Can 方 be taken out of some sentences without changing the meaning?


I've often found 方 to be quite abstract sometimes, and I've been thinking
about it more when I saw this:

> ……杉山さんって、こういう感じの方なんですね……

To me it looks like the sentence would mean exactly the same thing if I took
out の方 - "I can say with confidence that it feels like Sugiyama san"

Is this true or is 方 actually changing something here?




First, let's clarify two things:

  1. The 方 in “こういう感じの **方** ” is read かた, which is the polite way of saying _person_.
  2. The 〜ね at the end is important in understanding the tone of this sentence. 〜なんです is a confident/declarative statement, while 〜なんです **ね** effectively dampens the assertiveness in the tone. Think of the difference between saying “It's a friendly cat” versus something like “You could say it's a friendly cat” or “So it's a friendly cat, huh?”.

Back to your example,

>   1. 杉山さんって、こういう感じ **の方** なんですね  
>  _Sugiyama-san is this kind of person, huh._
>   2. 杉山さんって、こういう感じなんですね  
>  _Sugiyama-san is like this, huh._
>

Since the topic is clearly Sugiyama-san, a person, you can remove the の方
without altering the basic meaning of the sentence.

The only difference is that, in sentence #1, there is more information to be
gleaned about the **relationship between the speaker and Sugiyama-san**. Since
the speaker is referring to Sugiyama-san using the polite [方]{かた}, you can
infer that there is quite a bit of polite distance between the two people. I
would say that this distance is greater than what can be assumed from just the
use of 〜さん.

So while sentence #2 could be about any kind of two people, you can assume
from sentence #1 that the speaker and Sugiyama-san are **not** two classmates
in high school, for example.

