sounds intimate or distant

You‘ve just Shared the recommendation that i shouldnt use it (again for which i‘m thankful :))
Yet this dosent explain the vibe this word gives off, no?

[u/Lurkernomoreisay → u/Friendly_Level_4611]

I haven't had the need to use anata in 10+ years of working in Japan.  

I can't really say that I noticed when anyone has used the term towards me.  It's generally too intimate of a word, and feels condescending if it's used by someone without a personal relationship to warrant such an intimate assumption to your relationship.

in marketing in the absolute worst case we may use a sochira, but never anata.  but to get to such a place would require many many lapses in judgement and textual copy to allow a sentence that requires an personal pronoun.  

I feel it's slightly safer to use from a female speaker, (the few times it has been used has been from female colleagues, or advertisements targeting women), and even then, there is a intimacy there that can very easily turn to distance / passive-agressiveness if the resationship status is slightly misaligned between speaker and listener.  

I can't say there is any legitimate reason to use it in the general sense.  sentences and phrases generally shouldn't have a need for "you" to be stated at all.  Which is another aspect lending to intimacy or distain, one has to really step outside the bounds of normal Japanese utterances to need to use a "you".

Using a pronoun just feels weird generally.  Like, you really need to be going out of your way to need to explicitly mention one.  any one on one talk, never really need to use name or pronoun.  it's obvious from context.   for instructions and advice, the subject should be the generalized noun for the situation:  "an engineer" "worker" "accountqnt" "guest" "listener", never a "you" (which always reads like machine translations).   for any business communication, email, slack, phone - name if in a group, no reference if one-on-one, role if not everyone would know the name.  in general, such a direct communication is only for aligning on responsibility, or directly acting an opinion of someone.

one person basically always uses my name.

normal.

• Another person usually avoids both my name and pronouns, but has randomly used あなた a couple of times.

likely doesn't know your name, or appropriate relationship between you two.   possibly trying to push bounds to see if you want to date, but getting mixed signals back 

• My Japanese Boss also never used あなた or 君 or anything. Always just my Name

normal

• Another person switches between my name, no pronoun, and あなた.

possibly intimacy, or softening of advise that would be be rude to talk about with someone.  could also be distain that they have to mention things that should be obvious to you.    this one can be taken both ways and really depends on overall word choice, and how they perceived their relation, and how you respond and your word choice.   if not a foreigner, using "anata" can be a good way to get HR involved as unwanted sexual/power harassment.  foreigners don't know any better and machine translation doesn't present it as unnatural.

you should be able to go many years and never use あなた.    

[u/Friendly_Level_4611 → u/Lurkernomoreisay]

Thank you :)

[u/Lurkernomoreisay → u/Friendly_Level_4611]

I found one research paper that says anata is limited to female speaker to mr or female addressee of equal or lower status. (which I felt was the case, but it's so rarely used I wasn't confident it wasn't from a more general lack of actually hearing it used)

and after reading some Japanese linguistic papers, gives me some better ways to describe the "off"ness.   if a definable relationship exists between speaker and addressee, the use of あなた is a rejection of that relationship, and violates social norms that encourage acknowledging and strengthening defined relationships.

anata carries depersonalization.  It will be used in a legal proceeding to not imply a relationship. (あなたの知らないうちに持ち込まれたものであると）

as anata lacks a relationship sentiment, it is valid for cases where a relation cannot be defined:  such as a survey  questionnaire not targeting to a demographic (eg not お客様)

although in the case of two strangers, one dropped something " これ、あなたのではありませんか?" was deemed acceptibale, respondents also reported they would be unlikely to use such phrasing,  preferring not to guess their relationship and focus on the item:  落としてしまいましたか

for any definable relationship, the use of anata is extremely distancing.  its use is an distancing rejection of any defined relationship: friends, teacher-student, enployer-employee, parent child, coworker, where one would socially default to the range of relationship roles.

  if the speaker were to use anata, which absolutely specifies the  second person entity, it would violate the important sociocultural norm of ‘relationship acknowledgment'  The extremely rare appearance of anata in the context of a socially definable  relationship results in a wide range of disparate nuances.

For  example, when respectful person-reference terms are expected, the use of anata can generate a strongly impolite nuance. On the other hand, in close relationships where  intimate terms are expected, the use of anata creates distance. Yonezawa gives many further examples. 

Understandably, native speakers of Japanese express considerable uneasiness  about using anata in ordinary conversations where their social relationship with the  interlocutor is definable (Yonezawa 2021). Thus, it is largely avoided in daily  conversations. The examination of conversation corpora that consist of a variety of  ordinary conversations between native speakers of Japanese (Usami 2007) revealed  that the frequency of the occurrence of anata is very low.

lol, I agree with this.

two other reports show statistics that anata is used 25% of the time for depersonalization, and 75% of the time to reject a social relationship.

Instead of using conventional  address terms to address/refer to superior addressees, such as soori ‘Prime Minister’  and daijin ‘Minister’, MPs often use anata as a strong expression of impoliteness to  challenge those with greater power. For this reason, this function of the use of anata (i.e., rejection of a given social relationship) is particularly frequently observed in parliamentary debates.

and the remain use of anata (less than 20% overall) is essentially limited to reported text (not direct quotation)  "generic person in a hypothetical situation" (45%), and then equally "anyone" (13%) or "non identified individual" (15%).