後悔無し · kōkai nashi · No Regrets
Sold as No Regrets · Read kōkai nashi, four graphs, a classical sentence · Register literary; the everyday Japanese for the same thing is 悔いなし or 後悔はない · Sense one: there is no regret, said of a thing done.
The words
後悔 is regret after the fact, sorrow or regret for something done, as Hepburn's dictionary put it in 1886; the national dictionary says the same in Japanese, regret for what one has done, seen afterward as a failure. The two characters are Chinese, and Japanese readers had them by 794, when a glossary to the Flower Garland Sutra spelled out the native reading nochikui; the Chinese reading kōkai is first in a poem of the 1160s. 無し is the classical adjective there is none, the ancestor of modern ない. Together the four graphs make a statement, not a command: there is no regret. That is the sentence a modern speaker would say as 悔いなし, kuinashi, which the Japanese-English dictionary lists as a headword meaning no regrets, without regrets, or in talk as 後悔はない; the brushed form is the older and more literary of the three, and no dictionary carries it as a headword, because it is a sentence rather than a word. The page's two glosses are right. What the page does not say is where the sentence sits.
Where it comes from
The predicate is Chinese and very old. The Book of Changes closes six of its lines with 无悔, no regret, and nineteen of its paragraphs with 悔亡, regret vanishes; the line for the last hexagram reads steadfast, auspicious, no regret: the light of the superior man, it holds true, auspicious. The Analects has the word twice, and the first time it is a warning: Confucius says he will not take to war the man who would fight a tiger bare-handed, ford a river on foot, and die without regret, but the man who goes to the thing with care and likes to plan. The oldest moral reading of no regret, then, is the rash man's virtue. The two-character 後悔 follows in the Warring States and Han philosophers, and the fifth-century History of the Later Han already has the maxim once the water is spilled, regret is too late.
Japan read all of this in its own grammar. When a Japanese scholar read 无悔 aloud, he said 悔無し or 後悔無し; a 1916 kanbun edition of the Changes glosses the line above there is not the slightest regret, and three editions of the Vegetable Roots Discourse between 1908 and 1921 read its stop at half and there is no regret the same way. That is how the sentence on this design was made: it is the Japanese reading of a Chinese line. It was also ordinary Japanese long before the printed kanbun. In the summer of 1590 the general Maeda Toshiie, writing from the siege of Hachiōji, told a retainer that his own bodyguards had fallen before his and his son's eyes, and think of it as no regret at all, in the Chinese word order a warrior's letter used. In 1708 the Confucian moralist Kaibara Ekken named the way of no regret three times in his vernacular precepts, the Yamato zokkun: trust nobody's heart, not even your own; think ahead in everything; hold to reverence. A book of maxims copied around 1800 says it in the plain form the design carries, know the other side, guard against it, carry the thing through, and there is no regret. The proverb Japan says most about regret is older than all of these, regret does not come first, in a collection of 1283, and Hepburn printed it under his headword in 1886. In the twentieth century the short form took over: a biographical dictionary of 1886 has the peasant martyr Sōgorō say even if it comes to death, no regret; Shiki, before 1902, wrote a death poem in the new style whose line runs no regret; the heart like water; and in 1946 Kurosawa put 悔なし in the title of his first postwar film.
The text in English
Legge's Analects of 1861 gave dying without any regret for the line Confucius disapproved of. Hepburn in 1886: sorrow or regret for something done; repentance, remorse, compunction, with the proverb, repentance comes too late. The modern English equation is Kurosawa's: his 1946 film is sold in English as No Regrets for Our Youth, and the same two words sit in a 1967 paperback title and in the last words the manga Fist of the North Star gives its warlord, in my whole life, not one piece of regret, a line athletes still quote as a motto. The English phrase has its own carrier in Piaf's Non, je ne regrette rien, composed in 1956 and recorded in 1960, and on skin No Regrets is common enough that its misspelling has become a joke with a dictionary entry of its own. The house's English, No Regrets, is Timothy L. Jackowski's rendering for Takase Studios, and it is exact. A rendering of this design must keep the statement form, there is no regret, and may tell the buyer that the Japanese is the literary sentence, not the line of talk.
A reading
Signed 典, 2026-09-08. The sentence is right and it is old, but it is the bookish form, and that is a point in its favor for a wall and a fact a buyer should have. 後悔無し is how Japanese readers have read the classics' no regret since there were kanbun editions, and how a general wrote it from a siege and a moralist from his study; the form a speaker says today is 悔いなし, or 後悔はない. Its nearest classical echo is the one the Master refused, the man who would die without regret, and that is a better story than a list of glosses. The design needs no change. The page might say in one sentence where the sentence sits, and might name 悔いなし beside it so a buyer who wants the spoken form knows which word that is. One small question is Eri's, when convenient: whether the brushed form reads today as literary and fine, or as stiff beside 悔いなし. The library cannot answer register after 1949, and the account holds both forms either way.
