Desperate Fight

悪戦苦闘 (akusen kutō): a desperate fight, a hard struggle against heavy odds, the word for someone in the thick of it. The two halves are old Chinese words of battle. 悪戦 is a hard-fought fight, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms' word for the fiercest fighters and, in Japan, Bakin's; 苦闘 is a bitter struggle that does not let up, the word a Chinese history uses for a fight that ran from the hour of the dragon to the hour of the sheep. The four characters together are Japanese and young. No book carries them before 1900, and the first firmly dated uses, in 1903 and 1904, are a fight in the Diet and a sick man's three years in bed against the demon of illness and the demon of discontent. The histories of the Russo-Japanese War made it everyone's word, and within a decade it was in print for a shipping war, a whaling boat, an election, a poor childhood and a husband's working day, and schoolchildren were learning it as the vocabulary of a battle narrative. Sōseki called himself a man of hard fighting in the arena of the struggle for existence. The word crossed into Chinese from 1925. Its English is one dictionary's: We had to fight against heavy odds, 我等は優勢の敵を受けて悪戦苦闘した, in Saitō Hidesaburō's edition of 1928, which is where Fighting Against Heavy Odds comes from. It says the fight is being fought, not lost. 悪戦苦闘 is composed of the words 悪戦 (read akusen) meaning "hard fight; close contest" and 苦闘 (read kutō) meaning "bitter struggle".