守護天使 shugotenshi Guardian Angel

守護 (shugo) is guarding, protecting, keeping safe, a word whose oldest Japanese sense already holds the guardian; 天使 (tenshi) is heaven's envoy, the angel. The word is a church's.

When the missions put the doctrine into Japanese, one wrote it with a particle, the angel of guarding, and the other set the four characters solid in the Chinese manner and printed this reading over them, and it is the second that the language kept: translators used it, the dictionaries head it, and today it is simply the ordinary Japanese word, the one a Japanese search returns first.

The four characters are also exactly the Chinese term, so the design says guardian angel to Japanese, Chinese and English readers at once. Guardian Angel is the exact English. Its neighbors mark its edges: 守護神 (shugoshin) is a guardian god and 守護霊 (shugorei) a guardian spirit; this word is the angel of one person, the one in a child's prayer.

守護天使 is composed of the words 守護 (read shugo) meaning "protect; guard; safeguard" and 天使 Angel (tenshi).

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 守護天使.

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