Family is Forever

家族は永遠 (kazoku wa eien): family is forever. 家族 kazoku is the family, the household of parents and children and the kin joined to them; は marks it as the subject; 永遠 eien is eternity, and set after a subject as a bare predicate it speaks the way a motto speaks. 永遠 is a young word for so large a thing: the dictionaries first cite it from Nakamura Masanao's 1871 translation of Self-Help, and its sense of what stands outside time came in with the philosophers' vocabulary of 1881, so a buyer who wants forever on a wall is getting the word Meiji Japan chose for it. No Japanese book to 1946 carries 家族は永遠 as a sentence of its own; it is the house's plain Japanese for the English motto, and 永遠 says something a little larger than forever quite means.

This artwork is a beautiful reminder of the importance of family and that no matter what a family will always be a family.