大和魂 yamato-damashii Japanese Spirit
This is a philological study of the Japanese word 大和魂 (yamato-damashii), the Japanese spirit. It spans the record from the Tale of Genji, about 1008, where it names the native good sense that Chinese book-learning needs as its base, through Yoshida Shōin's prison poems of 1854 and 1859 and the nationalist reading the state taught for forty years, to a 1905 comedy in which a character declares that nobody has ever seen it.
Abstract
大和魂, yamato-damashii, holds two senses eight centuries apart. In the Tale of Genji, about 1008, it is the native good sense that Chinese book-learning needs as its base — the wit that keeps a courtier out of trouble. The brave-to-death sense is first attested in 1807, in a father's warning that it is shallow; the 国学 lecturers, the bakumatsu poets, and finally the Japanese state of the 1930s made it the root of the national polity, which is why the dictionaries now list that sense first. Three Japanese writers said in print, while it was being made, that the modern sense was not the word's own, and Natsume Sōseki, in 1905, had a character declare that nobody had ever actually seen it.
Overview
The sense. One word with two senses a thousand years apart: in the Tale of Genji, the native good sense that Chinese book-learning is the base of; since the 1850s, the brave and loyal spirit of the Japanese people, the sense the dictionaries now list first. 精選版日本国語大辞典 gives the two senses in the order of their birth. ① 「ざえ（漢才）」に対して、日本人固有の知恵・才覚または思慮分別をいう。学問・知識に対する実務的な、あるいは実生活上の才知、能力: against zae, Chinese learning, the wit, judgment or discretion native to the Japanese; practical or real-life ability as against learning and knowledge [1]. ② 日本民族固有の気概あるいは精神。「朝日ににおう山桜花」にたとえられ、清浄にして果敢で、事に当たっては身命をも惜しまないなどの心情をいう。天皇制における国粋主義思想の、とりわけ軍国主義思想のもとで喧伝された: the spirit or mettle proper to the Japanese people, likened to the mountain cherry in the morning sun, pure and bold, ready to give life and limb when it comes to it; loudly promoted under the nationalist and especially the militarist thought of the imperial state [1]. The 大辞泉 lists the same two the other way round, the modern sense first [1].
The words. 大和 Yamato is the old province around Nara where the early emperors sat, and by extension the country before it was called 日本; the two characters are read as the native word, not as Chinese. 魂 tamashii, voiced to -damashii in the compound, is the native word for the soul. The witnesses write the compound four ways and mean one word: やまとだましひ in kana in the Genji and the 大鏡 and as the headword of the 1919 大日本国語辞典; 和魂 in the 今昔物語集 and the 菅家遺誡, with 篤胤's 倭魂 and 大倭魂; 日本だましひ in 馬琴 and in 真木和泉's poem as the wartime card game prints it; and 大和魂, which is 篤胤's, 頼山陽's, 松陰's and everyone's since. A sister word, 大和心 yamato-gokoro, has its own entry and its own first witness, the 赤染衛門集 of the mid-eleventh century; it is the word 宣長 used in the poem that everyone quotes, and the dictionaries treat the two as synonyms.
The text in English. JMdict has the Japanese spirit; Yamato-damashii [2]. The house's title, Japanese Spirit, is Arthur Waley's 1927 rendering of the Genji line and JMdict's gloss.
The historical record
About 1008, 紫式部, 源氏物語, the chapter 少女, a court romance. Genji is explaining why his son must go to the university before he is given rank: なほ、才をもととしてこそ、大和魂の世に用ゐらるる方も強うはべらめ, it is with learning as the base that the yamato-damashii's usefulness in the world will be the stronger. 才 zae is Chinese book-learning; the 大和魂 is what the learning is applied with, the sense to be of use. The commentators have called it worldly wit, good sense, natural quickness, flexible political judgment, the knack of getting on [3].
About 1100, 大鏡, a history in dialogue, the life of the minister 時平. あさましき惡事を申し行ひ給へりし罪により、このおとゞの御末はおはせぬなり。さるはやまとだましひなどはいみじくおはしましたるものを, for the sin of that shameful slander his line has not lasted; and yet in yamato-damashii he was remarkable. The slander is of 道真; the yamato-damashii is shown in three stories: he had the emperor rebuke him in public so that a sumptuary law would be obeyed; a clerk's fart made him laugh so hard he ceded the day's business to 道真; and he drew his sword on 道真's thunder over the palace. Political craft, quick wit, a sense of humor [4].
About 1120, 今昔物語集, book 29, the tale of the scholar 善澄. Burglars broke in; he hid under the floor, then ran out after them to shout that he had seen their faces and would have them all arrested. They came back and killed him. 善澄才ハ微妙カリケレドモ露和魂无カリケル者ニテ。此ル心幼キ事ヲ云テ死ヌル也トゾ, Yoshizumi's learning was superb, but he had not a grain of wakon, and it was for saying that childish thing that he died. The 和魂 the scholar lacked is the sense to keep quiet [5].
1145 and 1220, the 中外抄 and the 愚管抄, and an undated medieval poem. 大江匡房 tells the regent's father that a regent needs no Chinese learning if his やまとだましひ is good; 慈円 grants 公実 more of it than 忠実 had; and a poem under the title 文章博士 praises the reader who opens a new text without stumbling, 読開きぬる大和と玉しゐ. Then the word sleeps: except for three or four glossaries, from the end of the middle ages to the start of the Edo period nobody made anything of it [6].
