Keigo is often thought of as a separate kind of Japanese (often called "polite speech," "honorifics," or the like) that is used to show respect to whoever is being addressed. It is an entire speech style and can be complicated. One writer notices that there are two dozen ways of asking "Did (X) go to Tokyo yesterday?" depending on who is saying it to whom, in what setting and just who (X) is. A choice must be made as to the degree of politeness (respect) to be expressed.
In any two-person interaction, the speech style is determined by the statuses of the speaker and the addressee, and also the degree of intimacy between them. In general, however, status superiority supersedes intimacy. Junior ranking members of a team, for example, are expected to use a polite style in addressing friends of even only slightly higher status.
Some foreign commentators have seen in keigo an example of a rigidly hierarchical social structure. As one critic has phrased it: "By elevating the addressee through exalted terms and lowering the speaker through humble terms, a great distance is created between the two, thereby expressing deeper respect for the addressee."