Itadakimasu: What Japanese People Really Say Before Eating

You Don't Always Say It Out Loud

First, Japanese people don't actually say it out loud every single time.

When eating alone at a restaurant, not many people say it aloud. Most of us say it silently, in our heads. Some just bring their hands together for a moment. Then again, some people say it out loud even when they live alone.

The interesting part is this: if you skip it, something feels off.

Japanese has a word, moyamoya, for a hazy, unsettled feeling — not guilt, not regret, just something that won't clear. That is close to what lingers when you forget to say it and start eating. You haven't been rude to anyone. Nobody is going to scold you. And yet something feels unfinished.

A Word That Doesn't Pick One Person

Why does it feel that way? I think it is because this word doesn't single out one person to thank.

Of course, if the person who cooked is right there, your thanks include them. If your mother made the meal, your itadakimasu carries thanks to your mother.

But it doesn't stop there. Japanese people say itadakimasu just the same at a restaurant, where the cook is out of sight, or over a meal they made themselves.

Japanese has another word built the same way: okagesama. You hear it in phrases like "okagesama de genki desu" — roughly, "I'm well, thanks to you." The kage in it means the shade, the unseen side of things. It thanks someone or something unseen — without naming who — and even adds the honorific -sama. I think itadakimasu is a close relative of that word.

Skip grace, and you are missing something in your faith. Skip bon appétit, and you may seem a little cold to the people you are eating with. In both cases there is someone specific on the other side, so leaving it out can come across as rude.

Itadakimasu doesn't pick one person. So leaving it out doesn't hurt anyone in particular. What remains is not someone else's disapproval, but a small untidiness inside yourself. It isn't an obligation, and it isn't faith — and yet, without it, you can't quite settle. Everyday life in Japan has words like that.

So What Are You Thanking?

What Japanese families teach goes roughly like this:

Thanks to everything involved in the food reaching your mouth and becoming part of your life.

The lives that became the food. The people who grew it. The soil, the sun, the rain. The people who carried it. The person who cooked it. The person who set it on the table.

I think of it less as a list and more as a way of drawing the circle: everything that had a hand in getting this food to you. That is why you can't count it all — and why you don't need to.

And the part about "becoming part of your life" matters. You take in the life of what you eat, and it becomes your own life. So the thanks doesn't stop at the ingredients. It reaches back along the whole path that brought them to you.

Japan has long had a feeling that there are gods in mountains, in rivers, in trees. Seen that way, "receiving nature's gifts" and "receiving from the gods" mean almost the same thing. Thanks to the lives you eat and thanks to something unseen sit together in a single word.

Many Japanese children grow up being told to eat every last grain of rice in their bowl. In my family, too, the rule was to leave not a single grain behind. Rice has long been treasured in Japan, as if each grain held a special power of its own. Don't let go halfway of what you received with itadakimasu. That promise is in the rice bowl, too.

What Every Family Shares, and What Differs

I want to be honest here: even within Japan, what people are taught isn't the same everywhere.

It differs from family to family and from region to region. It differs depending on which nursery school or kindergarten you went to. Something taken for granted in western Japan can be completely different in Tokyo — that happens a lot in this country.

Still, I think two things are shared by most families: thanks to the lives that became the food, and thanks to the person who made it. Beyond that, each home and each person gives it a slightly different shape.

Not only animals, but vegetables too are seen as having life. You might wonder what it means to thank a carrot. That connects to a Japanese sense that a spirit lives in everything — a story I would like to tell in another article.

Then You Pick Up Your Chopsticks

After saying itadakimasu, the first thing a Japanese person does is pick up their chopsticks.

At a Japanese table, chopsticks lie sideways, between you and the food. You pick them up to start eating, and set them back down when you are done.

About those sideways chopsticks, I heard a story as a child.

The food on the far side of the chopsticks still belongs to the gods. Only when you say itadakimasu and pick up your chopsticks do you receive it from them. The chopsticks lying across the table are a boundary between the gods' side and the human side — a kind of sacred line.

I don't remember exactly who told me. My grandfather, or maybe my father. At the time it didn't interest me much; I just said "huh" and let it pass.

It isn't something I read in a book. I suspect it is the kind of thing passed down by word of mouth, inside families. Some Japanese people grew up hearing the same story; others have never heard it at all. And yet the story I barely listened to is one I still remember today.

Chopsticks carry other ideas about the table, too.

The special chopsticks used at New Year, called iwai-bashi, are tapered at both ends, so you could eat with either end. The explanation usually given is that one end is for you, and the other is for the gods. New Year food is also an offering to the god of the new year, and you eat it together with that god. That is why you are not supposed to flip iwai-bashi around, even when serving food from a shared dish.

