少数精鋭

しょうすうせいえい
shousuu seiei

Today's yo-ji is a useful one for anyone considering going into any kind of business endeavor in Japan, as it represents, I think, one important concept in organization and philosophy. I was reminded of it last week by Jeff's 知る人ぞ知る post, although the meaning is somewhat removed from that specific phrase. (For another business philosophy phrase, see 鶏口牛後)

During college, I interned in the New York office of a Japanese newspaper, and one of the first things I noticed was that our office was significantly smaller than those of any of our peer publications. As an unpaid intern, I wasn't ever really expected to work all that hard, but it was pretty clear that the paid staff, especially the bureau chief, was working pretty hard almost non-stop. I remember talking to my boss about this at lunch one day, and he told me that the company's philosophy was to have 少数精鋭 rather than a large number of worker drones.

I'm sure our US readers all recognize this...

I don't think it'll be too useful to go over every kanji in this phrase, but I do think that the last two are worthy of our time here. First, we have 精. Rikai-chan will tell you essentially what it means. It's good to know for words like 精力 or 精気, or any of the hundreds of other words that contain it. (Yes, we'll skip that one. Maybe we'll put it up on the Nightly Yoji one day.) 鋭, meaning sharp, is another good one to know, because, as in English, it carries both the physically sharp (like a knife) and mentally sharp (like... me) meanings. Which brings us to our:

Definition:
少数の選りすぐった人々。また、その少数で事に当たること。
Translation:
1. The few, the proud, the mighty
2. The select few

例文：
うちは少数精鋭主義だから、よそより人数少ないけど、実力では誰にも負けない自信がある。
We believe in maintaining a small, select group. So, even though we have less people than our competitors, we're confident that we are second-to-none in terms of ability.

Good luck, and godspeed.

表現 Break: 知る人ぞ知る

This 表現 is actually a 表現, and not a ことわざ. I came across it for the first time well over a year ago, in an article that Claytonian of The Hopeless Romantic sent me. The article is about a hidden restaurant that a guy runs out of his junk/memorabilia filled house somewhere in Nagasaki, and though I could understand a fair amount of it back then, there was one phrase that was too far over my head, no matter how hard I tried to figure it out.

知る人ぞ知る
しる　ひと　ぞ　しる
shiru hito zo shiru

Translation:
Only those who know, know, and they know it well.
Conversely, if you're not in the know, you're not.

The hidden restaurant in the article remains hidden, because it refuses to divulge its address, referring to it only as 知る人ぞ知る長崎の穴場スポット: A nice little spot in Nagasaki, well-known and well-liked by a select few. Both Clay and I were of the opinion that it would be really, really cool to figure out a way to become 常連 or お得意 さん at a place like that.

There were a few reasons I couldn't figure this phrase out at the time: context, timing, and a lack of grammar knowledge.

When I got a Japanese friend to help me try to find out where this place was, they explained 知る人ぞ知る, by saying "People who don't know, won't know," which is a decent job of translating contextually, but not literally. Literally, this expression emphasizes KNOWING, but her translation put the emphasis on NOT KNOWING. Which was bad timing because I had just learned the ～ずに construction, I kept trying to think up a way to connect 知る人ぞ, to the idea of negation, like you would do with 知らずに. Why? Because they both had 'z' sounds, and because I wasn't yet familiar with the way to use こそ to stress a subject.

Turns out that ぞ, is yet another archaic feature of Japanese, still preserved in some turns of speech today. It's an old way of saying "こそ," which makes it much, much easier to understand. Who knows? People who know こそ know.

例文：
A-san: あなたは外国人なのに、日本の一般人より多くの四字熟語を知っている理由って、なぜ？
Why is it that even though you're a foreigner, you know more yojijukugo than your average Japanese person?
B-san: 知る人ぞ知るウェブサイトのおかげですよ。
It's thanks to a certain site that those of us in the know use...