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Home › Library › Philology › It Cannot Be Helped · It Can't Be Helped · It Can't Be Helped

仕方が無い · 仕様が無い · 仕方無い shikata ga nai · shiyō ga nai · shikatanai It Cannot Be Helped · It Can't Be Helped · It Can't Be Helped

仕方が無い, 仕様が無い and 仕方無い (shikata ga nai, shiyō ga nai, shikatanai), it cannot be helped, are three spellings of one idiom. The great dictionary first cites it from a commentary on the Book of Odes of about 1535. This study follows how English writers in Japan, from a letter of 1883, made it a word for a people.

Japanese Scroll of It Cannot Be Helped (shikata ga nai) — Calligraphy by Eri Takase
It Cannot Be Helped · It Can't Be Helped · It Can't Be Helped仕方が無い · 仕様が無い · 仕方無いshikata ga nai · shiyō ga nai · shikatanai

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Abstract

仕方が無い, 仕様が無い and 仕方無い, it cannot be helped, are three spellings of one Japanese idiom, first cited by the great dictionary from Kiyohara Nobukata's commentary on the Book of Odes of about 1535. Hepburn's first dictionary, of 1867, files the sentence under resignation. By 1883 a letter to an English paper in Japan called it a national policy, in 1890 a paper read in Tokyo spoke of the shikata-ga-nai feeling as a trait of the Japanese, and from Time in 1945 through Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's Farewell to Manzanar the phrase became, in English, a word for how the Japanese bear what cannot be helped.

Overview

The sense. The first sense has not moved in five hundred years: there is no way, so accept it. The dictionary's own gloss, 不満足ではあるが、あきらめるほかない, unsatisfying, but there is nothing to do but give it up, is the whole character of the phrase, and Hepburn heard it in 1867 when he filed the sentence under resignation. What changed is who was listening. In Japanese it stayed a phrase of daily life with two further senses, hopeless of a person and unbearably of a feeling. In English, writers on Japan made it a word for how the Japanese bear what cannot be helped, from a letter of 1883 to the books of the internment and the occupation, which is a reading of a people through a phrase.

The words. One idiom, three shapes: 仕方が無い, 仕様が無い, and 仕方無い, the clipped form. 仕方 and 仕様 are two nouns for a way of doing: 仕 is do, and 方 and 様 are manner. が無い is there is none [1][2]. The dictionaries write ない in kana; 無い in kanji is the same word. The second form's reading is the thing to know: 大辞泉 says 現在では多く「しょうがない」と発音される, it is now mostly pronounced shō ga nai, and the 日本国語大辞典 says 「しよう」が「しょう」と発音されることもある, しよう is sometimes pronounced しょう; so shiyō ga nai is the spelling and shō ga nai the usual speech, and a 1903 novel spells the same syllables a third way, 詮様 [2]. 大辞泉 gives 仕方が無い three senses: 1 どうすることもできない。ほかによい方法がない。やむを得ない, nothing can be done; there is no better way; it is unavoidable; 2 よくない。困る, no good, a nuisance, of a person (彼は怠け者で仕方がないやつだ); 3 我慢ができない。たまらない, unbearable, of a feeling (彼女に会いたくて仕方がない, I cannot stand how much I want to see her) [1]. For 仕様がない it gives the first two [2]; Chamberlain's grammar of 1889 gives the third for both forms [3].

The proverb in English. Hepburn's no resource and no help for it, in 1867, are the first English, and the plainest [4]. Cannot be helped is in print by 1892 and is the English of Saitō's dictionary of 1915 [5][6][7]; it can't be helped is how Time put it in 1945 [8]. What a rendering must keep is the acceptance in the phrase: not there is no solution, which is a report, but nothing to be done, which is a decision to stop looking.

The historical record

About 1535. Kiyohara Nobukata's commentary on the Book of Odes (毛詩抄), in the Kyoto University copy in twenty volumes, as the 精選版日本国語大辞典 cites it. The dictionary's first example of 仕方がない: なごりをしけれどもしかたがない程に郡国族の処へ行ぞ, sorry to part, but there is no way, so off to the provinces. The same dictionary describes the 毛詩抄 as 清原宣賢's commentary, in his own draft finished by 1535 and in 林宗二's notes of his lectures copied in 1539, and as 当時の口語を知る貴重な資料, a precious source for the spoken language of the time [9]. The dictionary is the witness for the line [1].

