Nyorai is the Japanese pronunciation of rúlái 如来, which is in turn the Chinese translation of tathāgata. The etymology of the original term is unclear, but in the context of the Mahayana Buddhism that swept China and later Japan, it refers to either the original Buddha or another who, like him, made a mercy mission to our world to spread truth and light. Bhaiṣajyaguru 薬師如来 or the “Medicine Buddha”, Amitābha 阿弥陀如来 a.k.a. Amida “Pure Landlord” Buddha, and the Five Dhyani Buddhas 五智如来 are just a few of the nyorai in the popular Japanese pantheon.

Nyorai has also been applied to the Christian God. When Francis Xavier and his retinue arrived in Japan in the 16th century, “Deusu Nyorai” was one of the many attempts made at translating His name (which also included a disastrous dead-end in which He was identified with Vairocana). When Japan reopened to Christianity in Meiji times, this appellation was revived with delight by Akutagawa and other writers, who took the liberty of applying it to Mary and Jesus as well.

But it was Tsubouchi Shōyō who took the logical next step and applied it to secular bringers of wisdom and joy, in a mini-essay collected in his 1896 Bungaku sono oriori 『文学その折々』 (“Literary Occasions”), under the title Gaikoku bi-bungaku nyorai 『外国美文学如来』 (“Foreign-literature nyorai”).

美文を翻訳して、彷彿原著の現れ来れるかと思はしむる訳者は、吾人之れをたたへて如来と名づくべし。明治文壇幸いにして已に三如来を得たり、英文如来を森田思軒氏とし独文如来を森鴎外氏とし魯分如来を長谷川四迷氏とす。輓近内田不知庵、原抱一庵等の諸氏、また大に翻訳に力を尽くせり、文界遠からずして二三の新如来を加ふべし。吾人は他の幾百羅漢が陸続紫雲に駕して登天し、更に如来となりて来降せんことを待つこと、大旱の雲霓も啻ならず。

Translators of fine literature, whose works strike me as faithful to the original, I praise with the term “nyorai.” The Meiji literary world is fortunate in already having three nyorai: the English Literature Nyorai, Morita Shiken; the German Literature Nyorai, Mori Ōgai; and the Russian Literature Nyorai, Hasegawa [Futabatei] Shimei. Of late, Uchida Fuchian [later "Roan"], Hara Hōitsuan, and others have also been exerting their utmost efforts in translation. It may not be long before the literary world adds two or three new nyorai to its ranks. I look forward to an ongoing stream of hundreds of arhats riding purple clouds to the heavens, becoming nyorai, and returning to our world; the rains that end this great drought will be something to behold.

Tsubouchi’s imagery is distinctly Buddhist, with its arhats and purple clouds (紫雲), but it’s strictly a metaphor. The traditional-mystical Buddhist “west,” as in Journey To The, has been abandoned. In its place we find the modern West: multi-faceted yet essentially unitary, and possessed of secret teachings that can render its adherents superhuman.

Hyperbole? Well, yeah. But, as Kōnosu Yukiko argues in Meiji-Taishō honyaku wandaarando 『明治大正 翻訳ワンダーランド』, with so many Japanese writers determined to create a “modern” (i.e. Western) literature in Japanese, translations of actual Western literature were hugely influential as both exemplars and taste-setters. For example, the runaway critical and popular success of Wakamatsu Shizuko’s translation of Little Lord Fauntleroy in the 1890s (as “小公子”) was equally a success for the genbun itchi movement (towards the “unification of speech and language,” i.e. away from the archaic written style that almost had to be taught as a second language), which had informed Wakamatsu’s technique. And, of course, it’s no coincidence that two of Tsubouchi’s nyorai are more famous today for their original works in Japanese than their translations — or that the central figure of modern Japanese literature, Natsume Sōseki, was a government-approved specialist in English literature.

Special bonus home-grown nyorai! From Taneda Santoka’s journal circa July 1932:

独居は好きだけれど寂しくないこともない、たゞ酒があつて慰めてくれる、南無日本酒如来である。

I like solitude, but it is not un-lonely; at least I have drink to comfort me, namu nihonshu nyorai.

