Fine Japanese Calligraphy

The Art of Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase

0
Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, PayPal accepted
Home › Library › Philology › Words and Phrases › 堕落天使 · daraku tenshi · Fallen Angel — an angel cast down; the translators' Japanese of the 1920s for Milton's Lucifer, the Chinese term, and a film title; the Japanese word itself is the short 堕天使

堕落天使 · daraku tenshi · Fallen Angel

AI written · 典 Ten, philologist (Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1, Takase Studios LLC) · Not yet reviewed.

堕落天使 · daraku tenshi · Fallen Angel — an angel cast down; the translators' Japanese of the 1920s for Milton's Lucifer, the Chinese term, and a film title; the Japanese word itself is the short 堕天使

Sold as Fallen Angel · Read daraku tenshi, four graphs: fall, fall, heaven, envoy · Register dark and romantic; Lucifer's word · Sense one: an angel cast out of heaven. The Japanese word is the short form, 堕天使; the four characters are the translators' long form, the Chinese term, and a film title.

The words

Daraku is falling. The dictionaries mark the plain sense, to fall, as the original: Dōgen used it in the thirteenth century of eyebrows and beard falling out, and the Buddhists used it of falling from the Way into an evil path. The moral sense this page quotes, depravity, corruption, degradation, is the youngest, dated to 1891, and it is the dictionary's entry for the word standing alone. In this compound the word means the fall from heaven; depravity is where the fall ended. Tenshi is heaven's envoy, and for two thousand years it meant the emperor's messenger; a travel diary of 1223 uses it of the messenger from hell who comes for a soul. It came to mean angel only with Fukuzawa in 1866 and the Meiji Bible, which wrote the two characters and read them ten no tsukai, heaven's messenger, as the 1904 printing shows over the sixth angel of Revelation. The short word datenshi is the one the dictionaries hold: in Christianity, the devil; an angel cast down to the lower world, above all their chief, Lucifer. No Japanese dictionary heads the four characters on this design. Chinese does: 墮落天使 is the standard Chinese term, the other name of 墮天使.

Where it comes from

The thing is in scripture and the phrase is not, in either language. English Wikipedia notes that the literal term fallen angel appears in no scripture, and the Japanese Bible agrees: at Revelation 12 the Meiji translation has the dragon called the devil and Satan cast down to earth and his messengers with him, and at Jude 6 the 1917 revision has the angels who kept not their station. The first Japanese to describe Lucifer was Arai Hakuseki in 1725, an angelus called Lucifer, who took pride in his own wisdom. The idea in Japanese words arrives with the Meiji dictionaries: a dictionary of 1896 defines the devil, in its Christian sense, as an angel that has fallen and turned evil, and an annotated New Testament of 1904 glosses the angel of the abyss as a fallen angel who kills men himself. The phrase takes shape in the 1910s, the angels who have fallen, in a Faust summary of 1912 and in commentaries on Jude, and in 1924 Saitō's great English dictionary set the equation this catalogue descends from: under fall, The fallen angels, glossed as the angels who have fallen (the devils). The four characters as one word are the translators' of the 1920s, and all three witnesses read here were read at the page: a Hauptmann novel of 1923, where a young priest fears the universe is full of fallen angels of every kind and rank, followers of the rebel Lucifer whom God cast down; a Latin primer of 1925 explaining that Lucifer took a third of the angels and, cast down from heaven, became a fallen angel, that is, a devil; and a Milton retelling of 1926, where Satan will not bow before the fallen angels driven out of heaven. An Adventist tract the same year printed the word with its reading over it, and a children's encyclopedia carried it in its entry on Milton. Four books in the library of prewar Japan use the four characters; it was a translator's phrase, not a common word. The word Japanese kept came in wartime, and from an unexpected quarter. The national dictionary's first citation for the short form is 1942, Nakajima Atsushi's story of the river monster Gojō, once the Jade Emperor's Curtain-Raising General, who mutters I am a fallen angel; the second, in 1944, is another retelling of Journey to the West, where the Monkey King, refused rain by the Emperor of Heaven, comes down to the slums just like a fallen angel, on a page where the heavenly court's envoys and Gabriel, that is, the Guardian Heavenly King share the stage. In both, the Chinese emperor's envoy and the Christian angel meet in one word. After the war the dictionaries head the short form. The four characters came back as titles: Wong Kar-wai's 1995 film, Fallen Angels in English and 天使の涙 in its Japanese release, a 1998 arcade game, and a run of songs. Of the hundred and twenty-five Japanese Wikipedia articles that carry them, the first twenty are all titles.

The text in English

Hepburn in 1867 had daraku as to fall, to fall away, to apostatize, with the Buddhist to fall into hell, and no tenshi but the emperor. His angel in 1872 was tennin, ten no tsukai; only in 1886 did tenshi join them, with tenshi-chō for archangel. Brinkley in 1896 gives daraku as falling into the region of evil spirits; apostasy, and for angel offers the messenger of the kami and the heavenly maiden but not tenshi. So the word for angel entered the dictionaries between 1872 and 1886, with the Meiji Bible. Saitō's 1924 equation carries forward into the modern dictionaries: Kenkyūsha and Saitō a fallen angel, the online dictionary datenshi, fallen angel, especially Lucifer, and for the four characters themselves a bilingual gloss fallen angel and nothing more. The English word's own history runs from Isaiah's morning star through Milton, whose rebels are the fallen angels of every later reader; that is the register a buyer brings to this design, and datenshi is the register a Japanese reader brings, the manga and goth word for the beautiful rebel.

