Comment by syockit

Fun trivia: the greeting only started to become a thing during the Meiji era as part of moral and ethics education. It may be argued that it has its roots in Buddhist teachings, but there's a theory that the drive to make it a common household practice may have come from the envoys who came back from western countries and saw the Christian prayer and thought it was a good thing to imitate. It's quite a stretch, but personally I find it quite interesting given that it was an era where Westernization was the craze.