Amen.

Haikara is a pseudo-English Japanese word from the Meiji period derived from the phrase “high collar.” (It originally had a long final a: haikarā, ハイカラー.) You might summarize its meaning as “fashionably Westernized,” but of course, the full story is more complicated.

In his Thoughts on Haikara (ハイカラ考), Kimura Shōhachi (木村 荘八) traces the origin of the term, via a passage in Ishii Kendō (石井研堂)’s Origins of Meiji Phenomena (明治事物起原), back to Meiji journalist Ishikawa Hanzan (石川半山). According to Ishii, Ishikawa used the word repeatedly in the last years of the 1800s to “icily criticize persons who had returned from overseas, such as Kaneko Kentarō (金子堅太郎).”

Originally, then, Ishikawa intended the word to be derisive. He used it, Ishii says, to describe people whose “adoption of the especially high collars fashionable in the West and smug-faced manner seemed a gratuitous implication of their recent return from abroad — the utmost limit of affectation.” This negative tone is what lies behind the ateji often applied to the word in those days: 灰殻 (hai-kara) “ash husk”, implying uselessness and insubstantiality.

But haikara was just one of many similar Ishikawa-isms. His work lampooned not only the Haikara Party (ハイカラア党) and their allies the Necktie Party (ネクタイ党) but also their conservative enemies: the Pistol Party (ピストル党) and the Chonmage Party (チヨム髷党). None of these other words, Ishikawa admitted in a later memoir, caught on. So why did haikara?

Ishii claims that haikara’s big break came in 1900, by way of a speech given by Komatsu Midori (小松緑) at a farewell party for Takekoshi Yosaburō (竹越与三郎) held in Tsukiji’s Metropole Hotel.

In our world to-day [sic], Komatsu said, the word haikara is generally used with derisive intent — but this is mistaken. Haikara evokes a civilized person of pure and noble character. Indeed, has not even our good Ishikawa, who spends so much of his life attacking haikara, honored us this evening with an exceedingly haikara ensemble?

Komatsu’s speech brought down the house, made all the papers, and gave haikara a decisive positive spin on its way to nationwide fame. Before long, Ishii writes, it came to mean “fashionable”, and then just “new”, until even schoolchildren were running around pronouncing baseball mitts and overcoats haikara.

(Naturally, not everyone went along with this positivity. One of the charms of the word is that two people could agree that a third was haikara based on diametrically opposed opinions of their taste, intelligence, and character.)

In the 1920s, Kishida Kunio (岸田 国士) wrote an article entitled The Thing Called “Haikara” (『ハイカラ』ということ) in which, after some stern get-off-my-lawning regarding the word’s semantic evolution, he gives some concrete examples of its broader use, particularly regarding literature: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Murō Saisei are haikara. Kawabata Yasunari is haikara. Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book is haikara. Minamoto no Sanetomo is haikara.

On the other hand, Kishida says, the “new-form poetry” (新体詩) of the Meiji period, though “no doubt considered haikara at the time,” is “the very model of an un-haikara phenomenon.” The mere inclusion of katakana English and translationese like “nani-nani suru tokoro no sore wa” (i.e., using tokoro no to translate an Indo-European relative pronoun, as had been common since the days of Rangaku) this is not sufficient to render writing haikara, and just because a married couple holds hands when they take their constitutional, and has their children call them “Mama” and “Papa,” they are not necessarily haikara either. Iki is not haikara; indeed, it is the yin to haikara’s yang.

Then there were the derivatives: a verb, haikaru; subcategories like binbō haikara (“ghetto haikara”) and inaka haikara (“bumpkin haikara”); mutations like bankara, meaning “barbarian-kara“, that is, the opposite of haikara — although Kishida points out that this could have positive connotations too: something simple, unpretentious, and culturally native.

