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雨にも負けず風にも負けず ame ni mo makezu kaze ni mo makezu Be Not Defeated by the Wind, Be Not Defeated by the Rain

雨にも負けず風にも負けず (ame ni mo makezu kaze ni mo makezu), not beaten by the rain, not beaten by the wind, opens Miyazawa Kenji's best-known poem. He wrote it in a notebook dated 3 November 1931, and it was not published in his lifetime. This study follows its variants and first printings, and shows that the two lines describe a person rather than command anyone.

Japanese Scroll of Be Not Defeated by the Wind, Be Not Defeated by the Rain (ame ni mo makezu kaze ni mo makezu) — Calligraphy by Eri Takase
Be Not Defeated by the Wind, Be Not Defeated by the Rain雨にも負けず風にも負けずame ni mo makezu kaze ni mo makezu

Original art by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase

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Abstract

雨にも負けず風にも負けず, not beaten by the rain, not beaten by the wind, are the opening two lines of a thirty-line poem by Miyazawa Kenji 宮沢賢治, quoted on their own as a motto by 1942, though they are neither a proverb nor a command. The poet wrote it in a black notebook, dated in his own hand to 3 November 1931, two years before his death; it was not published in his lifetime. The poem is one sentence long, its main verb the last line, such a person is what I want to become, and every line before it, including these two, describes that person rather than instructing anyone. On the facing page of the notebook he wrote seven lines of Nichiren invocation.

Overview

The text. The scroll brushes 雨にも負けず風にも負けず in kanji and hiragana; the poem itself was written in katakana, and nearly every printing keeps it so, 雨ニモマケズ / 風ニモマケズ. A printing of 1940 for young farmers sets the whole poem in kanji and hiragana, the script of the scroll, with the verb in kana, 雨にもまけず. The variants sit past the two lines: the notebook's ヒドリ against ヒデリ in every later witness read, from the stone of 1936 to 1949, an emendation the critical edition keeps in its text of the poem while printing the notebook as written, and which most scholars accept; 朿 for 束, a slip kept as the poet's own; デクノボー against the printings' デクノボウ; the stone's 野原ノ林ノ蔭ノ, which drops 松ノ; and 苦ニモサレズ for クニモサレズ in the 1942 reissue of the recitation anthology. The two lines carry no variant in any witness but their script.

The sense. Within the poem the two lines begin a portrait: not the weather but a person, whose body is strong and whose wants are few, and who goes east and west and south and north when he is needed. The Hanamaki memoirist of 1941 read the portrait as the poet's own: as this poem says, he spent his whole life for others alone. The illustrator of the same year calls it the teacher's own famous poem, and the stone of 1936 carries only the second half, from the hut to the end. From 1942 the poem served the war: the cultural division of the 大政翼賛会 printed it in an anthology of poems for reading aloud, a Ministry of Education pamphlet borrowed its first two lines, without the poet's name, for a farmer at his hoe, and in 1944 the philosopher Tanikawa Tetsuzō 谷川徹三 called it the most sublime poem since Meiji in a lecture printed as a booklet in 1945. In 1947 it went into the state textbook with its four measures of rice cut to three. Hiroaki Sato, its translator, calls it a prayer; the poet Nakamura Minoru called it defeatist, and in 1959 Tanikawa answered him.

The words. 雨, ame, is rain; 風, kaze, is wind; にも, ni mo, is even to, even by; 負けず, makezu, is the classical negative of 負ける, makeru, to lose, to be beaten, not of 負かす, makasu, the transitive verb to defeat someone. Not beaten even by rain, not beaten even by wind. ず is the negative continuative, and the clause is not a command but a description that runs on: the poem is a single sentence thirty lines long, and its main verb is the last line, サウイフモノニ / ワタシハナリタイ, such a person is what I want to become. Every line before it, including these two, describes that person, not a command to a reader.

