Japan's most popular buzzwords of the year reflect the scandals that rocked the political arena and the trend of people eager to shoot photogenic items for social media.
One of the winners — announced Friday — for the 2017 U-Can Shingo Ryukogo Taisho (2017 U-Can New Words and Buzzwords Awards) is "sontaku."
Its meaning is the proactive anticipation of a person's wish before an explicit order is given. It saw a revival following the Moritomo Gakuen cronyism scandal, in which bureaucrats in charge of approving a new school were suspected of acting in line with the intentions of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe without being actually ordered to do so.
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