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
This is a philological study of 雨にも負けず風にも負けず (ame ni mo makezu kaze ni mo makezu), the opening two lines of 宮沢賢治's best-known poem, sold as a proverb. It spans the poet's dated notebook of 1931 to the critical edition of 1997, and examines the poem's textual variants, its first public printings, and where a grammar note mistakes the poem's verb and reverses its two lines in English.
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, sold as a proverb though it is 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 from tuberculosis; it was not written for print and 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 the two sold here, describes that person rather than instructing anyone. A page of Nichiren invocation follows the poem in the same notebook, a vow written before a prayer.
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 every printing keeps it so, 雨ニモマケズ / 風ニモマケズ. The variants sit past the two lines sold: the notebook's ヒドリ against every printing's ヒデリ from 1934 to 1949, an emendation the 1997 critical edition reverses and the scholars now defend on other grounds; 朿 for 束, a slip kept as the poet's own; デクノボー against the printings' デクノボウ; and the stone's 野原ノ林ノ蔭ノ, which drops 松ノ, an omission its calligrapher corrected in 1946. The design's two lines carry no variant in any witness.
The sense. Within the poem the two lines are a portrait: not the weather but the man, whose body is strong and whose wants are few, and who goes east and west and south and north when he is needed. That is how the first readers took it. The illustrator in 1941 calls it the teacher's own famous poem; the Hanamaki memoirist says as this poem says, he spent his whole life for others alone; the stone, which begins with the hut and the sick child, keeps the portrait and leaves the weather off. The wartime state in 1942 took the first two lines out and made them a motto of endurance for farmers. The critical edition reads the notebook, not the motto, and finds a vow written before a prayer.
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 the two sold here, describes that person, not a command to a reader.
The text in English. The poem has been translated many times since the 1960s. Two renderings are printed in books: 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 [1][2][3]. Both put rain first, as the Japanese does. Neither of the two American proverb collections carries the lines, which is right, since they are not a proverb [4][5].
The historical record
3 November 1931. 宮沢賢治's notebook, pages 51 to 59, in pencil. The poet, thirty-five and ill with the tuberculosis he did not recover from, wrote the poem in a small black notebook and dated it in blue pencil, 11.3. It was not written for print, and 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 edition's glyph is a variant of 蔭 that Aozora carries as an image, JIS 第4水準 2-86-78) / 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 the facing page, page 60, he wrote seven lines of Nichiren invocation with 南無妙法蓮華経 in the center and larger; the poem is a vow written before the 題目 [6].
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. Yamamoto Yūzō 山本有三's anthology for children carried it in 1936 [7].
1935 or 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 the hand of the sculptor-poet Takamura Kōtarō 高村光太郎. A Hanamaki memoir of 1941 gives the stone's date as 25 November 1935, 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 the calligrapher corrected on the stone itself in 1946. Wikipedia dates the stone 21 November 1936; the 1941 memoir says 1935; neither date is settled here [8].
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. The earliest printing of the poem in the public domain, 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 [9].
1942 and 1943. The two lines alone. A pamphlet from the Ministry of Education's 教学局, 大東亜戦争とわれら, quotes the opening as a farmer's motto: 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, 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, which is the form the design descends from. A girls' novel of 1943 has a child recite the poem; a Kagoshima teachers' report of the same year quotes it whole [10].
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 [11].
1997. The 新校本 全集, the critical edition. Prints the notebook as written: ヒドリ where every printing from 1934 to 1949 had ヒデリ, drought; 朿 for 束, kept as the poet's slip; デクノボー for the printings' デクノボウ; and the seven lines of invocation after the last line. The editors argue in the notes that ヒデリ is what he meant, since he elsewhere wrote ひど and corrected it to ひでり, since the line pairs with the cold summer that follows, and since drought is in his other work; a claim of the 1980s that ヒドリ means day-labor is not accepted. The text is what he wrote, the sense is what he meant, and the edition keeps both [6].
The dictionaries today. No dictionary of proverbs carries the line, because it is not one; kotobank has no entry for it. The National Diet Library's public-domain books carry the poem's opening in twenty-six books from 1941 on, and the two lines in kanji and hiragana in six, the first a 1928 school magazine describing a football match played 降りしきる雨にも負けず, three years before the poem [12].
What is not a source. The seven lines of invocation on page 60 are a text of their own, sold separately (record 1074), 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 two lines sold. Much of what is said above about the years 1931 to 1936 rests on the Japanese Wikipedia article alone, not on the 1997 edition's own apparatus; the printings of 1941 and 1946 and the memoir of 1941 are witnesses read directly.
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. [1]
1983. Makoto Ueda, in Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, Stanford University Press; reprinted in Sato's Selections of 2007, pp. 216–217. 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. [2]
2007. Hiroaki Sato (ed.), Miyazawa Kenji: Selections, University of California Press, pp. 216–219, with Geoffrey O'Brien's foreword, p. xiii. 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"; 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 [3].
Today. Kotobank carries no entry for the line, since it is not a proverb; 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 dying man's vow in a notebook, in pencil, dated, not meant for print, one sentence long, ending that is what I want to become, with a prayer written on the facing page. The two lines sold 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.
References
- 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.
- 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. 216–217.
- Hiroaki Sato (ed.), Miyazawa Kenji: Selections, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007, pp. xiii, 214 and 216–219.
- James R. Buchanan, Japanese Proverbs and Sayings, University of Oklahoma Press, 1965.
- David Galef, Japanese Proverbs, Tuttle, 2012.
- 「〔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
- 「雨ニモマケズ」, Japanese Wikipedia. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/雨ニモマケズ
- 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
- 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
- National Diet Library Digital Collections, full-text search on 雨にも負けず and 雨ニモマケズ. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/
- 『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
- National Diet Library Digital Collections, full-text search on 雨ニモマケズ, 雨にも負けず, 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. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/