As the years passed, haikara in the positive sense came to often mean not something modern, but something Modern, something of fashionable Western derivation back in an earlier Japan where such things were precious and rare. The title of manga/anime/movie Haikara-san coming through (ハイカラさんが通る), set in the Taishō 1920s, is an example of this trend in action.

Haikara hasn’t become quite as archaic as moga and mobo (“modern girl” and “modern boy,” respectively), though, probably because its generalized negative meaning has survived: scornful synonyms for “(Westernized) poseur” are always in demand. Only a few years before Haikara-san began publication, Happy End released multiple versions of their cryptic song Haikara hakuchi (meaning both “Haikara moron” and “Blood puked from the lungs”), tellingly including it on Kazemachi Roman, their concept album about the old Japan that the 1964 Tokyo Olympics — that is to say, money and globalization — swept away.

Addendum: Excerpt from Ginza has always been a haikara place (銀座は昔からハイカラな所), by Awashima Kangetsu (淡島寒月)

“In Meiji 5 [1872], when the train line between Yokohama and Shinbashi was first opened, a great number of red lanterns were hung in celebration in front of the Shinbashi station, and all of those lanterns were lit by imported candles. I remember that the boxes the candles had come in were all piled up like a mountain near Shinbashi. This was probably the first time that Western candles had been used in such great numbers. Using Western candles back then was still quite uncommon, and the display was very well received by the public.”

Enryo (遠慮) is one of the most quintessential Japanese concepts. Japanese dictionary Kōjien provides the definition “restraining speech/actions towards people” (「人に対して言語・行動を控え目にすること」). Enryo is central to the image of Japan as a passive society, where people work to avoid conflict through self-restraint. Enryo means not using your mobile phone on the train, not throwing out all of your trash in one big bag, and recently, not lighting up that cigarette wherever you want.

In everyday language, enryo is often used to avoid an unpleasant linguistic phenomenon — the dreaded negative form. Japanese verbs come in four basic varieties: present/future, past, present/future negative, and past negative. Here’s a quick example how this works with the verb taberu, “eat”:

Present/future	taberu
Past	tabeta
Present/future negative	tabenai
Past negative	tabenakatta

Those bolded endings on the negative verbs are the offenders: nai, nakatta, and their more polite distal cousins masen and masen deshita. Shiver when you hear them, for they mean no. Not only are they negative in meaning, they also tend to have negative connotations, especially when combined with directness and applied to a topic brought up by the other speaker.

But then, how do the Japanese talk about avoiding things? Are they constantly accepting invitations to boring events? (“Yes, I’ll go see a Noh play with you, darling.”) Eating things they don’t want to eat? (“Yes, raw horse sounds lovely.”) And drinking things they don’t want to drink? (“There is a venomous snake in that distilled liquor? Fantastic.”)

No, in fact, they have very little difficulty in refusing to do these things, and it’s all thanks to enryo. Through enryo, they are restraining themselves from doing something else (i.e. not doing it). Enryo shimasu is the ultimate refusal: it allows the speaker to admire the offer as a tempting one while regretfully declining it for the sake of some implicit greater good, all without any negativity whatsoever. For this reason, it also works great as sarcasm: “Will you sing ‘Country Roads’ for us at karaoke?” Enryo shimasu.

Similarly, go-enryo kudasai (“Please enryo”) is the polite way to keep people in line. Rather than telling them not to do something, which would involve mucking around with nai (e.g. Tabako wo suwanaide kudasai, “Please don’t smoke”), you can appeal to their higher nature and ask them to proactively refrain from it (e.g. Kitsuen wa goenryo kudasai, “Please refrain from smoking”).

This concept is not totally foreign to the English language. Rather than saying “I can’t,” people (often very annoying people in service positions) use “I am unable to,” and “please refrain from” is a useful alternative to the negative imperative. The ultimate example comes from Pirates of the Caribbean, where Captain Barbossa denies Elizabeth Swann’s request for parlay with “I am disinclined to acquiesce to your request.” Very much like enryo shimasu: “IT MEANS NO!”

