Be my guest.

“Be my guest.”

どうぞご自由に。好きなだけ召し上がり下さい、あるいはご利用下さい、という意味のフレーズです。


“Be my guest.” This common English expression means “Do as you wish, feel free”. Yet this is rarely how we treat a visitor. Every invitation contains an unspoken code of admission.

Sometimes, as is happening with Germany’s judicial process for asylum, the code is made deliberately obscure, so complex as to confound the very notion of welcome. In order to keep the coalition government intact, and appease its more reactionary elements, in 2018 the German parliament agreed to the creation of the so-called Ankerzentrum. The word, which also means “anchor centre”, is an acronym for Ankommen Entscheidung Rückkehr – “Arrival Decision Return”.

The centres are intended as mass transit hubs to accommodate all asylum seekers, effectively immobilising them from the moment they reach Germany until their applications are approved, or they are deported – a process that can take up to two years.
(Make yourselves at home: the meaning of hospitality in a divided world. The Guardian. October 29, 2019.)


時にこのフレーズは皮肉にも用いられます。


A Bath resident has taken photographs of badly parked cars and has sarcastically captioned the collection online as ‘please, be my guest, park wherever you like’.

Twitter user @landatthebottom took photos of six vehicles parked on pavements in and around Widcombe Parade on Wednesday morning (November 20).
(Richard Mills. ‘Please, be my guest, park wherever you like’ - anger over badly parked cars in Bath. The Somerset Live. November 21, 2019.)


文字通りには、わたしのお客さんになって下さい、ということですが、お客様は神様です、といったフレーズに見られる関係性からは、相手が優位な立場にあることを認めた上でそれを暗に批判する表現ともなり得ます。

好きなようにしてよ、とか、やれるもんならやってみな、といったところでしょうか。