There is a word in this country that gets deployed with the timing of a magician palming a coin, and that word is shouganai. It cannot be helped. Nothing to be done. The Japanese shouganai meaning, if you crack open the guidebook written by some doe-eyed exchange student in 2004, is this beautiful Zen acceptance of forces beyond mortal control. Earthquakes. Typhoons. The heat death of the universe. Very stoic. Very noble. Very fucking convenient when what you're actually accepting is that a bloke behind a desk has decided he'd rather eat his own tie than do the thing you've politely asked him to do.

Because that's the con, isn't it. That's the whole racket. Shouganai was built for the tsunami and it has been quietly repurposed as a get-out clause for anyone who fancies clocking off early on the effort. The system is down. Shouganai. The only person who can approve this is on holiday until March. Shouganai. Your parcel has been sent back to a depot in Saitama because the third kanji in your surname made the scanner sad. Shouganai. None of these things are acts of God. Every single one of them is a decision, made by a person, who has looked at the small amount of effort required to fix it and thought: nah.

Why shouganai is the world's most polite middle finger

Here is the bit that actually makes me want to put my head through the laminated signage. It's unanswerable. That's the genius of it. If someone tells you no, you can argue with a no. You can escalate a no. But you cannot argue with the weather. Shouganai dresses a plain refusal up in the robes of cosmic inevitability, so that pushing back makes you the unreasonable one. You, the sweaty foreigner, shaking your fist at the tide. How gauche. How very un-Japanese of you to imagine the tide could simply be asked to fill in form 7B and sort it out by Thursday.

And it works vertically, top to bottom, all the way down. The manager tells the salaryman shouganai, so the overtime is unpaid. The salaryman tells the counter staff shouganai, so the process stays broken for another decade. The counter staff tell you shouganai, and you go home and drink a tall can in the dark and wonder what you've done with your one life. It's not fatalism. Fatalism is honest. This is fatalism weaponised, a whole culture of learned helplessness with immaculate customer service, bowing at you while it does absolutely sod all. The bow is the worst part. They're so sorry. They're sorry the way you're sorry about the tides.

The thing that could obviously be done

What sends me properly round the bend is that the thing is nearly always doable. Trivially. You can see it being doable. The form could be accepted. The exception could be made. The other member of staff, the one who isn't on holiday, could stand up and walk four fucking metres and press a button. But that would require someone to stick their neck out, to own a decision, to risk a bollocking from a superior who will himself deploy shouganai the moment anything lands on his desk. So instead the entire machine agrees, with exquisite politeness, that nothing can be done, and everyone goes home clean.

For fuck's sake. I've watched grown professionals, immaculate, competent-looking wankers in pressed shirts, invoke the tsunami defence over a photocopy. A photocopy. There was a photocopier right there. It was on. It had toner. And still: shouganai. As if the copier were Vesuvius and we were all just ash-covered Pompeiians waiting for the inevitable.

So no. I'm not accepting it any more, and I'll tell you exactly why. Shouganai means it cannot be helped. But nearly every time some tosser reaches for it, it very obviously bloody can be. It just won't be. By him. Today. And he'd rather I mistook his laziness for the wisdom of the ancients. Mate, I've filed the forms. I know the difference. Shouganai, my arse.