Japanese Phone Call Phrases for Work and Daily Life

Why the phone is harder than talking face to face

On the phone you lose everything that normally carries a conversation. There is no face to read, no gesture, no menu or document you can point at, and no chance to mouth a word again more slowly. Japanese adds two difficulties on top of that. Office calls run on humble and honorific verbs that beginner courses barely touch, and the first exchange follows a fixed pattern that every Japanese colleague already knows by heart.

The good news is that this is exactly what makes phone Japanese learnable. A restaurant conversation can go anywhere, but a business call has perhaps eight possible moves, and each one has a standard line. Once the opening, the hold, and the message are automatic, your attention is free for the one unpredictable part, which is the actual reason the person is calling.

• Keep a pen and paper by the phone before you answer, not after.
• Write the caller's company first, their name second, then the request.
• Say the fixed lines at normal speed; slowing them down sounds less confident, not more polite.
• Decide in advance what you will say when you do not understand, so silence never happens.

The moshi moshi rule

Moshi moshi is friendly and slightly informal. It is right when a friend rings you, when you ring a friend, and any time you need to check that the other person is still there. It is not how you answer a company phone, because it belongs to the casual register and a first-time caller may be a customer. Answer instead with hai plus the company name in de gozaimasu form, or thank them for calling first.

Answering a work call and giving your name

Osewa ni natte orimasu has almost no meaning you can translate. It is the handshake of a business call, and both sides say it before any content. Expect the caller to answer your greeting with their own company and name in the same order: company first, then the person. Write both down immediately, because you will need them again when you pass on a message.

Making the call and asking for someone

Use sama for a customer or anyone outside your company, and san for a contact you already work with closely. Irasshaimasu deshō ka is the honorific of iru, so it asks whether the person is there in a respectful way; onegai dekimasu deshō ka simply asks to be connected. Both are safe. Adding ima, ojikan yoroshii deshō ka once the person picks up is a small courtesy that Japanese callers rarely skip.

Putting a caller on hold and transferring

Shōshō omachi kudasai is the single most useful line in this article. It is short, it is expected, and it buys you five or ten seconds to find a name, check a diary, or simply breathe. The softer shōshō omachi itadakemasu deshō ka asks rather than instructs and suits a customer. When you come back on the line, always open with omatase itashimashita before saying anything else.

Saying that someone is out or in a meeting

Notice that the colleague loses his san. To an outside caller your whole company is one side, so Satō stands alone and the verbs turn humble: orimasu rather than imasu, gozaimasu rather than desu. Ainiku softens the bad news in the same way that I am afraid does in English. Always follow the bad news with an offer, because leaving the caller with nothing to do next sounds unhelpful.

Taking and leaving a message

Uketamawaru is the humble verb for receiving, so godengon o uketamawarimashō ka literally offers to accept the message on the listener's behalf. Mōshitsutaemasu is the humble form of passing something on, and it is what a caller expects to hear before hanging up. If you are the one leaving a message, keep it to three facts: who you are, what you want, and when you can be reached.

Spelling names and reading numbers over a bad line

Japanese colleagues do not spell kanji letter by letter. They explain each character with a common word that contains it, which is why you hear tanbo no ta for the field character in Tanaka. For a foreign name, katakana plus the English letters read as Japanese sounds is normal. Numbers have their own hazards: ichi and shichi sound alike on a poor line, so say nana for seven and yon for four, read digits singly, and join the blocks with the particle no.

Asking the caller to repeat

Odenwa ga tōi, meaning the phone is far, is the polite Japanese way of saying that the line is bad. It puts the blame on the connection rather than on the other person's speech or your own listening, which is why it never sounds rude. Say it early. Struggling through two minutes of guesswork and then admitting you missed everything costs far more time than one repair phrase at the start.

Ending the call cleanly

Sayōnara is not used to end a business call. The closing pair is yoroshiku onegai itashimasu followed by shitsurei itashimasu, and the caller usually replaces the receiver a moment after the person who received the call. If you initiated the call, let the other side finish speaking, then close. Rushing off the line straight after the last piece of information is the most common foreign mistake.

A full call from start to finish

Read this call aloud twice as the receptionist and twice as the caller. The second time, cover the English and work only from the Japanese. Almost every real call you receive will be a variation on these twelve lines, with a different name, a different reason, and one unexpected sentence in the middle. Everything else you can already say.