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悪戦苦闘 akusen kutō Desperate Fight

Japanese Scroll of Desperate Fight (akusen kutō) — Calligraphy by Eri Takase
悪戦苦闘 Original Scroll by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase

Abstract

悪戦苦闘, akusen kutō, a hard fight against heavy odds, is a word first found in Japanese print in the Meiji thirties, built from two old Chinese words of battle, 悪戦 and 苦闘; the compound itself is not found in print before 1897. Its oldest dated witness is a sports magazine's report of a school baseball game in 1897; then come a political history and a sickbed memoir, both of 1903, before the war reports, from October 1904, and a war history of 1906 made the word a formula and, with it, common currency. It was a schoolbook word by 1912 and entered the dictionaries through the 1910s and 1920s, and Chinese Wikisource has the compound only from 1925. The dictionaries give a hard fight against a strong enemy first and a struggle through hard straits as its extension, and the print record keeps that order without beginning on a battlefield: a ball game and a Diet fight, told in the terms of battle, then a sickbed in September 1903, and the war after.

A reading

This is a word for someone in the thick of it, which is what it has meant from its first years: a ball game, a Diet fight, a sickbed, a whaling boat, an election, a business war, a poor childhood. Desperate Fight is a fair lead and Fighting Against Heavy Odds the better one, because it says what the word says, that the fight is being fought, not lost. The story worth telling is the two halves: the 三國演義's word for a hard-fought battle and the 隋書's word for a fight that ran from morning to afternoon without letting up, joined by a Meiji generation and made everyone's by the war.

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Overview

The sense. First found in Japan, in the Meiji thirties, and built from two old Chinese words of battle. Together the four characters mean, in the dictionary's words, to fight a very hard fight against a strong enemy, and then to strive, suffering, in a hard situation [1]. The two halves are Chinese; the four-character word is first found in Japanese, and it is young.

The words. Akusen kutō. 悪戦 is a hard-fought battle. In the 三國演義, 馬超 says of 許褚, of all the hard fighters I have seen, none matches Xu Chu, a true mad tiger [2], and a fierce battle is the stock phrase of the Chinese adventure novels; in Japan it is 馬琴's, a chapter title of the 八犬伝: Genpachi alone fights hard against the crowd [3]. 苦闘 is a bitter struggle, and older: the 隋書 says of a general's attack on 流求, which the 資治通鑑 enters under 610, that from the hour of the dragon to the hour of the sheep the bitter fight did not let up [4], and 元稹 uses the word of making poems and of a game of go [5].

The text in English. The English trail begins with 斎藤秀三郎's dictionary of 1915, and its against heavy odds is still JMdict's.

The historical record

1897–1904. A ball game, a Diet, and a sickbed. The oldest dated print of the word that the National Diet Library's full-text search reaches is a sports report. The magazine 運動界 for December 1897 tells of a baseball match between the Hamamatsu and Shizuoka middle schools, played on 24 October: still behind after the fifth inning, the Shizuoka players, crying that this was an unseemly showing, fought a hard and desperate fight, and in the sixth made good their deficit and drew level [6]. The issue is served only in Japan, and this is read in the full-text search's windows of it, not at its page. The two halves had been set side by side three years earlier, the other way round and on a battlefield: a book of soldiers' lives from the war with China, November 1894, has one of its soldiers fight bitterly and desperately (苦闘惡戰) until at last the enemy is driven off (遂に敵兵を追けぬ, as the search's window prints it) [7]. Tokutomi Sohō, in a book issued in June 1903 on the Katsura cabinet and its enemies, says that the adversary they fought so bitterly in the last Diet now sits calmly in the cabinet's chair, with the air of a man wondering which way the wind of the world blows [8]. Three months later, in September 1903, a memoir of three years spent lying ill uses the word of the patient himself: the sick man who has fought his desperate fight against the demon of illness and the demon of discontent, his sword broken and his arrows spent, is fated to die with his castle for a pillow [9]. In 1904 a history of Japanese life insurance uses it of a contest growing fiercer by the day, in which they shrink not even from a desperate fight [10]. The figurative use is as old in print as the word.

