Japanese people like to apologize; or maybe "like" isn't the right word. As in English, many Japanese terms that have the meaning of an apology are used for the sake of perfunctory politeness, so a sincere apology requires effort, and there's no more powerful apology than dogeza, the act of prostrating oneself in front of another person to ask forgiveness. But even this gesture has been diminished through overuse lately, its emotional value cheapened by the realization that such apologies don't always solve anything.

Having evolved from medieval times, when common folk were compelled to bow low as their lord passed in front of them, dogeza implies fealty to a superior. It is also used to ask for something other than forgiveness, like money. As one Twitter user recently remarked in response to the spate of dogeza-related stories in the media, if banks actually lent you money after you got down on your knees and begged, everyone would be doing it.

The Tweet was a reference to a scene in the popular TBS series "Hanzawa Naoki," which finished several weeks ago with very high ratings. In that scene a small Osaka manufacturer performs dogeza in front of a banker named Owada while asking for a loan. Later, the man's son and the story's titular character, played by Masato Sakai, does dogeza in front of Owada, who is now his superior in the bank where he works. And then in the penultimate scene in the series, which earned a whopping 46 percent audience share and has attracted more than a million YouTube hits, Hanzawa forces Owada to perform dogeza at a board meeting to apologize for an inappropriate loan he made, though everybody knows it's all about revenge.