No Pain, No Gain

苦は楽の種 (ku wa raku no tane): hardship is the seed of ease. 苦 is hardship, toil, suffering; 楽 is ease and comfort, the same character that read tanoshimi is pleasure; 種 is a seed, and the seed is the whole figure: hardship is not a price paid for ease but the thing ease grows from. A literal rendering is pain is the seed of comfort. The saying lives as a pair, 楽は苦の種、苦は楽の種, ease is the seed of hardship and hardship the seed of ease, and the scroll carries the half people want on a wall. The pair is already a preacher's commonplace in a comic novel of 1774, and from the 1840s it heads a list of nine household precepts that the Meiji books credit to Tokugawa Mitsukuni, the lord of Mito: know that hardship is the seed of ease and ease of hardship; think master and parent unreasonable; fear the law, fear fire, fear the thoughtless; do not sleep late. The list is real and old, the name on it is a tradition that settled on Mitsukuni in the Meiji decades, and the proverb is older than any copy of it. No Pain, No Gain is the English proverb it sits nearest; the seed is what the Japanese keeps.