The text in English. The Internet Archive's full-text index finds the romanized first line in seventy-seven books, translations among them, the earliest dated 1974 [1]. Two renderings are read here whole: Hiroaki Sato's November 3rd of 1981, neither yielding to rain / nor yielding to wind, and Makoto Ueda's untitled one of 1983, Neither rain / nor wind / nor snow nor summer's heat / will affect his robust body, which Sato's Selections of 2007 prints one after the other, with three other renderings of the first two lines beside them [2][3][4]. All five put rain first, as the Japanese does. Neither of the two American proverb collections opened carries the lines [5][6].

The historical record

3 November 1931. 宮沢賢治's notebook, pages 51 to 59, in pencil. The poet, thirty-five, had fallen ill again that September and did not recover. He wrote the poem in a small black notebook and dated it in blue pencil, 11.3. It was not published in his lifetime. The text, as the 1997 critical edition prints it from photographs of the notebook: 雨ニモマケズ / 風ニモマケズ / 雪ニモ夏ノ暑サニモマケヌ / 丈夫ナカラダヲモチ / 慾ハナク / 決シテ瞋ラズ / イツモシヅカニワラッテヰル / 一日ニ玄米四合ト / 味噌ト少シノ野菜ヲタベ / アラユルコトヲ / ジブンヲカンジョウニ入レズニ / ヨクミキキシワカリ / ソシテワスレズ / 野原ノ松ノ林ノ蔭ノ (the notebook's form of 蔭 is 䕃) / 小サナ萓ブキノ小屋ニヰテ / 東ニ病気ノコドモアレバ / 行ッテ看病シテヤリ / 西ニツカレタ母アレバ / 行ッテソノ稲ノ朿ヲ負ヒ / 南ニ死ニサウナ人アレバ / 行ッテコハガラナクテモイヽトイヒ / 北ニケンクヮヤソショウガアレバ / ツマラナイカラヤメロトイヒ / ヒドリノトキハナミダヲナガシ / サムサノナツハオロオロアルキ / ミンナニデクノボートヨバレ / ホメラレモセズ / クニモサレズ / サウイフモノニ / ワタシハナリタイ. Not beaten by the rain, not beaten by the wind, not beaten by the snow or the summer's heat; with a strong body, without greed, never angry, always smiling quietly; eating four bowls of brown rice a day with miso and a few vegetables; taking everything in without counting himself, watching and listening well and understanding, and not forgetting; living in a small thatched hut in the shade of the pines on the moor; if there is a sick child in the east, going to nurse it; a tired mother in the west, going to carry her sheaves of rice; someone dying in the south, going to say there is nothing to fear; a quarrel or a lawsuit in the north, saying it is not worth it, stop; weeping in a drought, walking distraught in a cold summer; called a good-for-nothing by everyone, neither praised nor troubled over: such a person is what I want to become. On page 60, the left of the spread whose right page carries the poem's last lines, he wrote seven lines of Nichiren invocation with 南無妙法蓮華経 in the center and larger [7][8]. The chronology of 1946 records that he fell ill again on reaching Tokyo on 19 September 1931 and went home, and that he died on 21 September 1933, two days after the first signs of acute pneumonia [9].

16 February 1934. The notebook shown, and the poem first printed. The poet's brother Miyazawa Seiroku 宮沢清六 brought the poet's leather trunk to a memorial gathering in Tokyo, and someone there took the notebook out of its pocket and passed it round; the 岩手日報 printed the poem on 21 September 1934 as 遺作（最後のノートから）, a posthumous work, from the last notebook [8]. Sato places the find at the first meeting of the Society of Friends of Miyazawa Kenji, with the poets Kusano Shinpei 草野心平, Takamura Kōtarō 高村光太郎 and Nagase Kiyoko 永瀬清子 among the twenty-one present, and notes that the first collected works, of 1934 and 1935, left the poem out, which he takes to mean that Kusano and the other editors didn't think much of it as a poem [4].

