己に忠実なれ onore ni chūjitsu nare To Thine Own Self Be True

Be faithful to yourself: Polonius's precept to his son, and in Japanese a maxim in its own right. 忠実 is faithful, loyal, the word for serving with a whole heart and for a translation true to its original; なれ is the old imperative, be, which makes the line a maxim rather than a sentence. The six characters are a translator's, Kume Masao's Polonius, and his readers already knew the longer form, 自己に忠実なれ, as the watchword of a generation of Japanese writers who set faithfulness to the self above every rule and model. The words carry the precept; the half that follows it, that you cannot then be false to any man, is yours to keep.

The six characters are Polonius's line in Hamlet (about 1600) as Kume Masao 久米正雄 translated it in 1915, spoken on the Imperial Theatre stage in nearly the same sentence in 1918; the longer form 自己に忠實なれ was already in Japanese print by 1904, given to Shakespeare by one writer and used with no source by others.

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