1904–1909. The war's word. The oldest war report the full-text search reaches, of October 1904, uses it of a regiment's first day at Liaoyang [11]; a history of the Russo-Japanese War published in 1906 makes it a formula: a desperate fight, and the enemy at last fell back; a desperate fight, and the enemy's position was barely taken [12]. A women's reader of the same year shows the returned army at the emperor's review, living soldiers who faced the war with Russia in desperate fighting and bitter assault, no panorama but the men themselves [13]. The regimental and prefectural war records of 1907 put it in soldiers' obituaries [14], and by 1909 a biographical dictionary is telling a death of 1894 in the word of 1906 [15]. The Library's full-text index of books dates five books before 1905, three of them wrongly, and seventy to 1905–09; then the count rises in every five years but one (951 books in 1925–29, 885 in 1930–34) to its wartime peak, 1,053 books in 1935–39 [16].

1906–1911. Everyone else's word. In the same years the word is used of a shipping war (三菱 against the Pacific Mail, in a 1906 history) [17], of a whaling boat against the whale (1907) [18], of a lifetime against every hardship and sorrow on the ghastly battlefield of life (a self-help book, 1907) [19], of a poor childhood, an election (1908), a husband's working day (a household manual, 1908) [20], and illness again (嘉納治五郎, 1910: to pass one's days in a desperate fight with the demon of illness) [21]. In 思い出す事など (1910–11) Sōseki, with the first half alone, called himself a man of hard fighting (悪戦の人) in the arena of the struggle for existence [22], and in 1911 the Buddhist reformer 高島米峰 gave a book the first half for its title, 悪戦 [23].

1912–1925. The schoolroom, and the dictionaries. In 1912 a glossary to a middle-school reader defines it for the whaling lesson: to fight a bad, painful fight [24]; the same year a teachers' syllabus lists it as vocabulary for writing a battle narrative in the literary style [25]. The 大日本国語辞典 of 1916 gives it as the example under 苦闘 [26]; the 大字典 of 1917 brackets it under 悪戦 with the 三國演義 as the half's source [27]; the 新式大辞典 of 1925 gives it its own bracket, a hard and painful war [28]. The 日国's first citations, 谷崎 and 芥川, are 1918 [1]. In 1925 a retelling of the 太平記 writes the word into the fourteenth century, which is how a Meiji word comes to feel ancient [29].

1925 onward. Into Chinese. In Chinese Wikisource the four characters appear in a 1925 article on the Qingdao mill strike, in 蔣介石's preface of December 1925 to a military-academy yearbook and his 1937 diary of the Xi'an incident, and in speeches to 1958; nothing earlier there [30]. As with 適者生存, the dated record runs from Japan into Chinese.

What is not a source. Not a Chinese idiom: nothing before 1897 that the Library's indexes reach carries the four characters, and Chinese Wikisource has them only from 1925 [30]. Not the 太平記: the index's one Edo match for the half is a cursive leaf that does not settle it [31], and the 1925 book that puts the whole word in the 太平記's mouth is a retelling. Not a samurai maxim: it is first found at a school baseball game, then in a Diet and a sickroom, and was raised by the war histories. Not a proverb: it is a word, and it takes する.

The word in English

1915. 斎藤秀三郎's dictionary. 斎藤秀三郎's Idiomological English-Japanese Dictionary (熟語本位英和中辭典) has the word in its first edition of 1915, read here in its page text: it glosses A hard fight — hard fighting with 苦戰 and the word in brackets (p. 532), and under fight, in its sense against odds, gives the sentence the catalogue still carries, We had to fight against heavy odds, beside There is no fighting against such odds (p. 402); it reaches for it again at hard pressed, under struggle, against superior numbers, and at fight with one's back to the wall [32]. Read at the page, the printing of 1918 gives A hard fight—hard fighting. 苦戰(惡戰苦鬪)。 [33], and that of 1928, at the same page 402, We had to fight against heavy odds. 我等は優勢の敵を受けて惡戰苦鬪した。 [34].

1929. 研究社's English-Japanese dictionary. 研究社's 1929 English-Japanese dictionary reaches for it under wrestle, for the noun: 相撲; 惡戰苦鬪 (hard struggle) [35].