1935 and 1936. The poem in print in Tokyo. It was in the Society's own magazine in June 1935, by Sato's account [4]. In July 1935 the philosopher Tanikawa Tetsuzō 谷川徹三 quoted it from its first line, 雨ニモマケズ風ニモマケズ雪ニモ夏ノ暑サニモマケヌ丈夫ナカラダヲモチ慾ハナク決シテ…, in an essay on the poet in 岩波's journal 思想, reprinted in his 文学の周囲 of 1936 [10]. In 1936 an anthology of modern Japanese poets carried it, in January by Sato's account, and in July of that year Yamamoto Yūzō 山本有三's volume for children on people who have exerted themselves for the progress of mankind; Sato and Wikipedia give July 1936 for that volume, and the National Diet Library's copy is dated January 1937 [4][8][11].

November 1936. The stone. A poem-stone was raised at the site of the poet's farmhouse school outside Hanamaki, its text cut from the notebook in Takamura's hand. A Hanamaki memoir of 1941 gives its size, its calligrapher, and its text: 高さ十一尺、巾四尺五寸、厚さ一尺五寸ぐらゐの水成岩で、碑文は賢治の晩年所持してゐた手帳に走り書きをしてゐた覺え書から拔いたもので … 文字は高村光太郎先生が書かれた, then eight lines beginning 野原ノ林ノ蔭ノ小サナ萱ブキノ小屋ニヰテ. The stone starts not with the rain but with the hut, and its first line drops 松ノ, the pines, an omission that, by the Japanese Wikipedia's account, the calligrapher corrected on the stone itself in 1946 [12][8]. The memoir dates the raising to 25 November 1935, which is a year early: the 岩手日報's yearbook, compiled in 1937, records the unveiling ceremony on 23 November 1936, 十一年十一月廿三日除幕式を行つた, and Wikipedia gives 21 November 1936 for its raising, which need not be the day of the unveiling [13][8].

1939 and 1940. The poem for schools and young farmers. A book of supplementary material for moral-instruction talks quotes its opening lines in 1939, as far as the Library's excerpt shows [14]. In 1940 the 日本青年館's library for the young printed it among the poet's notes for farmers, on pages 15 to 17 under the heading 手帖より（三）, from the notebook, three, set in kanji and hiragana rather than katakana: 雨にもまけず / 風にもまけず / 雪にも夏の暑さにもまけぬ / 丈夫なからだをもち / 慾はなく / 決して瞋らず … 野原の松の林の蔭の … ひでりのときはなみだをながし … みんなでくのぼうとよばれ … さういふものに / わたしは / なりたい, where the notebook's ミンナニ, by everyone, has lost its に [14].

1941. The poem as frontispiece to a children's book, 羽田書店's グスコーブドリの伝記. On pages 2 and 3, in katakana, with furigana on 味噌, 野菜 and 萱: 雨ニモマケズ / 風ニモマケズ / 雪ニモ夏ノ暑サニモマケヌ … 野原ノ松ノ林ノ蔭ノ … 稻ノ束ヲ負ヒ … ヒデリノトキハナミダヲナガシ … デクノボウトヨバレ … ワタシハナリタイ, without the invocation. The illustrator Yokoi Kōzō 横井弘三's afterword calls it that famous poem of the teacher's own, eight years after his death [15]. The same year Qian Daosun 銭稲孫, a professor at Peking University, put it into Chinese for his anthology of Japanese poetry [4].

1942 and 1943. The wartime readings. In March 1942 the cultural division of the 大政翼賛会 printed the poem in the second number of 詩歌翼賛, subtitled 朗読詩集, poems for reading aloud, and reissued the book, revised, the same year as 常盤樹. The reissue prints the whole poem, ending ホメラレモセズ苦ニモサレズ / サウイフモノニワタシハナリタイ with 苦 for the notebook's ク, and follows it with a note that begins この詩が發見されたのはこの詩人の死んだ後であ(る), this poem was found after the poet died; Sato calls the book an anthology of patriotic poems [16][4]. A pamphlet from the Ministry of Education's 教学局, 大東亜戦争とわれら, borrows the first two lines without naming the poet, in a passage on war work: the worker's every swing and stroke, the draftsman's every line, and 雨にも負けず、風にも負けず、大地を耕す一鍬々々が國を支へる力で(ある), not beaten by rain, not beaten by wind, every stroke of the hoe that tills the earth is the strength that holds up the nation, in kanji and hiragana. In a children's novel of 1943, お父ちやん, a schoolboy recites the opening to his friends and names the poet; a Kagoshima teachers' report of the same year quotes the second half, from the hut to the last line, from the notebook he kept while he lived [16].

