How to start a formal phone call in Japanese

A formal phone call in Japanese typically begins with polite greetings and self-introductions to set a respectful tone. Here is a standard way to start:

1. Begin with a polite greeting appropriate to the time of day, for example, おはようございます (Good morning), こんにちは (Good afternoon), or こんばんは (Good evening).
2. Introduce yourself or your organization. Say [私、your nameと申します] which means “I am [your name]” using the humble form.
3. State the purpose politely, often starting with お忙しいところ失礼いたします meaning “Sorry to bother you when you are busy.”
4. Then continue to ask if it is a good time to talk, with 今、お時間よろしいでしょうか？ meaning “Do you have time now?”

This structure reflects Japanese etiquette of respect and formality on the phone and is widely used in business or formal settings. Using humble language (謙譲語, kenjougo) and respectful expressions (尊敬語, sonkeigo) is important to convey politeness in formal phone conversations. ^{2, 6}

References

• J.C. Herz (edited by Michael Pietsch), Joystick Nation: How Video Games Ate Our Quarters, Stole Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds [Book Review]

• Discourse Structure Analysis of Making Request in Japanese Conversation

• CALLS: Japanese Empathetic Dialogue Speech Corpus of Complaint Handling and Attentive Listening in Customer Center

• Request Expressions in Japanese Language for Educational Purpose

• Slang Abbreviation in Japanese and Indonesian Written Language: Origins, Process, Similarities, and Differences

• “Aisatsu” in Japanese Language Education

• The Communication Strategy Used by Japanese Learner at the Basic Level

• Mistakes in Using Keigo on Japanese Busines Correspondence Subject

• First grammatical encoding of Japanese Politeness (17th century)

• Controlling Japanese Honorifics in English-to-Japanese Neural Machine Translation

• A Kinetic Approach to Understanding Communication and Context in Japanese

• J-UniMorph: Japanese Morphological Annotation through the Universal Feature Schema