So long, and thanks for all the fish

I suppose, normally, you're supposed to do these sorts of things just before actually leaving, but I bought my ticket to return on the 4th of July (in fact didn't dawn on me that I had done that till I got home from Nagoya) and after watching the above video on Youtube and reading Masao Miyamoto, I began to get a bit sentimental about my time in DaiNippon.

Ringo-chan sums it up pretty well, when she says in the song: "sayonara, hajimemashite." Even a retarded monkey would recognize that as the most basic of Japanese, amounting, roughly, to what you say when greeting someone: "so long, nice to meet you." Yet, that's not really what you say when greeting someone; perhaps that's what one would say at the end of the world (the title of the song).

Normally, we don't even think about the weirdness that comes out of our mouths in formal situations. Rarely do we ponder much on the meaning of banal pleasantries like "the pleasure's all mine" or "my, these tarts are to die for!" yet they escape our lips with frightening regularity. I do like to think about it, in my idle moments, which are many more than few; I even bothered to look up sayonara in my electronic dictionary. Apparently, it's the protasis of an old formality that amounts to "so, what's been said is all I have to say." By itself, the phrase could mean something like "so, that's it," which would explain why you normally wouldn't say sayonara to someone unless you were going to part for a significant amount of time, perhaps forever. It certainly implies that there is no expectation of seeing them anytime soon.

The phrase that follows, hajimemashite, which also reeks of formality with morphemes present only to express politeness, literally means "starting," as in, "this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" or, less Casablanca-y, "I'm meeting you for the first time." This is how one usually begins their introduction to another person in Japanese society, yet it seems an oddly appropriate thing to say at the end of the world: "so, that's it. first time, eh?"

All I really have to say to Japan is:
然様なら、初めまして。
or, in the words of Douglas Adams:
"So long, and thanks for all the fish."