1944 and 1945. The lecture. On 20 September 1944, the eve of the anniversary of the poet's death, Tanikawa lectured at Tokyo Women's College under the title What we must be prepared to do today: I think this poem is the most sublime of all the poems the Japanese since Meiji have ever made. In June 1945 the lecture was printed as a booklet titled Ame ni mo makezu, twenty thousand copies when all printing was rationed, by Sato's account [4].

1946. 宮沢賢治名作選, volume 2, 羽田書店, pages 560 and 561. After the poet's essay on farmers' art, a heading, 手帖より, from the notebook, and the poem, with 瞋 glossed イカ. The book's chronology adds the provenance in one line: 昭和六年九月十九日 出京ト同時ニ再ビ發病歸宅。（三十六歲）「詩碑」ニ刻マレタ詩「雨ニモマケズ風ニモマケズ」ハ十一月三日附デ手帖ニ記サレテアル, 19 September 1931, fell ill again on arriving in Tokyo and went home; the poem carved on the stone is written in the notebook under the date 3 November [9].

1947. The textbook. After the war the Ministry of Education kept the poem in a school textbook. The Occupation's censors objected to 一日ニ玄米四合, four measures of brown rice a day, when the ration was 2.1 measures, and the state textbook of 1947 printed three, with Seiroku's agreement; at many schools children were required to chant the poem in unison [4][8].

1959. The poem called defeatist. In a talk of 1959 Tanikawa took the poet Nakamura Minoru to task for calling the poem defeatist, and Nakamura answered in the expanded edition of his book on the poet, by Sato's account [4].

1996 and 1997. The 新校本 全集, the critical edition. Prints the poem twice. Among the poems, in volume six of 1996, pages 108 and 109, it is the edited text, with ヒデリ, 束 and 萱, and the editors' changes bracketed [17]. Among the notebooks, in volume thirteen of 1997, it is the notebook as written: ヒドリ where every printing read had ヒデリ, drought; 朿 for 束, kept as the poet's slip; 萓 for 萱; デクノボー for the printings' デクノボウ; and the seven lines of invocation after the last line [7]. The argument for ヒデリ is that of Irisawa Yasuo 入沢康夫, an editor of the collected works, as the Japanese Wikipedia reports it: the poet elsewhere wrote ひど and corrected it to ひでり, the line pairs with the cold summer that follows, and drought is in his other work. A claim of the 1980s that ヒドリ means day-labor has not displaced it, and the emendation is all but settled among scholars [8].

The dictionaries today. Kotobank has no entry for the line, and its encyclopedias name the poem only under the poet. The National Diet Library's full-text index, which reaches books still in copyright, returns some thirteen thousand six hundred volumes for 雨ニモマケズ with its hiragana form folded in; the oldest of them use the words in prose, and the earliest that prints the poem is the essay of July 1935. Its public-domain subset returns twenty-six books, among them a run of one publisher's series of 1945 and 1946 that lists the poem only as a title in its back matter. The notebook's ヒドリノトキハ first appears among the poem's books in the index in 1952, in Ogura Toyofumi 小倉豊文's study of the notebook, against some two thousand two hundred volumes for ヒデリノトキハ. The words 雨にも負けず are older than the poem: a 1928 school magazine describes a football match played 降りしきる雨にも負けず, three years before it [18].

What is not a source. The seven lines of invocation on page 60 are a text of their own and not part of the poem. The stone is a witness to the poem's reception and not to its text; it drops a word and begins in the middle. The ヒドリ question belongs to the twenty-fourth line, not to the opening two. The notebook's showing in 1934, its first printing in the 岩手日報, the stone's correction in 1946, the notebook's layout and the argument for ヒデリ rest on the Japanese Wikipedia article and on Sato, not on the critical edition's own apparatus; the printings of 1935 to 1946 and the stone's date are read at the National Diet Library, whole where the book is public, and at the excerpt the Library shows where it is served only inside Japan.

