Evan
Is there a word for "entitled" in Japanese?

I was talking to a friend, and he was saying how people are so entitled nowadays. 

Just for reference, the definition for entitled goes: believing oneself to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment: kids who feel so entitled and think the world will revolve around them | his pompous, entitled attitude.

Is there a phrase or a word in Japanese that encapsulates this? I was thinking 自己中 and some of my friends said 当たり前だと思っている but I'm not that convinced. Does anyone have a clue?

2017年6月29日 09:07
コメント · 4
1
As you study this (an interesting question, btw), I would take into account psychological and cultural factors in whatever answers you get, and however you choose to regard those answers. As an analogy, it turns out that Baffin Islanders probably really DO have fifty words for snow. Asking a resident of Phoenix, AZ what the translations are for many of those words is unlikely to yield entirely useful nor actionable answers. Similarly, many Western countries (not naming any names, but you know who I mean!) have fifty words for the dark side of individualism; "entitled" being just one of them. I suspect that asking a resident of a wonderfully primarily socially cooperative country (again, you know who I mean) to translate most of those words is similarly unlikely to yield you an answer that will map back to *exactly* the same concept as the one intended by the Western term. Neither is the respondent likely to have the correct experience nor deep psychological insight into the phenomenon that the term is meant to represent. Just a thought. :D
2017年6月29日
偉そう。As in: 偉そうな態度を取る。
2017年6月30日
Yes. I hope you get an answer. Interesting! :D
2017年6月30日

Exactly what I was thinking, since I don't think "entitled-ness" is expressed very often in Japan.

However, I'm just wondering if there is a situation, where someone is fed up with another person's entitled attitude (for example a new staff in the workplace), and wanted to express that to his/her coworker about it. I think that happens quite a bit, so maybe in those situations there's an expression for that? 

2017年6月29日