世界平和 sekai heiwa World Peace
This is a philological study of the Japanese word 世界平和 (sekai heiwa), the peace of the world. It spans the record from two 1879 translations, one of them carrying a sentence of John Stuart Mill, to a postwar Diet resolution, and examines why a Meiji compound made to translate a European idea has been claimed in turn by Christians, diplomats, a nationalist, a socialist and an emperor, and why the English word "world peace" is thirty years younger than the Japanese word it now translates.
Abstract
世界平和, sekai heiwa, is a Meiji compound of two translated words, 世界, the world, and 平和, peace, made by translators of European political writing in 1879 to render the peace of the world. Since then it has been the word of Christians, diplomats, nationalists, socialists, the throne, a wartime declaration and a postwar Diet. The Chinese order is 世界和平; the Japanese order entered Chinese only as a loan of 1919.
Overview
The sense. A Meiji compound of two translated words, 世界 the world and 平和 peace, made by translators of European political writing in 1879 to render the peace of the world, and since then the word of Christians, diplomats, nationalists, socialists, the throne, a wartime declaration and a postwar Diet.
The words. 世界 sekai began as a Buddhist word, the Chinese translation of Sanskrit lokadhātu: 世 the three times, past, present and future, and 界 the six directions. The 日本国語大辞典 first finds it in a poem of 818 and first finds the modern sense, all the countries on earth, in a Dutch-studies book of 1795, where the men of the far West send their ships to 世界万国. 平和 heiwa in its older sense meant calm or gentle: the 神道集 of about 1358 has brothers 平和 with one another, and Issa in 1816 writes wild geese lined up 平和 on the master's death-day, spelling it 平話. The sense the compound carries, the absence of war, the same dictionary first finds in 1868, in 鈴木唯一's translation of an English book on how England is governed, where in 平和の時, in time of peace, the great barons shut themselves in their castles. The reversed word 和平 wahei is older in Japanese and is the ordinary Chinese word for peace; in modern Japanese it has come to mean the making of peace rather than the state of it. 平和主義, pacifism, is 1883 [1].
The compound 世界平和 has no entry in the national dictionaries [1]. Weblio's usage dictionary defined it in 2012 as a state in which the whole world is free of war, famine and danger and everyone is at ease. The Japanese-English dictionaries of 1908, 1910, 1918 and 1919 do not list it; 竹原常太's dictionary of 1946 gives world peace; the world's peace.
The text in English. Mill wrote the peace of the world in 1848, and universal peace was the nineteenth-century phrase in English, with a book called The Dawn of Universal Peace in 1792.
The historical record
1879: two translators. The National Diet Library's full-text index returns 7,189 books for 世界平和, and none of them is old: the four it marks as classical are twentieth-century manuscripts, and of the eleven records it dates before 1890, three are noise in the machine reading (1869, 1881 and 1883, no phrase on the leaf), two are Sohō's 平和世界 caught across a line break, and six are real. The two oldest real uses are both translations of 1879. 田口卯吉's version of Leone Levi's History of British Commerce closes with the sentence that the great expansion and rapid increase of international trade is the principal guarantee of 世界平和 and therefore the permanent protector of the progress of human thought, institutions and character. Levi was quoting John Stuart Mill, whose Principles of Political Economy of 1848 says that international trade, in being the principal guarantee of the peace of the world, is the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions, and the character of the human race. The other 1879 witness is a translation of a French treatise on government, where a writer who proposes one currency for all nations says he need not fear the nickname of visionary that is given to those who aim at 世界平和 and one language for the world. The Japanese word was made to translate a European idea, from 世界 in its 1795 sense and 平和 in its 1868 sense [2].
The index also returns Tokutomi Sohō's Future Japan of 1886, and that is a trap worth naming: his contents page repeats the phrase 平和世界, the peaceful world, which he sets against 腕力世界, the world of force, and the machine reads 世界平和 across the boundary between two repetitions. His word is the other order [3].
1889–1902: the Christians, the diplomats, a nationalist, a socialist, a novelist. In 1889 the Christian reformer 中西牛郎 wrote that he had longed to make the teaching of Jesus the source of 世界平和 and spread its love and light until the four seas were calm. In 1890 the 大日本平和会 was founded at Yokohama. A boys' reader of 1892 tells the life of Elihu Burritt, the American blacksmith who learned dozens of languages and founded what the book calls a 世界平和會 to end war between nations; the leaf carries the reading せかいへいわ in small kana, the oldest furigana known. The diplomatic histories of the 1890s hand the phrase to the powers: Alexander III of Russia was called its guarantor (1895), Castlereagh sacrificed a nation's glory for it, Napoleon was its disturber, England its keeper (1897). In 1899 高山樗牛 made 世界平和の維持, the maintenance of world peace, a task of his Japanism. In 1901 幸徳秋水's Imperialism quotes Moltke against it: the hope of world peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful one; two years later his Essence of Socialism claims it for socialism. In 1902 矢野龍渓's utopian novel New Society gave it a chapter title, The future of the new society: the guarantee of world peace, the first title use known [4].
