押忍の精神 osu no seishin Spirit of Perseverance
押忍の精神 (osu no seishin), the spirit of osu, turns the greeting shouted in karate halls into a creed. The dictionary treats 押忍, push and endure, as characters fitted afterward to a spoken greeting, おす, and the tellings of where that greeting began disagree on the place and the decade.
Abstract
押忍の精神, the spirit of osu, is a modern Japanese phrase of the training hall, attested in no dictionary and in no book digitized to 1946. Its one word with a dictionary entry, 押忍, is a spoken greeting, おす, with the characters push and endure fitted to it. The dictionary gives the word no dated origin, and the tellings of where it comes from disagree on the place and the decade, which is what a legend looks like.
Overview
The sense. Endurance under pressure: the hall's greeting turned into a creed. Modern Japanese, plain and correct, and without a history in print. It is not old, it is not scripture, and it carries a quotation from no one.
The words. 押忍, osu, is the greeting shouted in karate and other halls, and it has a dictionary entry: デジタル大辞泉 heads it as the interjection おす, 若い男性どうしが出会ったときに使うあいさつ語。親しい間柄で使われる。おっす, a greeting used when young men meet; used between familiars; ossu, and adds 「押忍」とも当てて書く, also written with the characters 押忍, which is to say the two characters, push and endure, are ateji fitted to a spoken word, not its source [1]. 精神, seishin, is spirit in the ordinary sense.
The text in English. No Meiji bilingual dictionary and no printed English book carries the phrase. Word for word it is the spirit of osu. An English gloss such as perseverance reads the two characters of 押忍, push and endure; 押忍 itself is a greeting, and perseverance is an explanation of its characters.
The historical record
No book in the National Diet Library's full-text corpus of digitized books to 1946 carries the phrase, and 押して忍ぶ, push and endure written out, returns no book [2]; kotobank has no entry for the phrase [3]. 押忍 alone returns 124 books [2], every one of them a hit on the two characters in some other word, 押 and 忍 side by side in a Buddhist ritual text of 1321, a Nichiren letter, a place name.
1981 and 2016. Where 押忍 is said to come from. The Japanese Wikipedia article, which carries a banner that its sourcing is thin, lists the tellings and calls them 諸説, various theories: that it is おはようございます clipped in the old navy; that it arose among students of the 大日本武徳会's 武道専門学校 in prewar Kyoto, for which it cites 『月刊剣道日本』 of December 1981, page 48; that おはようございます shrank by stages, おはよーっす, おわーす, おす, and the characters 押して忍ぶ, push and endure, were fitted afterward, of which the article says 自我を抑え我慢する、の意か, perhaps in the sense of suppressing the self and enduring; and 大森敏範's claim, in his 2016 book 『押忍とは何か?』, that it began at 拓殖大学 before the war from a sumo word for withstanding a push [4]. The tellings disagree on the place and the decade, which is what a legend looks like, and the article's dates are the article's.
What is not a source. The four origin tellings of 押忍 are tellings, not attestations, and none is chosen over the others. The 極真 association of 押忍 does not appear in the sources cited here. The standard five-line 道場訓 that karate organizations post, 人格完成に努むること and its four fellows, does not contain the phrase. No school's own page names 押忍の精神 as its motto.
A reading
A saying of what a dojo says, and a dojo's sayings mostly live in the air rather than in books, so the honest history of this one is short and says that. The phrase is good Japanese and means what it appears to mean, and it carries no claim of an origin, an author or an age. Push and endure is how the characters of 押忍 are usually explained, not where the word began; the dictionary presents it the other way round, a spoken greeting with characters fitted to it afterward.
References
- デジタル大辞泉「押忍」, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/押忍-1996120
- National Diet Library Digital Collections, next-generation full-text search on 押忍 and 押して忍ぶ. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/
- kotobank, search for 押忍の精神: no entry. https://kotobank.jp/search?q=押忍の精神
- Japanese Wikipedia, 「押忍」, citing 『月刊剣道日本』 1981年12月号48ページ and 大森敏範『押忍とは何か?』, 三五館, 2016. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/押忍