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不言実行 fugen jikkō Action Before Words

不言実行 (fugen jikkō), action before words, is a Japanese-made word of Meiji politics. It is in print by 1898, of a new cabinet that would not publish its platform. This study follows it to the Katsura cabinet's watchword of 1901, a conscript's virtue by 1913, and a poet who called it ancient.

Japanese Scroll of Action Before Words (fugen jikkō) — Calligraphy by Eri Takase
Action Before Words不言実行fugen jikkō

Original art by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase

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Abstract

不言実行, fugen jikkō, action before words, is a Japanese-made word of Meiji politics. It is first in print in 1898, of a new cabinet that would not publish its platform, and in 1901 the first Katsura cabinet declared it its own watchword; from 1902 its users tied it to the Analects' gentleman, slow in speech and quick in action, and the commentators later to he acts before he speaks. It was mocked as a buzzword by the politician Ōkuma Shigenobu and taught to conscripts as a virtue by 1913; by 1943 a poet could call it ancient. Its pun, 有言実行, say it and do it, is in print by 1913.

Overview

The sense. To do what should be done, in silence, without complaint or argument: the two words are Chinese, the four-character word is Japanese, and it is young.

The words. 不言 is not saying: 老子's 不言之教, the teaching that uses no words, and the 史記's peach and plum trees that say nothing and still wear a path to their feet. 実行 is real doing, a word the dictionary first cites from an 1830s satire of the Confucians of Edo who wag empty tongues and have no real conduct in their persons [1].

The text in English. The English begins in the foreign press of Yokohama, with the critics: in 1903 The Japan Weekly Mail writes of the celebrated fugen jikko seisaku (policy of deeds without words) which the Katsura Cabinet credits itself with pursuing [2]. The first dictionary to match it to a foreign saying matches it to a French one: a 1909 Japanese dictionary of foreign idioms glosses faire sans dire as 言はずして行ふ, 不言実行, to act without talking, and on the same page gives deeds, not words and the Italian deeds are male, words female without matching either to it.

The historical record

1840, China: the same four characters, meaning the opposite. The only pre-modern book in the National Diet Library's full-text index that contains the string is Chinese, an 1840 collection by the Qing official Li Yanzhang. His sentence complains that scholars for the most part do not speak of practical conduct and do not read the whole classics. There 不言 is the verb and 實行 its object; the words are a fragment of a sentence, not a phrase. Nothing older in that index carries the word, in either language [3].

1898. A silent cabinet. The oldest print of the word that the National Diet Library's full text reaches is a magazine of 10 February 1898, and it is about a different cabinet: the third Itō cabinet, a month old, which having seen the previous cabinet fail by its declaration, cunningly took up a doctrine of 不言実行 and did not publish its platform; it is simply silent (彼は前内閣が宣言に失敗せしを見て狡猾にも不言實行說をなし又かの政綱を發表せず。唯默々たる也). The word is already a label, and already a charge. The page is read in the library's machine-read text; its image is served only inside Japan [4].

1901–1903. A cabinet's watchword, and its critics. The first Katsura cabinet took office in 1901 and made the word its own. A member's report to his constituents in July 1902 says that it declared no principles and no platform, and announced that it called itself 不言実行 (其主義政綱ヲ宣言セス自ラ稱シテ不言實行ト聲明ス) [5]. Speaking to voters in Morioka in February 1903, after the Diet had been dissolved, Hara Takashi said that at the founding of the present cabinet they announced 不言実行, to act without speaking; look at the record and they have spoken without acting. Among the first books to carry the word, in 1902, the founding address of an oratory society is already an attack: it says that the kind of 不言実行 practiced by the present cabinet, working in silence, "slow in speech and quick in action," is a thing not to be done in today's constitutional politics, which rests on public opinion. The quoted phrase is the Analects, and it is attached to the word in its first year as the cabinet's watchword. Three more books of 1903 say the same, one a manual of rhetoric warning that silence, few words and 不言実行 alone will not get through in today's world [6].

1904–1909. The buzzword and the sect. Ōkuma Shigenobu, the most talkative politician of the age, sneered at the buzzword 不言実行: a man who talks may not be a doer, but there is no doer who does not talk; what they call 不言実行 is nothing but the excuse of a man with no opinions and no confidence. By 1909 a book of portraits of government men calls it a religion: 不言実行 is the mark of the Katsura cabinet, and Baron Hirata is the head temple of the 不言実行 sect; the world calls Marquis Katsura its founder, but it was the baron who converted him. The same year the lawyer and politician Yamada Kinosuke, annotating the Analects in Chinese, wrote that those who now preach 不言実行 only make the people doubt; where is the trust in that? [7]

1903–1916. The word in English. The foreign press read it as the cabinet's slogan and the critics' complaint. In 1906 The Japan Weekly Mail, reporting a general's remark that the present era was one of deeds not words (fugen jikko), answered that it was Count Katsura who invented this term fugen jikko, which the 1898 magazine shows was not so; and in 1910 Uyehara, writing in London on Japanese elections, said that the government has invented a doctrine called "the principle of Fugen-jikko, or practice without discussion", a sentence Clement repeated in 1916 [8].

