念願は人格を決定す継続は力なり nengan wa jinkaku o ketteisu, keizoku wa chikara nari Your Heart's Desire Decides Who You Are; Continuing Is Strength

念願 (read nengan) is a wish held with the whole heart; a Japanese dictionary gives wishing and longing with one's whole heart. 人格 (read jinkaku) is a person's character, a late Meiji word for the English personality. 決定す (read ketteisu) is to decide, read kettei and not the older ketsujō. 継続 (read keizoku) is keeping on with what one has been doing, and 力 (read chikara) is strength. す is the classical form of する, to do, and なり is an older is.

An essay by Sumioka draws a man who keeps to his own road. Among the young who ran after him, men of greater authority than he have arisen, and seeing it is his greatest joy. Each line of the couplet stands in its own quotation marks, and the essay goes on: he is always trying to hear a certain powerful voice within.

In 1928 Kamase Haruyoshi, a member of the movement, called the couplet Sumioka's sole precept. The heart's desire that unifies what a person does, he wrote, weighs the whole person, and keeping it up needs a fire of faith burning within.

Sumioka's book The Last Day, of 1932, ends a ladder of years with the couplet. At the start you are treated as a madman; then sympathy, admiration and helpers come; and a work that after ten years still moves no one is a work that people have no need of.

In 1948, the year before he died, Sumioka wrote that the couplet's 念願 is in truth prayer, a flame of the whole self. In his selected works he calls it the one phrase that moved him and kept him alive.

A member of Japan's House of Representatives used the second line in a speech, calling it a known saying. The National Diet Library's full-text index finds to decide a character in Meiji and Taishō writing on education, religion, ethics, business and law. The opening line makes the heart's desire the subject of that phrase. Of the 84 items that index returns before 1932, none joins that phrase to 念願 in the passage it shows.

By the school's account of 1991, the educator Matsuda Fujiko counted Sumioka her religious teacher, asked his counsel, and was advised to found a school. Sakuyō Gakuen opened in 1930, and at its founding, the school's account says, the couplet was received from him. A history of private schools of 1977 lists it as the school's motto.

Writers in the 1981 memorial volume of Sumioka's movement remembered the couplet as the banner under which he founded the movement. They recalled him writing it out for them on square cards for calligraphy. His movement prints it today inside his poem to the young that begins young people, be strong.

Our history reads the couplet as a teacher's rule for a life held to one road. The wish a person holds with the whole heart makes the person, and holding it day after day is what strength is. The couplet's Buddhist frame is its author's own, and the couplet as sold stands without it.

A couplet of the lay Shin Buddhist teacher 住岡夜晃 Sumioka Yakō (1895–1949), signed 住岡狂風 until 1936; its oldest print read is his essay 「事實の權威」 in his movement's magazine 『光明』 of 15 December 1925, which gives it as a figure's creed, 彼の信條は、『念願は人格を決定す』『繼續は力なり』といふことである; its second line was already a saying in 1918.