Today. The later 和英: to be hard pressed; fight against heavy odds (斎藤和英); fight desperately (against heavy odds); struggle hard (研究社, whose example is He has attained his present position after a long and hard struggle); to fight desperately against someone (EDR); fighting with his back against the wall (the sentence corpora); hard fighting; hard struggle; fighting against heavy odds (JMdict) [36]. The house's Desperate Fight is 研究社's adverb made a noun, and Fighting Against Heavy Odds is JMdict's gloss, which 斎藤's sentence of 1915 already says as fight against heavy odds. One dictionary, the 四字熟語を知る辞典, says the word was originally (本来は) a hard fight against a strong enemy and was extended (転じて) to everyday matters. The books keep that order, but not on a battlefield: the first witness is a ball game and the next a Diet fight, both told in the terms of battle, then a sickbed, and the war reports come after; by 1910 business, poverty, illness, an election and a whale are all in print. What the war did was not to give the word its meaning but to give it its currency, and the war register never left: it was taught to schoolchildren as battle-narrative vocabulary, and its peak is the wartime one. The word has always been two things at once, a battle and a struggle, and the figurative reading is its own first decade, not a later softening.

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Japanese Scrolls by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase

Japanese Scroll of Desperate Fight (akusen kutō) in a block font by Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase
悪戦苦闘VB5CBlock
Japanese Scroll of Desperate Fight (akusen kutō) in a cursive font by Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase
悪戦苦闘VC5BCursive
Japanese Scroll of Desperate Fight (akusen kutō) in Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase's own style (Eri's Choice)
悪戦苦闘VD5BEri's Choice
Japanese Scroll of Desperate Fight (akusen kutō) in a semi-cursive font by Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase
悪戦苦闘VS5CSemi-Cursive