1906–1915. The virtue. Tokutomi Sohō took the word up in 1906 with a caveat, what we should strive for is 不言実行, though 不言実行 does not mean absolute silence. In 1913 a manual for the spiritual education of soldiers gave conscripts a lesson on it, numbered thirty-one: what you have resolved in your heart you carry out without saying so; what you are ordered you do exactly, in silence; its drill of questions and answers two leaves on gives the reasons, said aloud it sounds like boasting, and a soldier carries out orders at once and reasons are forbidden, and between them the lesson quotes 老子, he who knows does not speak. The same year the essayist Ōmachi Keigetsu put the man who aims at great things is a man of 不言実行 into a calligraphy copybook, and from 1915 the county gazetteers praise their local worthies for the virtue of 不言実行 [9].

1913–1916. The pun. 有言実行, say it and do it, is in print by June 1913, in the journal of the Nihon Kōdōkai, a society for moral teaching: 不言実行 is fine, but 有言実行: speak well and do well, that is, word and deed as one (不言實行も結構であるが有言實行で。能く言つて能く行ふ。即ち言行一致); the same words stand in 1915 in a book of addresses by the society's president, Count Tokugawa Satotaka. Both are read in the library's machine-read text [10]. By 1916 it is the third term of a joke about three prime ministers: Katsura made 不言実行 his principle, Yamamoto neither spoke nor acted, and Ōkuma raised the ideal of 有言実行. By 1926 a lecturer could say that constitutional politics is politics of responsibility, which is to say 有言実行, and by 1938 the two were a pair: 不言実行 is to be honored, 有言実行 is to be done [11].

1935–1943. The word forgets its birth. The Library's curve rises from eleven books in 1900–04 to 466 in 1935–39, most of them in politics, the military, education, biography and ethics. In 1943 a poet could write that we have been taught 不言実行 since ancient times, of a word forty-five years old in print [12].

The sense across time. The dictionaries record one sense, the virtue: to do without announcing. The books record two, and they are the two sides of one argument that began the year the word did. For the barracks, the copybook and the commentators on the Analects, the word is the sages' own teaching: act first, and let your words follow; the gentleman is ashamed when his words outrun his deeds; I would prefer not to speak: does Heaven speak? The four seasons run their course. For the orators, for Hara and for Ōkuma, a government that will not speak is a government that need not answer, and 不言実行 is the silent man's excuse. A 1940 commentary reconciles the two in one line, and it is the best gloss the word has: 不言実行 prizes not the silence but the doing [13].

What is not a source. Not a Chinese idiom: the 1840 Chinese sentence uses the four characters to mean do not speak of practice, and the Buddhist canon and the Chinese classics in the Wikisource library carry them nowhere. Not ancient: the oldest print the National Diet Library's full text reaches is the 1898 magazine, and the first dictionary there to list it, a 1906 kanji dictionary, gives it as a usage example under 実行 [14]. Not the Analects verbatim: the Analects supply the idea in four passages and the four characters in none; 不言 alone stands in six passages, one of them the four's own 陽貨, where it is the disciple's protest at the Master's wish for silence, 子如不言、則小子何述焉, if you do not speak, what shall we disciples pass on? [15] Not a samurai maxim: it was born in a cabinet and raised in a conscript's barracks.

Today. Two books of 1909–12 reach for the word to render Carlyle [16]. The English glosses: the 1942 Kenkyūsha already has action before words; in deed but not in words, with he is a man of deeds but few words; the modern ones, as Weblio carries them, are working in silence (斎藤和英大辞典, 1928), action before (rather than) words; work before talk (研究社 新和英中辞典, whose example sentence is still political: What is now most needed in Japan is politicians who act rather than talk), deeds, not words (英語ことわざ教訓辞典) and actions speak louder than words (Tatoeba) [17].

A reading

A Meiji word with a Confucian spine. Action Before Words is the English it has carried in Kenkyūsha since at least 1942, and where it comes from is the Master's answer to a talkative disciple, act first, then let your words follow. The birth in the cabinets is the story, and it is a good one for a word about resolve: it began as a charge against a silent government, was taken up as a boast by the next, was mocked as a buzzword by the best talker of the age and outlived the mockery because soldiers, teachers and calligraphers found it true. The best one-line reading is the 1940 one: not the silence, but the doing. The modern 実 and the pre-war 實 are one word.