The idea of gods and people eating the same food shows up in Japanese festivals as well. After a festival, it is customary for everyone to share the food that was offered to the gods.

On the other hand, there is one thing you should never do at a Japanese table: stick your chopsticks straight up in a bowl of rice. That is how rice is offered to someone who has died, placed by their pillow, so at an everyday meal it is considered deeply unlucky. When you eat in Japan, rest your chopsticks on a chopstick rest or across your bowl instead.

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Gochisousama Faces the Other Way

Gochisousama, said after the meal, is also thanks — but a different kind.

Chisō originally meant running around. Both of its characters mean "to run," and the word goes back to old Chinese histories. In the days before refrigerators and shops, the only way to host someone was to run here and there gathering food. From there the word came to mean hospitality, and eventually a lavish meal.

So gochisousama isn't praise for how fancy the food was. It thanks someone for the time and trouble they took — for all that running around.

Put the two side by side and you can see they face opposite ways. Itadakimasu grew out of your gesture of lifting something above your head to receive it. Gochisousama grew out of the other person's effort, running around for you. One is the receiver's word; the other is turned toward the person who did the work.

Gochisousama also carries a report on the meal: it was delicious; I'm full, thank you. Itadakimasu doesn't include "this looks good," but gochisousama includes how it went. If the cook is there, you say it to them.

You don't have to clean your plate to say it. It is simply what you say when the meal is over.

How It Gets Passed Down

Itadakimasu isn't something you learn in one lesson at school. It settles in little by little, in several places.

Usually you learn it first at home. The family sits down together, the parents put their hands together and say itadakimasu, and the child copies them. It may well be the first table manner Japanese parents teach their children.

Nursery schools and kindergartens teach it too, as a basic manner — but how they do it depends on the school.

The nursery school my children went to was run by a Buddhist temple of the Tendai school. There, before saying itadakimasu, the children put their hands together and recite words of prayer. I will come back to that, through my daughter, a little later.

In elementary school, there are chances to think about what it means, in moral education classes and elsewhere. And every school day, the whole class says it together at lunch — a lunch the children serve to each other themselves. Here is how lunch and cleaning time work at a Japanese school.

But it is hard for small children to understand the meaning behind the word. That animals and plants become food; that what is alive looks nothing like what ends up in your mouth. Children start to grasp that only when they are a bit older. The manners come first, and the meaning catches up later.

Whether to put your hands together is up to each person. Most people do, but there is no rule that you must.

An Old Word, a Newer Greeting

The word itadaku itself is old. Its use as a humble way to say "eat" or "drink" already appears in kyōgen comic plays from the late Muromachi period, around the sixteenth century.

As a greeting said before every meal across Japan, however, it may be much newer. One view is that it spread around the 1910s and 1920s, partly through etiquette lessons at school.

But when something started and what it holds are two different questions. And what passes from parents to children inside the home rarely gets written down. Just because something doesn't appear in the records doesn't mean it wasn't there — like the story about the chopsticks I heard as a child.

The Prayer My Daughter Taught Us

At my daughter's temple nursery school, the children recite words of prayer together before they start to eat. The words said before the meal are called shokuzenkan, and the words said after it are called shokugokan.

I don't remember the exact wording myself. But in the words before the meal, the children give thanks to the Buddha and to the many things that went into the meal. There is also a sense of receiving it gratefully, without complaining about how it tastes or how much there is. Then they say itadakimasu, put their hands together — and pick up their chopsticks.

When the meal is over, they recite the second set of words, giving thanks for the strength the food has given them and promising to repay the kindness they have received.

One day, my daughter taught this to the rest of us at the dinner table. "This is how you do it!"

At home, we normally just say itadakimasu. So I told her that the single word itadakimasu holds the same meaning as the prayer she says at school. She took that in, as if it made sense to her.

I had seen Christian families say grace before meals many times in foreign TV shows and movies. But it was my own child who taught me that something similar was right here, in everyday Japanese life.

Not Quite Faith, Just Part of Life

Japan is often described as a non-religious country. Yet in daily life, you run into religious moments all the time.

That doesn't mean people believe in a particular religion or belong to one. It means that customs born from religion have melted into everyday life, as something people simply do.

We greet the New Year by visiting shrines and temples, spend Christmas in a Christian-ish way, and close out the year with Shinto and Buddhist customs again. Many couples marry in a church, and nearly all funerals are Buddhist. For many Japanese people, I think religion is received less as faith and more as culture.

And Japan has a deep feeling for gratitude — for saying thank you. So we put thanks into words, for food and for people alike. Plenty of people live with a quiet gratitude toward the spirit they sense in everything around them.

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