人生は短い jinsei wa mijikai Life is Short

人生 (jinsei) is a human life, は marks it as the topic, and 短い (mijikai) is short; the older form of the adjective is 短し (mijikashi), and the two are one line. The sentence is a translation, and its history is how life is short came into Japanese.

The words carry the clause every use shares, a reason to do now what matters.

The Japanese sentence renders the English life is short, the first clause of the first Hippocratic aphorism; it is in Japanese print from the 1880s, in translations and in a debate in the Meiji senate of 1888, and Japan's own life is short is a song of 1915.

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