The poem in English

1981. Hiroaki Sato, in From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, edited and translated by Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson, Anchor Press / Doubleday, pp. 505–506. Titled November 3rd: neither yielding to rain / nor yielding to wind / yielding neither to / snow nor to summer heat / with a stout body / like that / without greed / never getting angry, with the note Written in a pocket notebook Miyazawa is thought to have used beginning late 1931. The typographical arrangement is as faithful to the original as possible. [2]

1983. Makoto Ueda, in Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, Stanford University Press; reprinted in Sato's Selections of 2007, pp. 217–218. Untitled: Neither rain / nor wind / nor snow nor summer's heat / will affect his robust body. / Free of anger / and desire / he will always keep a calm smile. [3]

2007. Hiroaki Sato (ed.), Miyazawa Kenji: Selections, University of California Press, pp. 217–220, with Geoffrey O'Brien's foreword, pp. xiii–xiv. Prints Ueda's rendering and Sato's own in succession. Sato's introduction: The piece is usually cited by its first line, ame ni mo makezu, though I call it simply "November 3rd," for the date noted at the outset, "11.3", and beside it three renderings of the first two lines, Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite's Bending neither to the rain / Nor to the wind, Roger Pulvers's Strong in the rain / Strong in the wind, and Katsunori Yamazato's Unbeaten by rain / Unbeaten by wind; his endnote 42: I have also italicized them because Kenji used katakana instead of the usual hiragana; O'Brien's foreword calls it an unpublished notebook entry probably intended more as a prayer than a poem, and Sato's introduction says Kenji obviously meant it as a prayer [4].

Today. What a rendering must keep is rain before wind, as the Japanese has it, and the fact that the lines describe someone rather than instruct anyone. The house title, Be Not Defeated by the Wind, Be Not Defeated by the Rain, reverses the lines and reads them with 負かす, the transitive to defeat, where the poem's own verb is 負ける, to be beaten, in a continuative clause rather than a command.

A reading

The poem is a wish written by a sick man in a notebook, in pencil, dated, unpublished while he lived, one sentence long, ending that is what I want to become, with the invocation written on the facing page. Sato reads it as a prayer, and the facing page bears him out; I read its last line as a vow as well, a promise of what he would become. The two lines are the beginning of that sentence, whose verb is at the end; the person they describe is not beaten by rain because he is out in it, walking to someone who needs him. In 1942 the state set the same words to the hoe, still as description, in a passage meant to rouse; the command a reader hears in them was never in the grammar.

