Household Harmony

家庭円満 (katei enman): a harmonious home. 家庭 is the home, husband and wife, parents and children; 円満 is round and full, a Buddhist word for completeness that came to mean getting along without corners. The phrase is younger than it looks. Both halves took their present senses in the Meiji years, when the old house was being reformed toward a Western way of life and 家庭 became the Japanese for home, and the four characters first appear together in a publisher's advertisement for a book on the pleasures of the home. Within a year it was the stock compliment of the who's-whos, said of a family that had raised a son or of a couple whose lute and zither were in tune; the preachers and the home-economics texts took it up, a new-words dictionary of 1919 defined it as a household living round and without complaint, and the slang of the 1930s gave it a joke-synonym, the tangerine, because the segments all cling together. No national dictionary has ever given it a headword, so it is not one of the classical four-character idioms; it is a modern word, born as something said of a couple by a biographer, a preacher or a friend. That is what makes it a wedding or anniversary wish, and a housewarming one too, because a new house is where both wishes get said. Its companion 家内安全 is the prayer for the house kept safe from outside; this is the wish for the home kept warm within. 家庭円満 is composed of the word 家庭 (read katei) meaning "home; family; household" and 円満 (read enman) meaning "harmony; perfection; peace; completeness".