References

  1. 「不言」・「実行」・「不言実行」・「有言実行」, 精選版日本国語大辞典・デジタル大辞泉, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/不言実行
  2. The Japan Weekly Mail, 21 November 1903, p. 551 (Mr. Inukai). https://archive.org/details/jwm-bound-1903.7-12/page/n554
  3. 李彦章, 榕園全集 (榕園文鈔 卷一), 1840, scan 32. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2598944/1/32
  4. 中外時論 第二号, 精神社, 1898 (明治三十一年二月十日発行, by the colophon at scan 5), 政界観象「伊藤内閣の凶徴」, scan 29, in the library's machine-read text. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1546238/1/29
  5. 杉下太郎右衛門, 議会報告書, 1902, scan 7. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/783868/1/7
  6. 東洋雄弁会演説集, 1902, scan 4; 原敬, 第十七議会の顛末, 1903, scans 2 (盛岡市社陵館に於て演說速記, 5 February 1903) and 16; 小室重弘, 実験雄弁学, 1903, scan 8. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/900479/1/4 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/784263/1/16 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/861824/1/8
  7. 鳥谷部春汀, 明治人物月旦, in 春汀全集, 1909, scan 58; 山本実彦, 政府部内人物評, 1909, scan 14; 山田喜之助, 標註論語, 有斐閣, 1909, scan 47 (his career: 「山田喜之助」, 政治家人名事典 and 日本人名大辞典+Plus, at kotobank). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/778039/1/58 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/778198/1/14 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/754311/1/47 · https://kotobank.jp/word/山田喜之助-1117787
  8. The Japan Weekly Mail, 18 August 1906, p. 162 (Manchuria); George Etsujiro Uyehara, The Political Development of Japan, 1867–1909, Constable, 1910, p. 269; Ernest Wilson Clement, Constitutional Imperialism in Japan, 1916. https://archive.org/details/jwm-bound-1906.7-12/page/n161 · https://archive.org/details/politicaldevelop00uyehuoft/page/n296 · https://archive.org/details/constitutionalim00clemrich
  9. 徳富蘇峰, 日曜講壇, 1906, scan 92; 実際的軍人精神教育要領, 1913, scan 69 (and scans 70–71); 大町桂月, 修養三体習字帖, 1913, scan 60; 鈴鹿郡郷土誌, 1915, scan 77. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/898344/1/92 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/941757/1/69 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/917848/1/60 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/950885/1/77
  10. 弘道, 日本弘道会, June 1913, scan 8, in the library's machine-read text; 徳川達孝, 国民道徳訓, 1915, scan 166, in the library's machine-read text. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/6057799/1/8 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/954934/1/166
  11. 大正政界之裏面, 1916, scan 57; a political lecture, 1926, scan 239; a teacher-training text, 1938, scan 42. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/936068/1/57 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/918651/1/239 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1457336/1/42
  12. National Diet Library Digital Collections, next-generation full-text search on 不言実行, counted by five-year period; 野口米次郎, 伝統について, 1943, scan 22. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/ · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1871662/1/22
  13. 原重治, 興亜の理念論語新説, 1940, scan 25 (on 為政 2.13). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1055830/1/25
  14. 漢和大辞林, 1906, scan 190. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/862748/1/190
  15. 論語, 陽貨第十七, 鄉黨第十, 先進第十一, 憲問第十四, 季氏第十六, at Chinese Wikisource; CBETA full-text, no hit. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/論語/陽貨第十七
  16. 文芸百科全書, 早稲田文学社, 1909, scan 941 (on Carlyle's father); 北沢種一, 1912, scan 91 (on Carlyle). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/871775/1/941 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/938321/1/91
  17. 神田乃武・南日恒太郎, 英和双解熟語大辞典, 1909, scan 857; Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary, Takenobu, Harvard University Press, 1942; James Legge (trans.), The Chinese Classics, vol. 1, Trübner, 1861, 為政 2.13; 「不言実行」, 斎藤和英大辞典・研究社新和英中辞典・英語ことわざ教訓辞典・Tatoeba, at Weblio 英和・和英辞典. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/990169/1/857 · https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/不言実行

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 · Claude Sonnet (Anthropic), 2026-09-15, citations — every item tested at its address; some verbatim; one differing — the account's under-bracketed quotation, corrected from the OCR text; nothing found not to resolve; the rest not openable, most re-opened by hand at the Lab's page text and verbatim, the count of books by year taken from the National Diet Library's own search results; several renderings, the modern ones verbatim at Weblio, the instrument now named

Cite as: Tim Jackowski and Ten, "Philology of 不言実行 (fugen jikkō)," Takase Studios, 2026, https://takase.com/library/philology/fugen-jikko.