1676. A New Guide to Interpreters (捷解新語), a Japanese textbook for Korean interpreters, as the same dictionary cites it. The first example of 仕様がない: なにともしやうかなさに、たいくゎんとももいろいろにおもゑども, there being no way at all, the officials thought this and that [2].

1813 to 1846. Edo comic fiction and a moral talk. The dictionary's next examples: 浮世床, which it labels 滑稽本, comic fiction: そんなら仕方がねへ。化物で出て呉べい, then there's no help for it; come out as a ghost [1]; and 松翁道話, the moral talks of the 心学 teacher Fuse Shōō [10]: どうも仕様のないものぢゃ, a hopeless sort, which is the second sense, of a person [2].

1867. J. C. Hepburn, A Japanese and English Dictionary; with an English and Japanese Index, the first edition. Under 仕方, p. 402: Way of doing, treatment, conduct toward others; way of making, how any thing is made; resource; gesture. or sign … Shikata ga nai, no resource. Under 諦, akirame, p. 7, the missionary files the whole sentence: to be resigned or become easy in mind … Shikata ga nai to —, finding there is no remedy to be resigned. Syn. OMOI-KIRU. And in the English index, p. 69, under No: No help for it, shikata ga nai; shiyō ga nai [4]. The English is no resource and no help for it, and the place he files it, resignation, is the sense English writers would make a national character of. The second edition of 1872 keeps the entries under 仕方 and 諦 and adds kwan-nen to the synonyms [4].

1883. A letter to The Japan Weekly Mail, Yokohama, 10 February 1883, p. 90. After a snowstorm stopped the Tokyo–Yokohama trains, a reader writes that the Japanese, with a national character moulded by the physical phenomena to which the country is subject, had been beginning to abandon the "shikata-ga-nai" unavoidable policy by Western means; and asks whether the average man, when the trains stop, does not rather stay at home for the day and abandon his projected trip to Yokohama, finding consolation by reverting to the old "shikata-ga-nai" [11]. It is the earliest known English, in this library's books and its harvest of the Internet Archive, that makes the phrase a people's habit.

1889. Basil Hall Chamberlain, A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese, second edition. The third sense, in both forms: Another phrase corresponding to our Colloquial "awfully" is the gerund of the adjective or verb, followed by the words shi-yō ga nai or shi-kata ga nai, which signify literally "there is nothing to be done," "there is no help for it," thus: Atsukute shi-yō ga nai. "It is awfully hot." (§ 218, p. 144) [3].

1890. Walter Dening, "Mental Characteristics of the Japanese", read to the Asiatic Society of Japan on 12 November 1890, printed in The Japan Weekly Mail of 22 November and in the Society's Transactions, vol. XIX, 1891. The phrase as a trait, in English, reported as other men's view: Others there are who maintain that the levity and unconcern so noticeable in the Japanese is real and deep-seated; and that it is the result of the fatalism and scepticism which form so prominent a feature of Japanese thought. The shikata-ga-nai feeling, these critics affirm, permeates everything, and reconciles the Japanese to events that would cause Westerns the gravest concern. His footnote: Lit. "there is no help for it." Dening himself does not think it the whole account (p. 26) [12].

1892 to 1902. Cannot be helped. The Japan Weekly Mail of 2 July 1892, on how lightly a life is held: A man is murdered—yes, very pitiable, they say, but what matters it—shikata ga nai—it cannot be helped [5]. In the Asiatic Society's journal, in C. Meriwether's Life of Date Masamune (vol. XXI, 1893), the dying lord says he had hoped to die on horseback, But now it seems I cannot. Shikataganai (Cannot be helped) [6]. In E. W. Clement's Japanese Calendars (vol. XXX, 1902), the old-fashioned Japanese who misses a train only says shikata ga nai ("way there is not," or "there's no use") and waits half a day for the next [6].

1915. Saitō Hidesaburō, Idiomological English-Japanese Dictionary. Under help: It can not be helped. 仕方が無い; and What can not be helped, bear. 仕方が無い事は我慢せよ [7].

1945 and after. The phrase in English as a concept. Time, 8 October 1945, after a list of the occupation's first orders: And what did the people say? They have a phrase for calamity: "Shikata ga nai." It means: it can't be helped [8]. The English encyclopedia lists that piece as further reading; it names Willard Price as using the term in the 1930s and 1940s, and among the books Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's Farewell to Manzanar (1973), which gives the idea a chapter to explain why interned Japanese Americans did not resist more, John Hersey's Hiroshima and James Clavell's Shōgun [13]. In Houston's book the second chapter of Part 1 is titled Shikata Ga Nai, and at the family's removal it says, There is a phrase the Japanese use in such situations, when something difficult must be endured. You would hear the older heads, the Issei, telling others very quietly, "Shikata ga nai" (It cannot be helped). "Shikata ga nai" (It must be done); in the camp years the phrase again became the motto, but under altered circumstances [14]. For Price, Hersey and Clavell, the witness is the encyclopedia's list.

