自由に生まれて jiyū ni umarete Born Free
自由に生まれて (jiyū ni umarete), born free, carries the title of the 1966 film Born Free and its Academy Award song into Japanese, and like the English it is a fragment, born free, and…. Its 自由, in the sense of liberty, is a Meiji word: Fukuzawa wrote in 1866 that it did not suffice for the original.
Abstract
自由に生まれて, jiyū ni umarete, born free, carries the title of the 1966 British film Born Free into Japanese, and is a fragment as the English title is: the connective form of 生まれる, born free, and…. Its 自由, in the sense of liberty, is a Meiji word, fixed by the constitution of 1889; none of the public-domain books the National Diet Library's full-text search reaches prints the phrase.
Overview
The sense. Plain Japanese, and a fragment. 自由に生まれて, born free, ends in the connective form of 生まれる, so it reads born free, and …, the way the English title does. It is grammatical and reads at once, and its source is in English.
The words. 自由 jiyū, freedom, is old in the sense as one pleases, cited from 777, and new in the sense meant here: Fukuzawa wrote in 1866 that the translations 自由 for liberty and 通義 for right do not suffice for the original sense, and the Meiji Constitution of 1889 fixed the word in 居住及移転の自由, freedom of residence and movement [1]. 生まれて umarete is the connective form of 生まれる, 子が母親の胎内から出る。…出生する。誕生する, to come from the mother's womb; to be born, cited from the 万葉集, うぐひすの卵の中にほととぎす独り所生て, in the warbler's eggs a cuckoo alone is born [2]; so the phrase is a fragment, born free and …, the way the English title is.
The text in English. The English words are the same words in the other order [3]: 自由に, free, then 生まれて, born.
The historical record
What is not a source. No Japanese text stands behind it. 自由に生まれて returns no page in the Library's full-text search of its public-domain books [4]; its source is in English.
Today. Born Free is the 1966 British film of Joy and George Adamson raising the lioness Elsa in Kenya and returning her to the wild, and the song John Barry and Don Black wrote for it, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song; 自由に生まれて, born free and…, is a fair carrying of the title, which is also a fragment [5].
A reading
自由に生まれて is honest modern Japanese for an English title, and a fair carrying of it: a fragment for a fragment. The 自由 in it is the Meiji word for liberty, the one Fukuzawa found wanting in 1866.
References
- 「自由」, デジタル大辞泉・精選版日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/自由
- 「生れる」, 精選版日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/生れる-441450
- JMdict (EDRDG), 「自由に」, at jisho. https://jisho.org/word/自由に
- National Diet Library next-generation full-text search on 自由に生まれて, searched again 26 September 2026: 0 books. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/api/book/search?searchfield=contentonly&keyword=自由に生まれて
- "Born Free", English Wikipedia; "Born Free (Matt Monro song)", English Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Free · https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Free_(Matt_Monro_song)