References

  1. 「悪戦苦闘」・「悪戦」・「苦闘」, 大辞泉・日本国語大辞典・四字熟語を知る辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/悪戦苦闘
  2. 三國演義, 第59回 (馬超語許褚), at zh.wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/三國演義/第059回
  3. 曲亭馬琴, 南総里見八犬伝, 第六十四回, the typeset of 1885 (published 24 December 1885, by the colophon, scan 32), scan 5. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/879317/1/5
  4. 隋書, 卷64, 陳稜傳, at zh.wikisource; the year from 資治通鑑, 卷181, under 大業六年 (610), where the captives of 流求 are presented in the second month. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/隋書/卷64 · https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/資治通鑑/卷181
  5. 元稹, 和樂天贈楊秘書・酬段丞, 全唐詩 卷415・卷406, at zh.wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/全唐詩/卷415 · https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/全唐詩/卷406
  6. 『運動界』 1巻6号, 運動界発行所, December 1897 (NDL Digital pid 1527015, served only in Japan; read in the full-text search's snippet windows, not at the page). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1527015
  7. 堀本柵, 帝国軍人名誉列伝, 東雲堂, 明治27年11月 (1894) (NDL Digital pid 778398; the item serves no page image, so read as the full-text search's snippet). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/778398
  8. 徳富猪一郎 (蘇峰), 近時政局史論, 民友社, 1903 (issued 6 June 1903, by the colophon, scan 121), scan 81. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/783011/1/81
  9. 近藤常次郎, 仰臥三年, 博文館, 1903 (issued 5 September 1903, by the colophon, scan 128; the library's record spans the two volumes, 1903–04), scan 37. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/833199/1/37
  10. 設楽久 (瑞籬) 編, 日本生命保険業史, 1904 (NDL Digital pid 800704; the item serves no page image, so read as the full-text search's snippet). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/800704
  11. 『日露戦争実記』, 博文館, October 1904 (NDL Digital pid 1592434, viewable only at the Library; read as the full-text search's snippet). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1592434
  12. 日露大戦史, 上, 大成社, 1906, scan 290 and scan 335. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/774444/1/290 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/774444/1/335
  13. 下田次郎, 新女訓, 明治書院, 1906, scan 125. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/757311/1/125
  14. 明治卅七八年徳島県戦時史, 1907, scan 298. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/774518/1/298
  15. 大日本人名辞書, 1909, scan 977. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1087059/1/977
  16. National Diet Library Digital Collections, next-generation full-text search on 悪戦苦闘, by five-year period. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/
  17. 明治史, 第五編, 交通発達史, 博文館, 1906, scan 142. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2942257/1/142
  18. 江見水蔭, 捕鯨船：実地探検, 博文館, 1907, scan 36. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/888205/1/36
  19. 堀内新泉, 精力増進法, 1907, scan 90. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/836978/1/90
  20. 全力の人, 1907, scan 16; 三宅雪嶺, 明治丁未題言集, 1908, scan 75; 嘉悦孝子, 家政学講話, 1908, scan 50. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/887044/1/16 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/898548/1/75 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/848272/1/50
  21. 嘉納治五郎, 青年修養訓, 1910, scan 48. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/757519/1/48
  22. 夏目漱石, 思い出す事など, 1910–11, at Wikisource. https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/思い出す事など
  23. 高島米峰, 悪戦, 1911, scan 225. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/994852/1/225
  24. 中学国文教科書字解, 国語研究会, 1912, scan 13. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/868521/1/13
  25. 小学校教授細目, 東京高師附属, 1912, scan 970. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/938109/1/970
  26. 上田万年・松井簡治, 大日本国語辞典, 1916, scan 34. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/954646/1/34
  27. 上田万年他, 大字典, 1917, scan 455. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/950498/1/455
  28. 新式大辞典, 1925, scan 124. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/912793/1/124
  29. 足立栗園, 太平記読本, 1925, scan 208. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/983217/1/208
  30. zh.wikisource, search for 惡戰苦鬥 (7 hits, 1925–1958), and for 惡戰苦鬭 and 恶战苦斗 (3 more, all after 1925), 30 September 2026. https://zh.wikisource.org
  31. 太平記, Edo print, scan 13 (kuzushiji, unconfirmed). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2570079/1/13
  32. 斎藤秀三郎, Saito's Idiomological English-Japanese Dictionary 熟語本位英和中辞典, S.E.G. Publishing Department, 1915, pp. 402, 532, 1018, 1305 and 1501, s.v. fight, hard, press, struggle and wall (HathiTrust hvd.32044086539269, the page text; the page images were not seen).
  33. 齊藤秀三郎, 熟語本位英和中辭典, 1918, scan 274, s.v. hard. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1681530/1/274
  34. 齊藤秀三郎, 熟語本位英和中辭典, 1928, scan 209 (p. 402), s.v. fight. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1699960/1/209
  35. 岡倉由三郎, 新英和中辞典, 研究社, 1929, scan 473. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1904907/1/473
  36. 斎藤和英大辞典・研究社新和英中辞典・EDR日英対訳辞書・JST科学技術用語日英対訳辞書・JMdict, at Weblio 英和・和英辞典 and jisho.org. https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/悪戦苦闘 · https://jisho.org/word/悪戦苦闘

Authors

Tim Jackowski (Systems Architect, Takase Studios, LLC) · 典 Ten (Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1, Opus 5, Sonnet 5 and Opus 5.5, Takase Studios, LLC)

AI written · Ten wrote the history. Tim Jackowski commissioned it and answers for it.

Checked · Claude Sonnet (Anthropic), 2026-09-14, citations — every item tested at its address; most resolve verbatim; nothing found to differ; the rest not openable for want of an address or a file · Claude Sonnet (Anthropic), 2026-11-03, citations — every claim tested at its address; the one that differed, a count said to rise in every period, was corrected to name its dip; the Japan-only and live-URL sources could not be opened by the checker · two fresh-context readers (Claude), 2026-11-03, every claim in the page's summary block traced to its source: round 1 found the account of the dictionaries' order of senses wrong, and it was rewritten here and in the abstract; round 2 PASS from both, no wrong fact; wordings narrowed at the sources, and two dates of the Chinese texts corrected

Research depth: step 3 of our 10-step ladder, foundation complete · November 2026

Cite as: Tim Jackowski and Ten, "Philology of 悪戦苦闘 (akusen kutō)," Takase Studios, 2026, https://takase.com/library/philology/akusen-kuto.