The nuances of “kechi”, a Japanese word that means both stingy and thrifty depending on context, was best explained to me by a friend: good marriage is when the wife is thrifty and the husband is stingy, but in a bad marriage the wife is stingy and the husband is thrifty.
The explanation didn’t make sense to me at the time…until I put it into the context of my own family and work experiences. Then it made perfect sense. My mother was thrifty, which saved our family many times, because my father was not stingy in the business sense in that he wanted be looked up to as a nice guy instead of protecting his own business interests. The resulting business failures sorely tested my mother’s thriftiness but that thriftiness kept our family together.
The flip side bad marriage angle I experienced when training to become a Nichiren Shu priest. My temple master’s family, who ran the temple, were a complicated knot. At that time the master’s father was the head priest, his mother was one who actually ran the temple because she controlled the money. She was also stingy, mean with money and mean with people, that is to say utterly devoid of feeling for others, ‘dry’ as Japanese like to say.
The father was full of feeling: throwing big temple events, being the big guy people look up to…by spending other people’s money to make sure he was looked up to working his way up to the top of the Nichiren Shu priest world. The son, my master, inherited the worst of both, devoid of feeling but loving being a big guy who people look up to. His pretty, personable, much smarter wife was the only member of the temple family who was normal but she didn’t stay around. Neither did I. Later on she got a divorce after the daughters graduated from college and into marriages far way from any temple connection, the sensible thing to do. Long story short, stinginess drove all good things out of the temple, and temple family.
Stingy and thrifty share similar aspects with important distinctions. In Japanese both stingy and thrifty are usually translated as ‘kechi’ but using the same word is tricky: one has to be careful about the context and clear about the human nature at play. Most people might say ‘kechi’ when they mean ‘setsu-yaku’, an expression that captures the act of being economic, the positive spirit and mindset of thrifty, not wasting for the benefit of all. This is the traditional positive Japanese cultural value expressed in kechi. The negative connotation of kechi came with postwar affluence and looser attitudes. A spend now pay later mentality that looked down on thrifty.
Using kechi when you mean stingy is treacherous ground however. When in doubt human nature is the best guide: a person who cares for nobody, thrifty for the sake of spending money on themselves and nobody else, mean with money and with feelings. That kind of stingy. Instead of ‘kechi’ use ‘sekoi’ or ‘asamashii’ which means narrow minded, narrow hearted. The kind of thing I experienced when training at my master’s temple. It was a useful experience however as I learned how temple members dealt with the situation. Fully aware of the dynamics at play, they only engaged with the positive sides of the temple family. To them there was no point in trying to change human nature they cannot change.