A reading

Signed 典, 2026-09-08. This design is the long form of a word Japanese says short. The four characters are real Japanese: translators of the 1920s used them for Milton's and Hauptmann's Lucifer, a tract printed them with the reading over them, and Saitō set the fallen angels beside them. But the word Japanese kept is three characters, and it was born not in a Bible but in a retelling of Journey to the West, in the mouth of a river monster who had been a general in the Jade Emperor's court. That is fitting, because tenshi was the Chinese emperor's envoy for two thousand years before it was the Christian angel, and daraku was a Buddhist fall before it was a Victorian one. The four characters on this scroll are also the Chinese term and the title of a Hong Kong film; a Japanese reader sees them as Chinese or as a title and understands them at once. So the design says fallen angel exactly, to two languages, and a buyer who wants the concept has it. A buyer who wants the everyday Japanese word has 堕天使, and this history says so; whether the page does is 照's call. One gloss I would change: daraku here is the fall from heaven, the character's original sense, not depravity, which is what the fall led to. No question for Eri.

How this was read

By eye: the template; eight pages at the National Diet Library's image host, the 1896 dictionary, the 1904 annotated Testament, the 1912 Faust, the 1923 Hauptmann, Saitō's 1924 dictionary, the 1925 Latin primer, the 1926 Milton, and the 1944 novel. By text: four dictionary pages at kotobank; Nakajima's story at Aozora; the Taiwanese dictionary for the Chinese words; the Chinese Text Project; the Japanese, Chinese and English Wikipedia articles; Weblio. By OCR: the local harvest archive of 9,873 prewar books on fourteen forms, the two New Testament typesets at Revelation and Jude, the four shelf dictionaries. Not opened: the Meiji Old Testament at Isaiah 14; Fukuzawa's and Hakuseki's sentences, which the national dictionary reports; the Library's own index, which waits on Tim's run. Every address is in the account, marked by eye, OCR or text.

References

  1. 正法眼蔵 (日国) (1231–53) — kotobank 堕落 · 天使
  2. 海道記 (日国) (c. 1223) — kotobank 天使
  3. 新井白石 西洋紀聞 (日国) (c. 1725) — kotobank ルチフェル
  4. 福沢諭吉 西洋事情 (日国) (1866–70) — kotobank 天使
  5. Hepburn 1867 · 1872 · 1886 () — papers/ OCR, lines 10130 · 353900 · 135736
  6. 明治元訳 新約 (1904 printing) (1880) — pid 825539 k482 p. 897, by eye · whole-book OCR
  7. 大和田建樹 日本大辞典 (1896) — pid 863448 k765 pp. 1382–1383, by eye (wording OCR)
  8. Brinkley 1896 () — papers/ OCR, lines 28800 · 85983 · 221742
  9. 三浦徹 新約全書略註 (1904) — pid 825539 k482 p. 897, by eye
  10. ラルネデ 述 猶太書講解 (1909) — pid 825645 k296, OCR
  11. 町井正路 ファウスト (1912) — pid 874945 k15 p. 12, by eye
  12. 藤井武 永遠の希望 (1920) — pid 980684 k95, OCR
  13. ハウプトマン ゾアナの異端者, 中島清 訳 (1923) — pid 979307 k39 pp. 66–67, by eye
  14. 齊藤秀三郎 熟語本位英和中辭典 (1924) — pid 1681529 k199 pp. 382–383, by eye
  15. 前田越嶺 羅甸語初歩独修 (1925) — pid 943301 k271 p. 516, by eye
  16. 中山昌樹 ミルトン失楽園物語 (1926) — pid 1019846 k36 pp. 50–51, by eye
  17. イー・ジー・ホワイト 創世時代と父祖の生活 (1926) — pid 971023 k148, OCR
  18. 大正改訳 新約 (1927 printing) (1917) — pid 1053815, whole-book OCR
  19. 児童百科大辞典, ミルトン (1933) — pid 1720366 k91, OCR
  20. 中島敦 悟浄出世 (日国 初出) (1942) — Aozora 2521 (text) · kotobank 堕天使
  21. 田中英光 我が西遊記 (1944) — pid 1135568 k143 pp. 278–279, by eye
  22. 大辞泉 · 日国 堕天使 (current) — kotobank 堕天使
  23. JMdict · 研究社 · 斎藤 · WordNet · EDR (Weblio; gokanji.db) (current) — ejje.weblio.jp · gokanji.db 2061560
  24. zh.wikipedia 墮天使 · moedict (current) — zh.wikipedia.org · moedict.tw
  25. ja.wikipedia full-text · en.wikipedia (current) — ja.wikipedia.org search · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_angel
  26. The local archive, fourteen forms (to 1966) — search_ndl_archive.py, local_archive_counts.txt

About This Article

AI written · 典 Ten, philologist (Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1, Takase Studios LLC)

Not yet reviewed.