The dictionaries today. The Japanese encyclopedia defines the idiom as what is said 理不尽な困難や悲劇に見舞われたり、避けられない事態に直面したりしたさいに、粛々とその状況を受け入れながら, when struck by unreasonable hardship or tragedy, or facing what cannot be avoided, while accepting the situation quietly; and 仕様がない redirects to it [15].

What is not a source. The English books that made the phrase a concept are its reception, not its source. The three forms are three spellings of one idiom, not three sayings.

Today. Sold as It Cannot Be Helped · It Can't Be Helped · It Can't Be Helped. The titles are the received English, exact for the first sense: cannot be helped from 1892 and Saitō's dictionary, can't be helped from Time, and It cannot be helped is Houston's gloss of 1973; word for word the three forms say there is no way, and a phrase on a wall is read by people who know all three senses.

A reading

Of the three forms, the first is the fuller one a textbook teaches, the second is what people say, and the third is the first clipped. The other two senses, and Hepburn's filing the phrase under resignation, are where the phrase's whole English career already sits in 1867; sixteen years later a letter to a Yokohama paper had turned the dictionary's to be resigned into a people's policy.

References

  1. 「仕方が無い」, デジタル大辞泉・精選版 日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/仕方が無い-517291
  2. 「仕様がない」, デジタル大辞泉・精選版 日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/仕様がない-530458
  3. Basil Hall Chamberlain, A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese, second edition, London: Trübner; Tokyo: Hakubunsha, 1889, § 218, p. 144 (archive.org scan 166). https://archive.org/details/ahandbookcolloq01chamgoog
  4. J. C. Hepburn, A Japanese and English Dictionary; with an English and Japanese Index, London: Trübner, 1867, pp. 7, 402 and index p. 69 (archive.org scans 25, 420 and 647). https://archive.org/details/japaneseenglishd00hepb ; second edition, A Japanese-English and English-Japanese Dictionary (和英語林集成), 1872, National Diet Library pid 993689, scans 22, 249 and 257. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/993689/1/249
  5. The Japan Weekly Mail, 2 July 1892, p. 30. https://archive.org/details/jwm-bound-1892.7-12
  6. C. Meriwether, "Life of Date Masamune", Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan XXI, 1893. https://archive.org/details/transactionsasi16japagoog ; Ernest W. Clement, "Japanese Calendars", Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan XXX, Tokyo, 1902 (read 16 April 1902). https://archive.org/details/transactionsasi20japagoog
  7. Saitō Hidesaburō, Saito's Idiomological English-Japanese Dictionary, Tokyo: S.E.G. Publishing Department, 1915, s.v. help (HathiTrust, Harvard copy, scan 574). https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044086539269&seq=574
  8. "Shikata Ga Nai", Time, 8 October 1945, as archived 10 March 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070310190734/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,776254,00.html
  9. 「毛詩抄」, 精選版 日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/毛詩抄-397133
  10. 「布施松翁」, ブリタニカ国際大百科事典 小項目事典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/布施松翁-124831
  11. The Japan Weekly Mail, 10 February 1883, p. 90, a letter to the editor (archive.org scan 97). https://archive.org/details/jwm-bound-1883.1-6
  12. Walter Dening, "Mental Characteristics of the Japanese", Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan XIX, Tokyo: Hakubunsha, 1891, p. 26 (archive.org scan 75). https://archive.org/details/transactionsasi07japagoog ; first printed in The Japan Weekly Mail, 22 November 1890. https://archive.org/details/jwm-bound-1890.7-12
  13. "Shikata ga nai", Wikipedia (English). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikata_ga_nai
  14. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, Houghton Mifflin, 1973, Part 1, ch. 2.
  15. 「仕方がない」, Wikipedia (Japanese). https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/仕方がない

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 resolve; nothing found to differ; the rest not openable; Houston flagged in prose as in books held here

Cite as: Tim Jackowski and Ten, "Philology of 仕方が無い · 仕様が無い · 仕方無い (shikata ga nai · shiyō ga nai · shikatanai)," Takase Studios, 2026, https://takase.com/library/philology/shikata-ga-nai-shiyo-ga-nai-shikatanai.