1907: the throne. On 19 April 1907 the Meiji emperor's rescript to the envoy he sent to the second Hague conference opened 朕常に世界平和の維持に眷々たり, We have ever been solicitous for the maintenance of the peace of the world. The rescript is printed in the peace society's 1911 collection. By 1930 a schoolbook of the emperor's poems files five of them under the heading 世界平和, among them the 1904 poem written as the Russian war began, 四方の海みな同胞とおもふ世になど波風の立ちさわぐらむ, in a world where all within the four seas are brothers, why do the winds and waves rise?, and says that his devotion to 世界平和 was the concern of every day [5].
1919–1947: everyone's word. The Korean declaration of independence of 1919 calls Korea's freedom a necessary step toward 世界平和 and the happiness of mankind; Itagaki the same year names 人種平等世界平和 as the great ideal. The Greater East Asia declaration of November 1943 makes 世界平和確立 the ground of its argument. The Diet's resolution on the imperial will in 1945 resolves to bring 世界平和. The 1946 constitution uses neither form, writing 恒久の平和, lasting peace, and 国際平和, international peace; the 1947 education law's preamble uses the particle form, 世界の平和と人類の福祉. The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the city declarations from 1970 keep the four characters [6].
Chinese reversed it. Chinese says 世界和平: Sun Yat-sen's speech of 1 April 1912 on the Chinese people's duty to promote it, the Republic's constitution, the United Nations documents. The Japanese order turns up in Chinese from the end of 1918, among writers who read Japanese: 杜亞泉's 新亞細亞主義 in the 東方雜誌 of November 1918, under his pen name 高勞, uses both orders in one essay, 擾亂世界和平之慮 and 確保世界平和最捷之徑路; and 李大釗 cites Trotsky's The Bolsheviki and World Peace as Bolsheviki與世界平和. The particle form 世界の平和, the commoner in Japanese today, is later than the compound: its oldest witness is 1889 [7].
The sense across time. The sense has not moved: the absence of war among nations, and the wish for it. What moved is who said it. A translator's phrase for Mill in 1879; a Christian society's aim in 1889; a schoolbook hero's league in 1892; the property of tsars and foreign secretaries in the 1890s; a nationalist program in 1899; the object of a general's scorn in 1901 and of a socialist's hope in 1903; an emperor's word in 1907; a declaration of war aims in 1943; a Diet's resolution in 1945; a city's motto since 1970. No school owns it, and each has used it against the others.
What is not a source. Not a proverb, not a Zen phrase, not a Chinese classic. Nothing before 1879 in a corpus of seven thousand books; the one earlier record (1869) and two of the 1880s are machine noise, not the phrase. Not Sohō's 平和世界, which is the other order. Not the constitution's phrase. Not a headword in any Japanese dictionary.
Today. World peace itself was rare in English before 1900, rises in the 1900s, becomes common in the 1910s with Trotsky's title of 1918 among the first, and peaks in 1945. The Japanese compound is thirty years older than the English currency of its usual translation. The Japanese-English dictionaries give world peace from 1946 and the peace of the world beside it, and that is what the house sells it as.
A reading
世界平和 is a Meiji word of 1879, made from two translated parts to carry a European hope, and since then the word of every party in turn: a tsar's admirers, a socialist, an emperor, a postwar Diet. That is why it can hang on anyone's wall. Of its parts, harmony belongs to 和 rather than to 平和, which means the absence of war; World Peace is what the dictionaries have given for it since 1946. Its first writers were translators of Mill.
References
- 「世界」・「平和」・「和平」・「平和主義」, 精選版日本国語大辞典・デジタル大辞泉・字通, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/世界
- 田口卯吉 (trans.), 大英商業史 (Leone Levi, History of British Commerce), 律書房, 1879, scan 61; 仏国政法論, 1879, scan 69; John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848, III.xvii § 5, at archive.org (principlespolit21millgoog); Leone Levi, History of British Commerce, 1880 ed., at archive.org (historyofbritish0000unse_w2l0). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/803348/1/61 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1365805/1/69
- 徳富蘇峰, 将来之日本, 1886, scan 5. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/798586/1/5
- 中西牛郎, 宗教革命論, 1889, scan 55; 少年亀鑑, 学齢館, 1892, scan 90; 平田久, 露西亜帝国, 民友社, 1895, scan 18; 高山樗牛, 時代管見, 博文館, 1899, scan 33; 幸徳秋水, 帝国主義, 警醒社, 1901, scan 31; 矢野龍渓, 新社会, 大日本図書, 1902, scan 127. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/814860/1/55 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/757041/1/90 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/767334/1/18 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/898288/1/33 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/783518/1/31 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/798597/1/127
- Meiji emperor, rescript of 19 April 1907, in 大日本平和協会, 平和論集, 1911, scan 3; 田中常憲, 明治天皇御製読本, 1930, scan 36. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/785654/1/3 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1028596/1/36
- 己未独立宣言書, 1919, at ja.wikisource; 大東亜共同宣言, 1943, at ja.wikisource; 聖旨奉體ニ關スル決議, 1945; 日本国憲法, 1946, at ja.wikisource; 教育基本法, 1947, at ja.wikisource.
- 孫文, speech of 1 April 1912, at zh.wikisource; 杜亞泉 (pen name 高勞), 新亞細亞主義, 東方雜誌, 15 November 1918, at zh.wikisource; 李大釗, citing Leon Trotsky, The Bolsheviki and World Peace, 1918.