We can divide obsolete Japanese vocabulary into two categories: kogo 古語, “old words,” and shigo 死語, “dead words.” Kogo held respectable careers in pre-modern Japan but retired quietly at some point before the Meiji restoration. Shigo are more recent and violent casualties — many began as conscious neologisms in response to the same accelerating social change that would later render them irrelevant. All shigo once rubbed shoulders with the surviving portion of modern Japanese. Kogo haunt the language with dignity, like ghosts in an ancestral mansion; shigo lie unquiet in shallow graves out back. There is a reason that shigo are also known as haigo 廃語: “abandoned words.”

Naui 「ナウい」was a mayfly of a word, declared dead almost as soon as it was born, reviled as a desperate attempt to squeeze a few more youth dollars out of an already-uncool borrowed English lexeme (“now”). As a word in its own right, nau had already demonstrated a tenacity rivaling Madeline Usher’s, but naui was fated to surpass its progenitor in every respect. It became a lexicographic Cartaphilus ― cursed to wander the sentences of Japanese forever, scorned and reviled but never granted the peace of oblivion. Its unforgivable sin? To once have both been and meant “fashionable.”

According to Takahashi Nobuo’s dictionary of Showa buzzwords (「昭和世相流行語辞典―ことば昭和史 WORD&WORDS」), naui’s story begins in 1972 — the year that nau entered the language as a bona-fide loan word, written in kana and used as a na adjective. This was a logical development, Takahashi notes, from the popularity of English NOW (in Roman characters) used in similar contexts the previous year.

Nau collocates closely with yangu (“young”), as in nau na yangu (“the groovy youth of today”). Nau and nau na yangu even share an entry in the first volume of Kobayashi Nobuhiko’s Contemporary Shigo Notebook (『現代「死語」ノート』). Kobayashi deems nau “a shigo among shigo,” one that is “just plain embarrassing.” He also claims that even back then, it was used “less by actual young people than by adults pandering to them,” and that it died almost immediately.

Naui itself, then, is an -i adjective derived from the same English root. It seems to have turned up at the end of the seventies in what Kobayashi, in the second volume of his Notebook (『現代“死語”ノート〈2〉1977‐1999』), calls a “shigo counteroffensive.” The online Dictionary of Japanese Slang also places the birth of naui in 1979.

Back then, naui wasn’t without competition. For example, imai 「今い」, was a roughly contemporaneous and structurally identical synonym based on the Japanese word for “now” instead of the English one. But naui bested all contenders on sheer charisma. The precise image it invokes of an awkward middle-aged man finger-quote “rapping” with the finger-quote “kids” kept it in the vocabulary of both middle-aged men oblivious to their own awkwardness and all those embarrassed by and for same. (This blog entry traces the survival of naui in literature and the media through the Famicom age and beyond, even expressing doubts as to whether naui deserves its shigo status at all.)

One interesting recent appearance of naui was in the straight-to-convenience-store Cyclopedia of Messed-Up Heisei Words (『図解 平成ぶっこわれコトバ事典』) of 2005. This grave and scholarly work records naui yatsu as an ironic term applied to people who are insufficiently fashionable. In some cases, then, naui has come to mean its own opposite: to be called naui is to be mocked for insufficient, well, now-ness.

If indeed naui is to be deprived even of the right to mean what it means, perhaps the correct metaphor is not Wandering ‘Djective but Struldbrug: “looked on as dead in law” but nightmarishly alive, imprisoned in an increasingly ridiculous and pitiful form and reduced to begging for whatever scraps of favor it can get.

Genki is the first Japanese word most learn upon arriving in the country. It’s fun, it’s useful, it’s easy to pronounce. It means “energy, pep, health,” and you can usually find someone on hand to explain that the kanji 元気 mean “original spirit” or similarly, are indicative of a positive worldview in which the default state for a human is to be in good health and high vigor.

