Answering “Aren’t You Going?”
— Yes/No Systems in Japanese, English, and Sign Language

1. What is the “yes” agreeing with? — the Japanese system

Japanese hai (yes) and iie (no) most often express agreement or disagreement with the assumption behind the other person’s utterance. The question “aren’t you going?” assumes “you are (probably) not going.” If that assumption is right, the answer is “hai, I’m not going”; if it’s wrong, “iie, I am going.” Even when the content of the answer is a negative sentence, it opens with “yes” as long as it agrees with the assumption. That is the basic Japanese pattern.

Japanese linguistics has made this point repeatedly. A Nagoya University journal paper analyzes how hai and iie can both attach to the very same continuation (“…I’m not going”) precisely because they mark agreement with the idea the question presupposes, not the answer itself. A Chiba University bulletin paper sums up the contrast: Japanese “answers to the other person’s mind,” while English “answers to the facts.”

2. English is the mirror image — Yes/No follows your own answer

English yes/no aligns not with the questioner’s assumption but with the polarity of your own answer — whether your reply is an affirmative or negative sentence. To “Aren’t you going?”: if you are going, your answer is the affirmative “I am going,” so Yes. If not, it’s the negative “I’m not going,” so No. Whether the question itself was negative makes no difference.

Which means English has, as a rule, no equivalent of the Japanese “hai, I’m not going” — no “Yes, I’m not.” When Japanese speakers answer an English negative question with “Yes” and get taken to mean the opposite, the classic stumble comes not from vocabulary but from this difference of system.

3. Which type is which language? — and a manga scene

These two patterns are studied in linguistics as a typology of answering systems. A typological study of prosody and gesture (Frontiers in Psychology, 2015) classifies English and Catalan as polarity-based, and Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese as truth-based, with languages like Russian mixing both strategies. The same study also shows the dichotomy is a simplification — real languages behave in mixed ways depending on context. Japanese speakers, too, sometimes answer polarity-style: “iie, I’m going!”

Remarkably, a shōnen manga once tackled this structure head-on. In chapter 407 of Yoshihiro Togashi’s HUNTER×HUNTER (vol. 39, Shueisha, 2026), two characters — Morena and Boursen — sit down to a high-stakes card game, and before playing they perform “an alignment of answer formats for negative questions.” The scene describes a people who answer “aren’t you doing it?” with “yes, I’m not doing it” — taking the other person as the reference point and opening with “yes” in the sense of “your question is right” — and the characters agree that confirming the convention in advance prevents chaos. It is, almost word for word, an explanation of the truth-based system: a quiet corner of linguistic typology written into the psychology of a card game. You don’t expect to meet answering-system typology in an entertainment magazine; I slapped my knee.

4. In sign language — what does a nod affirm?

In signed conversation, the nod and the headshake play roles close to “yes/no.” And here is the interesting part: an answer consisting only of a nod or headshake can leave the same room for assumption-mismatch as a bare Japanese hai. Asked go + not-exist? (“not going?”), a nod may read as agreement with the not-going — but part of that reading is left to the viewer.

That is why, in practice, re-stating the proposition does the work. Don’t stop at the nod: sign go + not-exist (“I’m not going”), or go (“I’m going”) — show the content of the answer itself on the hands. Then the answer lands unambiguously, regardless of how anyone read anyone’s assumption. The property we saw in the previous article — that JSL splits the carriers of negation at the level of vocabulary — earns its keep here too.

5. The interpreter’s technique — don’t translate yes/no; answer with the proposition

Brought down to interpreting practice, this becomes three habits.

1. Never map yes/no mechanically — converting a Japanese hai straight into a nod or an English “yes,” or a nod straight into hai, breaks down the moment a negative question is involved. Keep the premise in view: yes/no points at different things in different languages.
2. Where possible, open the question itself into the affirmative — interpret “aren’t you going?” as go + questioning face (“are you going?”), and the answering nod or headshake maps cleanly onto going / not going, with nowhere for the mismatch to creep in. The standard move from the previous article — conversion to the affirmative — turns out to be answerability design too.
3. Answer with the proposition — when voicing a deaf person’s nod into Japanese, say not just “hai” but “hai, I’m not going”; in the other direction, render a hearing person’s “hai” as nod + go + not-exist, proposition and all. One added phrase, and the two systems structurally cannot collide.

6. Wrapping up

One last thing. The sorting and examples here are one way of thinking about it. Sign-language expression varies by region and individual, and answering conventions vary with the scene and the interlocutor. If you have thoughts or other renderings, please send them through the contact form (the form is in Japanese; the article name is filled in automatically).