黙殺

Japanese

Kanji in this term
もく
Grade: S
さつ
Grade: 4
on’yomi

Pronunciation

  • (Tokyo) さつ [mòkúsátsú] (Heiban – [0])
  • IPA(key): [mo̞kɯ̟̊ᵝsa̠t͡sɨᵝ]

Noun

黙殺 (hiragana もくさつ, rōmaji mokusatsu)

  1. ignoring someone's suggestion, opinion, or report.
  2. keeping a contemptuous silence

Usage notes

  • At the close of World War II, Japanese Premier Kantaro Suzuki chose mokusatsu to express Japan's reaction to the Potsdam Declaration's demand for Japan's unconditional surrender. It was translated to mean that Japan rejected the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, and later it was often suggested that the Allies took his response to be more assertive than he putatively intended it to be, the ostensible mistranslation thus contributing to the events that followed.
  • The Japanese verb for withholding comment is mokusatsu(suru), which you could better understand culturally as, “We'll wait in silence until we can speak with wisdom.”

Verb

黙殺する (transitive, hiragana もくさつする, rōmaji mokusatsu suru)

  1. to take no notice of
  2. to treat with silent contempt
  3. to shut one’s eyes
  4. to ignore
  5. to withhold comment
  6. to cut someone dead
  7. to withdraw from discussion, a common practice to take pause and reflect on what has been discussed and what the next steps should be

Conjugation

References

  • 2002, Ineko Kondō; Fumi Takano; Mary E Althaus; et. al., Shogakukan Progressive Japanese-English Dictionary, Third Edition, Tokyo: Shōgakukan, →ISBN.
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