This may be what genki means today, but the history of the word is far more complex. A 1988 paper by Ran Chikumin (栾竹民), modestly entitled “Some thoughts on three spellings of genki” (「減氣・験氣・元氣」小考), goes back thousands of years to lay out the facts for us:

• The term 元気 was used in ancient China, but not to mean “health” or “vitality”. Instead it referred to a ubiquitous, primal energy that made up all things: “元氣者、天地之始、万物之祖” (“Genki is the beginning of heaven and earth and the ancestor of the myriad things”).
• In Japan, the word 減気 (also pronounced genki) was invented by Heian scholars writing in Chinese to describe a reduction (減) in the energy (気) of an illness. 減気, which bore no relation to the much less common 元気 despite the coincidental homophony, soon spread from straight kanbun to other forms of writing. And so, for example, you find Dōgen in the 13th century saying things like 「種々ニ療治セシニ依テ少キ減氣アリシカレドモ」 (“Following a range of treatments, there was some remission in his illness, but…”). In other words, unlike ancient 元気, classical 減気 was very close to the genki of today.

• Sometime in the Muromachi period, a trend began towards writing genki with the characters 験気. These had the same pronunciation but had previously been used for a different genki meaning a positive effect observed after ritual or prayer.
• By the Edo period, 験気 had more or less taken over from 減気 as the preferred spelling for genki as in “get well”. It had also obtained an extra, related meaning: “be well”, without any implied recovery from an unwell state.

• Later in the Edo period, the spelling changed to 元気, bringing the modern meaning and spelling together for the first time. Ran suggests that this may have been for a combination of reasons: the shift in meaning away from the subsiding of an illness and towards health in general, influence from dictionaries and other authoritative texts (including medical texts), and most intriguingly, collateral damage from the ongoing Neo-Confucian debate over whether ki (気, energy) and ri (理, principle) were of equal importance (理気二元論), or whether ri was secondary to the primal ki (気一元論).

In other words, Ran argues, modern genki is a chimera, a relatively recent combination of a straightforward word that describes illness receding and a philosophical concept with millennia of metaphysical baggage. To the extent that it has a deep philosophical meaning, it acquired it by phonetic accident.

Never forget: a kanji is a lie.

Truly understanding a “foreign culture” requires a tight grasp on its language. So we at Néojaponisme will now offer a bi-weekly vocabulary lesson that looks at a single Japanese word or phrase and its cultural context. Although these posts should be particularly helpful for language students, I hope they will not be too pedantic for our general readership.

When making requests to others, the wording is crucial for differentiating between military command, sorrowful pleading, and prostrate kowtow. In a language and culture as hierarchical as Japanese, there are a vast number of linguistic options for appeal, each properly respecting the speaker’s place within an organizational structure.

So when it comes to action heroes, CEOs, and tough guys, they don’t have the time or the patience for the standard pleases of onegai (お願い) or kudasai (下さい). The proper phrasing for a man of means is tanomu yo (頼むよ). Tanomu is a verb meaning “to ask someone to do something.” In the polite verb form tanomimasu the speaker can state “I plead with you. / I beg you” to superiors with the level of sad desperation inherent in that English translation. “Tanomu yo” can also be bandied about between friends making desperate requests.

But out in the real world, you will probably run into “tanomu yo” in its favored gruff masculine praxis. This is the word of choice for 24‘s Jack Bauer, Lost‘s Jack Shepard, Michael Douglas in The Game, and Twin Peaks‘ FBI Agent Dale Cooper. Subtitlers would never make such powerful male protagonists stoop to using more polite terms. (And conveniently, “頼むよ” is a brisk three-characters compared to its alternatives.)

In fact, “tanomu yo” mostly exists these days solely in the world of films and fiction. Due to the gradual declines in white-collar office hierarchy and blurring in daily life’s chain-of-command, there are fewer and fewer “Division Chiefs” who get to bark “tanomu yo” to their charges. So maybe you will have to hold off on using this phrase until a big promotion. But remember: “tanomu yo” is always ready for you if suddenly you are required to stop terrorists from detonating a nuclear bomb or fighting supernatural predators. At that point, you will realize there’s just not enough time to deal with formalities of polite speech.