By Alexx Thompson

When I saw Sally had posted a Kemushi-Chan (Loretta) video in our Facebook group, I was beyond excited. She is one of my favorite YouTubers to watch for foreigners experiencing Japanese culture, and I’ve been watching her for years. I really like her drive and how motivated she is, and I can relate to her a lot. We both started learning Japanese when we were around high school, but she is obviously really good now. The entire video she did was her speaking in Japanese, minus a few sentences in English for an example. I was really blown away and she’s been one of the reasons I want to become a translator and I want to be able to speak as well as she does. Check it out for yourself:

The video Sally posted was about Loretta explaining how in Japan the voices the store workers use to welcome people is very interesting. It’s kind of a loud nasally sound and they say “irasshaimase!,” but then she goes on to say it’s not their real voice, and normally they don’t speak that nasally. She was really surprised at first when she saw and she wondered why they didn’t just speak normally. I thought it was extremely interesting and I really wanted to know how it developed into what it is today! She then compared it to America in that when we go to a store, usually store clerks have a “customer voice,” if you will, and I thought that maybe it really wasn’t that different after all. Especially since I’ve noticed that the worker voice is higher pitched while talking to customers, kind of like a robot, or a set of lines. So even though it is shocking at first, it’s still kind of similar!