愛してる (Aishiteru): How to Say “I Love You” When the Language Doesn’t Exist

When he asked me how to say “I love you” in Japanese, I translated linguistically, but mistranslated culturally.

This is Mistranslate, a monthly column by Nina Li Coomes about language, self-expression, and what it means to exist between cultures. 

Last week, a half-Japanese friend of mine told me that on a visit to Japan, she asked her Japanese mother if she felt any angst over her daughter not being able to speak Japanese. “Oh, I don’t mind,” her mother replied in English. “This way I can tell you I love you.”

To non-Japanese speakers, this might seem like a strange sentiment. For my friend and me, it was cause for immediate peals of laughter. Her mother was exactly right: In Japanese, there is no way to say “I love you.”

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A tenet of American romance that I have never understood is the fuss surrounding the word “love.” In high school, my friends used to giggle while comparing when significant others would employ it, as if it was something to be kept locked away in a drawer until the right time. One day not long ago, my partner Jack looked up from his phone to giddily tell me that his best friend had finally told his girlfriend he loved her.

When Jack and I first began to date, we skirted the phrase for months, leaving pockets of meaningful silence in conversations where “I love you” might have fit. Finally, one night, I turned to him in frustration and told him I thought such coy conversations were for cowards. Jack took it in stride, laughing, and then gently said that he loved me. The confirmation relieved me, my posture relaxing in a bodily sigh as I told him that, of course, I loved him back. I had known from the moment I saw him, not in a “love-at-first-sight” kind of way, but in an “I am loving you” kind of way—a labor of incremental, deepening emotion, pursued day by day, moment by moment.

Our relationship is an English language relationship. When we say “I love you,” our mouths widen into Midwestern vowels, lips and teeth cleaving the “v” and “y.” Japanese is important to me, and as such Jack has made an effort in the past years to slowly pick up turns of phrase, with the eventual goal of becoming proficient in my other mother tongue. When he asked me how to say “I love you” in Japanese, for some reason I translated linguistically, but mistranslated culturally, telling him it was 愛してる (Aishiteru). After that, when Jack wanted to express his love, sometimes he would opt for “Aishiteru.”

Instead of warmth, I felt a shiver of disgust due to the sheer awkwardness of the phrase. I knew he meant well, but as soon as he uttered the word I would either burst into laughter or shudder before returning the sentiment in English. In my bilingual mind, “like” and “love” are two ends of the same word. If you agreed to date someone, or had a crush on them, wasn’t that just a diluted feeling of love? And if that relationship persisted and flowered, wouldn’t that diluted feeling deepen? Weren’t these all titrations of the same emotion?

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In Japanese, the phrase “I love you” exists linguistically, but does not exist culturally. Linguistically, it is best translated as 愛してる or Aishiteru. Unlike English, it does not contain the “I” and “you” involved in “I love you”; instead, the “I” is implicit, belonging to the speaker only in assumption, as is the “you.” The phrase most directly means “(I) am loving (you),” as if to convey that love is an active labor, not just an amorphous feeling tossed between two parties.

Linguistic differences aside, there is a larger cultural difference that causes a mistranslation to occur. Japanese people simply do not regularly say “I love you.” Someone might say “Aishiteru” in a sappy romantic movie, but overall the lingering impression after one professes their love in Japanese is a profound feeling of undeniable awkwardness.

It’s not that there’s no way to convey love in the Japanese language—there are hundreds of ways to convey love, but many of them are nonverbal. When reminiscing about maternal love, Japanese people will sometimes reference おふくろの味 (Ofukuro no aji), or the specific taste of a mother’s cooking, as a form of love. Lovers are not bound by emotion, but rather by an invisible “red thread of fate” or 運命の赤い糸. On Valentine’s Day, Japanese women are tasked with giving boxes of chocolates to the objects of their affection. A month later, on a holiday known as White Day, if the feeling is mutual, said object of affection is expected to give a small gift in return.

We celebrate 七夕 or Tanabata on July 7th, a holiday that honors the love between two celestial beings separated by the Milky Way. The heavenly lovers’ devotion to each other is not shown by speech, but rather by their love story: Separated for eternity, they are allowed to meet only once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month. Their love is remembrance, thoughtfulness, the willingness to endure on behalf of another. Paradoxically, in the same way that the unused “Aishiteru” implies action, it seems in Japanese, we do not speak love but rather act it.

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Though born in a majority-white suburb outside of Chicago, my father lived for thirteen years in Japan, where he learned to speak Japanese. When he returned to the States after college and met my mother, he stumbled in asking her on a date. She appeared at the agreed time in a full pantsuit, clutching a briefcase, because she thought he was asking her to meet to discuss a business opportunity. Luckily, my mother spoke English, so the miscommunication was quickly cleared up.

Through the course of their relationship, I imagine my father learned a more tender version of the Japanese language—how to properly schedule a date, or how to ask where to drop my mother off as he maneuvered her neighborhood on his rickety bicycle, she perched on the rear rack, her legs swinging off the side. Eventually he would learn the Japanese necessary to ask my grandfather for his daughter’s hand in marriage, muddling through postwar histories of hurt and anxieties about the happiness an interracial marriage could bring. Later, my father’s business colleagues taught him the art of Japanese negotiation: the way someone sucks their teeth to avoid saying no; the Japanese songs to sing after a night of drinking to cement the celebratory camaraderie of a deal well-negotiated.

When I was born, and then my sister, my father learned the Japanese of preschool playgrounds and parent-child athletic days. He learned the names of the Doraemon cast, inundated by the high-pitched chatter of animated television shows and our own toddling attempts at speech. All of these experiences and relationships together culminated in his ability to speak a tongue not originally his own.

It shouldn’t have surprised me, then, when my father scolded me for joking about Jack’s awkward “Aishiteru”s. He thought it was uncaring of me to continue to let Jack use the wrong term without his knowledge. “You have to tell him to stop that!” he said. “How will he ever learn the language if you won’t tell him he’s saying the wrong thing?”

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Language is a labor of love. To understand each other, to listen, to speak with intention and precision is love in action, no matter if it is across two separate languages or one shared one. To tell someone you love them in a way they will understand requires thought and meaning. To be open and receptive to expressions of love requires similar thought and meaning. Though the direct phrase “I love you” is mistranslated into “Aishiteru,” the love itself is not mistranslated—instead it is transmuted, existing in a plethora of different expressions and phrases.

I took my father’s reprimand to heart and told Jack that a better way to say “I love you” in Japanese was not Aishiteru, but 大好き or Daisuki ((I) big like (you)). When expressing love verbally, Japanese people tend to use a variation of 好き or “suki,” which means something closer to “like.” Though he initially balked at what seemed like a downgrade from “love” to “like,” he eventually came around to the idea that this would be the best way to tell me how he felt. These days, when his voice turns soft at the end of the phone call, or heavy with sleep after a long day, I might hear him say “Nina, daisuki.” I smile, and my voice softens to respond with the words we now share.