How this was read
By eye: the template; seven pages at the National Diet Library's image host, the 1590 letter in the 1928 prefectural history, Ekken's chapter in the 1911 reprint, the c. 1800 maxim book in cursive, the 1916 edition of the Changes, the 1886 biographical dictionary, Shiki's poem in the 1926 collected works; Hepburn's 1886 entry from the shelf PDF. By text: the Changes, the Analects and the pre-Qin and Han search at the Chinese Text Project; the dictionary blocks at kotobank, jisho and Weblio; the two Wikipedias for the film and the manga; the JMdict rows in the house dictionary. By OCR: the local harvest archive of 9,873 prewar books on twelve forms of the phrase, filtered by hand for the verb 後悔なし(て) and for 懺悔; the kanbun headnotes of 1916 and of Yamaga Sokō's Analects commentary; the Vegetable Roots editions; the 1967 title. Not opened: the Library's own index, which waits on Tim's run; Hepburn's 1867 and 1872 editions and Brinkley at the entry, which the OCR search did not find; the 1906 bilingual dictionary's page, which the image address missed; the Changes at a full hexagram page; Ekken at an Edo print; the general's letter in manuscript; the title of Shiki's poem; the manga at its page; Legge in print; a Japanese kanbun edition of the Analects at the line itself. Every address is in the account, marked by eye, OCR or text.
References
- 易經 (ctext) (Zhou) — ctext.org/book-of-changes?searchu=无悔 · ?searchu=悔亡 (WebFetch)
- 論語 述而 11 (ctext) (Warring States) — ctext.org/analects/shu-er (WebFetch)
- 論語 為政 18 (ctext) (Warring States) — ctext.org/analects/wei-zheng (WebFetch)
- 荀子 非相 · 說苑 敬慎 · 韓詩外傳 9 (ctext search) (Warring States–Han) — ctext.org/pre-qin-and-han?searchu=後悔 (WebFetch; first three of 37)
- 後漢書 光武帝紀上 (ctext search) (5th c.) — ctext.org/pre-qin-and-han?searchu=後悔無及 (WebFetch)
- 新訳華厳経音義私記 (日国) (794) — kotobank 後悔-494241 (curl)
- 蓮禅, 本朝無題詩 (日国) (1162–64) — kotobank 後悔-494241 (curl)
- 米沢本沙石集 五本 (日国) (1283) — kotobank 後悔先に立たず-494242 (curl)
- 前田利家 letter, 遺編類聚, in 『石川県史』 (1590 (印 1928)) — pid 1186759 k94, by eye
- 貝原益軒 大和俗訓 卷之四, in 『日本教育文庫』 (1708 (印 1911)) — pid 1708742 k107, by eye; k127, k275 OCR
- 山鹿素行 四書句読大全 (17th c. (印 1921)) — pid 957476 k20, page opened, headnote OCR
- 三木維清 故花菴備忘録 (c. 1800 (manuscript)) — pid 11446267 k56, cursive, by eye
- 大日本人名辞書 (佐倉宗五郎) (1886) — pid 779849 k152, by eye
- Hepburn, Japanese-English Dictionary, 3rd ed. (1886) — shelf PDF page 367 = p. 325, by eye
- 漢籍国字解全書 (易) (1911) — pid 898777 k11, OCR
- 漢文大系 周易 卷十六 未濟 (1916) — pid 941450 k195, text by eye, headnote OCR
- 正岡子規 新体詩, 子規全集 第6巻 (before 1902 (印 1926)) — pid 978842 k265 (p. 490), by eye
- 亀井勝一郎 人生論 (1944) — pid 1129992 k9, OCR
- Kurosawa, わが青春に悔なし (1946-10-29) — ja/en Wikipedia (curl)
- 加藤恭子, 青春に悔いなし, 三一書房 (1967) — 全日本出版物総目録 pid 3047928 k123, OCR
- ラオウ, 北斗の拳 (ja.wikipedia) (1980s (date not on the page)) — ja.wikipedia ラオウ (curl)
- JMdict 2840474 (current) — gokanji.db; ejje.weblio.jp/content/悔いなし
- Weblio 英和 no regrets (current) — ejje.weblio.jp/content/no+regrets (curl)
- The local archive, twelve forms (to 1949) — search_ndl_archive.py, local_archive_hits.jsonl