大和魂 yamato damashii Japanese Spirit

大和 (yamato) is the old province around Nara where the first emperors sat, and so the old name for Japan itself; 魂 (tamashii) is the native word for the soul, voiced to damashii in the compound. The word has two senses and the dictionaries list both.

The one people mean today is the spirit of the nation, bold, pure and loyal, the mountain cherry in the morning sun, ready to give everything when it comes to it; it is the sense of the loyalist poets, and for the decades before the war it was the state's own word, written into the army's draft field regulations of 1889 and into the Ministry of Education's account of the national polity in 1937, which is why a Japanese reader may hear that history in it.

The older sense lives inside the same characters and is a good one: in the Tale of Genji the word is the native good sense that book-learning is the base of, the practical wit that gets on in the world, set against Chinese scholarship and needing it. In Natsume Sōseki's comic novel a schoolteacher reads his friends a piece saying that everyone speaks of the Japanese spirit and no one has ever seen it.

Japanese Spirit is the plain English of it; Arthur Waley used it in 1927 for the word in the Genji, the first English of that passage.

大和魂 is composed of 大和 (read yamato) an old name for Japan and 魂 (read tamashii) meaning "spirit; soul". Together they are read yamato damashii, because the sounds change where the characters meet: 魂 tamashii becomes damashii after 大和.

A native Japanese word, first in the Tale of Genji, about 1008, for practical good sense set against Chinese learning; the scholars of the native learning tied it to the native heart from the 1760s, and the 日本国語大辞典's earliest example of its brave sense is a novel of 1808.

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

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