Thank you

有難う御座います (arigatō gozaimasu): thank you, in its polite form, and literally it is a rare thing: 有り難い meant hard to exist, rare in the Man'yōshū, and gratitude grew out of rarity. ございます is the polite verb, in use since the 1590s. The one thing to know about this design is its spelling: it writes the thanks in kanji, 有難う御座います, where a Japanese hand today writes ありがとうございます in kana. The kanji form is not wrong; it is what the printer set in 1884 for the first shorthand transcript of a storyteller, Sanyūtei Enchō, and what 1,739 prewar books carry. It is the printed, slightly ceremonious form, and a reader who knows Japanese will see that at once.