References

  1. Internet Archive, full-text search on ame ni mo makezu, 28 September 2026: 77 books, the earliest dated 1974. https://archive.org/search?query=%22ame+ni+mo+makezu%22&sin=TXT
  2. Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson (ed. and tr.), From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, Anchor Press / Doubleday, Garden City, 1981, pp. 505–506.
  3. Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, Stanford University Press, 1983; the rendering as reprinted by permission in Hiroaki Sato (ed.), Miyazawa Kenji: Selections, University of California Press, 2007, pp. 217–218.
  4. Hiroaki Sato (ed.), Miyazawa Kenji: Selections, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007, pp. xiii–xiv, 45–49, 214, 217–220 and 246.
  5. James R. Buchanan, Japanese Proverbs and Sayings, University of Oklahoma Press, 1965.
  6. David Galef, Japanese Proverbs, Tuttle, 2012.
  7. 「〔雨ニモマケズ〕」, 【新】校本宮澤賢治全集 第十三巻（上）覚書・手帳 本文篇, 筑摩書房, 1997. Aozora Bunko card 45630. https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000081/card45630.html
  8. 「雨ニモマケズ」, Japanese Wikipedia. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/雨ニモマケズ
  9. 『宮沢賢治名作選』, 下巻, 羽田書店, 1946, pp. 560–561 and chronology. National Diet Library pid 1244737, scans 66 and 74. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1244737/1/66
  10. 谷川徹三, in 『思想』 no. 158, 岩波書店, July 1935, scan 57, National Diet Library pid 3198862; reprinted in 谷川徹三, 『文学の周囲』, 岩波書店, 1936, scan 204, pid 1257652; both at the full-text search's excerpt. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/3198862/1/57
  11. 動脈社 編, 『現代日本詩人選集』, 動脈社, 1936, scan 178, National Diet Library pid 1218906; 山本有三 編纂, 『人類の進歩につくした人々』 (日本少國民文庫 8), 新潮社, January 1937, scan 148, pid 1873791; both at the full-text search's excerpt. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1873791/1/148
  12. 関登久也, 『北国小記』, 十字屋書店, 1941, pp. 86–87. National Diet Library pid 1130403, scan 53. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1130403/1/53
  13. 岩手日報社 編, 『岩手年鑑』 昭和13年版, 岩手日報社, 1937, scan 143. National Diet Library pid 1072321, at the full-text search's excerpt. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1072321/1/143
  14. 東希一郎, 『修身説話補充資料』, モナス, 1939, scan 85, National Diet Library pid 1266981, at the full-text search's excerpt; 宮沢賢治, 『農民とともに』 (青少年文庫 9), 日本青年館, 1940, pp. 15–17, scans 9–10, pid 1109728. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1109728/1/9
  15. 宮沢賢治, 『グスコーブドリの伝記』, 羽田書店, 1941, pp. 2–3 and afterword. National Diet Library pid 1720627, scans 5 and 129. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1720627/1/5
  16. 大政翼賛会文化部 編, 『詩歌翼賛』 第2輯, 目黒書店, 1942, contents (雨ニモマケズ…宮澤賢治/36), National Diet Library pid 1906088, and 『常盤樹』, 翼賛図書刊行会, 1942, contents (雨ニモマケズ・宮澤賢治/40), pids 1128842 (scans 22–24) and 1093284 (修正2版, scan 23), at the full-text search's excerpt, and the Library's catalogue records (朗読詩集; 大政翼賛会文化部 編; 『詩歌翼賛』第2輯改版); 教学局 編纂, 『大東亜戦争とわれら』, 1942, scan 25, pid 1097653; 日吉早苗, 『お父ちやん』, 1943, scan 133, pid 1029451; 鹿児島県教育研究会 編, 『研究録』, 1943, scan 131, pid 1463722. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1097653/1/25
  17. 「〔雨ニモマケズ〕」, 【新】校本宮澤賢治全集 第六巻 詩5 本文篇, 筑摩書房, 1996, pp. 108–109, as transcribed at Japanese Wikisource. https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/雨ニモマケズ
  18. National Diet Library Digital Collections, full-text search, oldest first, on 雨ニモマケズ and 雨にも負けず, all tiers; and the Library's public-domain full-text search on 雨ニモマケズ, 雨にも負けず, 雨にもまけず, 雨ニモマケズ風ニモマケズ, ヒデリノトキハ and ヒドリノトキハ; the full-text search, all tiers, on ヒドリノトキハ and ヒデリノトキハ, 28 September 2026. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/search/searchResult?keyword=雨ニモマケズ&fulltext=true&sortKey=ISSUED_ASC

Authors

Tim Jackowski (Systems Architect, Takase Studios, LLC) · 典 Ten (Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1, Takase Studios, LLC)

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

Checked · grok-4.6 (xAI), 2026-09-05, citations · gpt-6-astra (OpenAI), 2026-09-05, citations · Claude Sonnet (Anthropic), 2026-09-14, citations — every address tested; those openable in books held here found nothing to differ; the rest are live URLs, searches or an undelivered page image

Cite as: Tim Jackowski and Ten, "Philology of 雨にも負けず風にも負けず (ame ni mo makezu kaze ni mo makezu)," Takase Studios, 2026, https://takase.com/library/philology/ame-ni-mo-makezu-kaze-ni-mo-makezu.