人生良好 jinsei ryōkō Life is Good
This is a philological study of the Japanese phrase 人生良好 (jinsei ryōkō), life, in good condition. It is not a Japanese saying but house Japanese for an English one, first on record from the house's own site in January 2011, and it examines why the word 良好, the language of the report card and the ward chart, gives the phrase the character of a status line rather than a sigh of contentment.
Abstract
人生良好, jinsei ryōkō, is house Japanese for the English Life is Good, four characters with no witness in any Japanese book, dictionary or text outside this house. The phrase is on record from the house's own site by January 2011; for the parts, 人生 is in a poem of 892 and 良好 in a travel book of 1833. 良好 is the word of the report card and the ward chart, not of a poet, so the compound reads to a Japanese eye as a status line, Life: condition good, rather than a sigh of contentment.
Overview
The sense. House Japanese for an English sentence: 人生 life and 良好 good, in good condition, four characters with no witness in any Japanese book, dictionary or text outside this house. Not Chinese; in the dictionaries neither Japanese nor bilingual. 良好 is what a grader writes, not what a poet says [1].
The words. 人生 jinsei is a person's life in this world, and the span of it [1]. 良好 ryōkō means good in the sense of in good condition [1].
The text in English. The English is ordinary and old.
The historical record
892, and 1713. 人生 is Chinese in the 史記, Japanese in a poem of 892 and in Kaibara Ekiken's 養生訓 of 1713, where caring for the body is 人生第一の大事, life's first business [1].
1833, the manuscript leaf. The 日本国語大辞典 first finds 良好 in 1833, in the Japanese translation of a Dutch account of Nagasaki, where the climate, for damp and heat, is 最も良好和平ならざるなり, not at all good and mild [2].
1906, Sōseki. Its next citation is Sōseki in 1906, 成績は良好だ, the results are good, and that is the word's home: the dictionaries illustrate it with reception, grades and a patient's progress [1].
The corpus. The Diet Library's index has 成績良好 at its ceiling of ten thousand books, 経過良好 in over fourteen hundred, 感度良好 in nearly a hundred from an army ordnance manual of 1914 onward [3].
Li Shizhen. In Chinese it is the same kind of word; Li Shizhen's materia medica uses it of a drug that improves with age [4].
2011, the house's own record. There is none to write for the compound. 人生良好 appears in no book of the Diet Library's public-domain corpus, nor do 良好な人生 or 人生は良好; Chinese and Japanese Wikisource have it nowhere; no dictionary, Japanese or bilingual, lists it. It is this house's rendering of Life is Good, and the earliest record of it is the house's own: the design image was captured on takase.com on 8 January 2011 [5].
1913, and the other Japanese phrases. What Japanese writers said when they meant the same thing the corpus does show. 人生は美しい, life is beautiful, is in thirty-six books from 1913 onward, and nearly all of them are translations or their echo: Kuprin's Duel in 1913 (Yes, life is beautiful), Dostoevsky's elder Zosima, Beethoven's letter (life is beautiful, but for me it is forever poisoned), Tolstoy's Family Happiness, Gorky, and then Nagai Kafū and Nagayo Yoshirō writing it for themselves [6]. 人生は楽し, life is a joy, the index finds in 122 books from 1902, most of them the adjective 楽しい or the adverb 楽しく rather than the bare predicate, the first a student's primer, 人生は樂しく送らるべし; 人生は善い from 1906; 好い人生 from 1886 [6]. The subtitle phrase 人生は素晴らしい, which is what Weblio's film corpus gives for life is good, has no prewar book at all.
What is not a source. Not a proverb, not a classical phrase, not a dictionary word. Not Chinese. The 萬葉集 and the 史記 both appear in the index for 良好, and both are false: the one is 山上憶良 followed by 好去好来, the other 温良 followed by 好樂, the two characters meeting across a boundary [3].
The phrase in English
1815, and after. Wordsworth in 1815 has when evil men are strong no life is good; Swinburne, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Edwin Arlington Robinson and William Carlos Williams (Come! Life is good—enjoy it!) all have it, as do Origen and Anselm in translation [7].
1994, and today. Its frequency in English books is flat across two centuries and doubles after 2000, and the capitalized form appears only then: the Life is Good Company, a Boston apparel maker founded in 1994, registered Life is good. as its trademark and put it on a stick figure's T-shirt [8]. Most people who ask for Life is Good in Japanese today are asking for that sentence in that spirit.
A reading
This is not a Japanese saying; it is a rendering of an English one, and the rendering has a character worth naming: because 良好 is the word of the report card and the ward chart, 人生良好 reads to a Japanese eye as a status line, Life: condition good, nearer to all systems go than to a contented sigh. That may be exactly the wit wanted, and a T-shirt slogan wears it well; no one will misread it. A reader who wants what a Japanese writer would write has 人生は美しい, a century of translated joy, or 人生は楽し.
References
- 「人生」・「良好」, 大辞泉・精選版日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/人生
- 日本風俗備考, 1833, scan 87. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/11223206/1/87
- National Diet Library Digital Collections, next-generation full-text search on 良好 and 成績良好, counted by decade. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/
- 李時珍, 本草綱目, 1653 print. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2556307
- Internet Archive Wayback Machine,
takase.com/Names/images/j/jinseiryoukou_02.gif, captured 8 January 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20110108175548/http://takase.com/Names/images/j/jinseiryoukou_02.gif - National Diet Library Digital Collections, next-generation full-text search on 人生は美しい, 人生は楽し, 人生は善い and 好い人生. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/
- "life is good", English Wikisource, search. https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?search=%22life+is+good%22
- "Life is Good (company)", English Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_is_Good_(company)