仕方が無い shikata ga nai It Cannot Be Helped

There is no way, so accept it: what a Japanese speaker says when a thing is beyond changing, unsatisfying, with nothing to do but let it go, and the acceptance is the point, not a report that there is no solution but a decision to stop looking. It has two further senses in speech, hopeless of a person and unbearably of a feeling. In English the phrase has become a name for a whole way of bearing what cannot be helped; in Japanese it is the phrase of daily life. The same idiom is also written 仕様が無い, said shō ga nai, and clipped to 仕方無い, and each is offered on its own. Whether it is for the acceptance or for the shrug is yours.

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