Late Kamakura at the earliest, the 菅家遺誡, a book of precepts under 道真's name, with an Edo-period philologist's rebuttal. 其自非和魂漢才、不能闞其閫奥矣, unless one has Japanese spirit and Chinese learning both, one cannot see into the depths. This is the first witness for 和魂漢才, the four-character pairing built from the Genji's opposition, in a text written at least three centuries after 道真 died in 903. The attribution to him is the legend; this is its earliest attestation [7]. 黒川春村 already saw it: 古書どもに見えてこは文才に相対つて小賢き世才を称へり … 此大和魂を皇国人の廉直勇猛の事とおぼえたる人も多かれど … 和魂漢才と見えたるもいと後世の訛言, in the old books it means the small clever worldly sense set against literary talent; many now take this 大和魂 for the uprightness and valor of our countrymen; and the 和魂漢才 reading is a late corruption [8].
1790, 本居宣長, a poem on his self-portrait; the word is 大和心. 敷島の大和心を人問はば朝日ににほふ山桜花, if someone asks what the heart of Yamato is: mountain cherry blossom, fragrant in the morning sun. A scholarly encyclopedia says 真淵 and 宣長 revived the word as the natural, gentle, even womanish heart, and that the poem was later read for the cleanness of the cherry's falling; 和辻哲郎 in 1959 called that reading 俗説, a vulgar error, against 宣長's meaning [6]. In print by 1867 (正氣歌俗解), and in English in Nitobe [9].
1807, 曲亭馬琴, 椿説弓張月, a historical novel. The first attestation of the brave-to-death sense is a father telling his son it is a fault: 事に迫りて死を軽んずるは。日本だましひなれど多くは慮の浅きに似て学ざるの誤なり, to make light of death when pressed is the Japanese spirit, but it mostly looks like shallow thought, the error of the unschooled. The kana reads 日本 as yamato [10].
1813 to the 1840s, 平田篤胤, the 国学 lecturer. 大倭魂 in the 霊能真柱 of 1813, 倭魂 paired with 漢学之才 in the 古史成文 of 1823, and in the lecture transcripts the modern word and the modern claim: 此御国ニ生レタカラニハ … 御恩ノ有ガタキヲ辨ヘテ。大和魂ノアル人人ハ。小踊リシテ悦ビ, having been born in this land … those with yamato-damashii will leap for joy; elsewhere, 根ガ大和魂ノ堅マラヌカラノデ, because at root the yamato-damashii has not set firm. The word is now something a Japanese person has by birth [11].
1836, 頼山陽, 書後. 豈可謂之大和魂哉, can one call that yamato-damashii?, a Confucian's aside in a book of colophons, arguing over the word with the 国学 school. It is contested before 松陰 is born [12].
1854, 吉田松陰, in the Edo prison. かくすればかくなるものと知りながらやむにやまれぬ大和魂, knowing that doing this would bring that: the yamato-damashii that would not be stopped. Written in the fourth month of 1854 at 伝馬町 after he tried to board Perry's ship at 下田. The 1897 collection that prints it says so: 右は四月二十四日江戶傳馬町の獄にて作りし書なり。『かくすれば』の一首、一唱涙あらしむ. On that leaf the poem itself stands inside 松陰's kanbun letter in man'yōgana, 加久壽禮婆加久奈留…也滿登駄滿志意, and the kanji form given here is the editor's, from his note on the same page [13].
1859, 吉田松陰, 留魂録, the night before his execution. 身はたとひ武藏の野邊に朽ぬとも留め置かまし大和魂, though my body rot in the fields of Musashi, I would leave my yamato-damashii behind. The opening poem of the 留魂録 [14].
1866, 前島密, 漢字御廢止之議, a memorial to the shogun on abolishing kanji. 御國人の所謂大和魂は一種特有の魂氣の如く御坐候得共決して然るものには有御坐間敷取りも直ほさす愛國の一心に外ならすと奉存候（自盡決死に果敢なるか如きは大和魂の一部分なるに過きすと奉存候）, what our countrymen call yamato-damashii is spoken of as a peculiar soul-stuff; it is nothing of the sort; it is simply the one heart of love of country (readiness to die by one's own hand is only a part of it). The first witness here to equate the word with 愛国心, and to say the death-readiness is only a part [15].
1882, 外山正一, 抜刀隊, in the 新体詩抄. 刃の下に死ぬべきぞ大和魂ある者の死ぬべき時は今なるぞ, die under the blade; for those with yamato-damashii the time to die is now. The police sword-unit of the 1877 rebellion, in the new-style verse, later set as a march. The sense is now on the parade ground [16].
1868 to 1945, the numbers. The Diet Library's index of public-domain books has the word in 3 books of the 1860s, 27 of the 1870s, 131 of the 1880s, 433 of the 1890s, 925 of the 1900s, 1,627 of the 1910s, 1,436 of the 1920s, 2,590 of the 1930s and 1,218 of 1940 to 1945; the peak year is 1935. A kabuki called 大和魂 opened in 1904; 萩原朔太郎 published an aphorism under the title in 1935 [17].
1904, 福本日南, 愛国本義. A Meiji nationalist's anthology of the bakumatsu poems, with a claim about the words themselves: 『大和心』なる辭は卽ち是なり。『大和魂』なる辭は即ち是なり, that both were coined in the last fifty years, by the nation and by no one, for a love of country the plain ancestors had not been able to name. Both words were Heian; the claim is a witness to how Meiji felt them, as new [18].
1905, 夏目漱石, 吾輩は猫である, the sixth installment, a comic novel. The schoolteacher reads his friends a composition of sixty-odd words:
「大和魂！ と叫んで日本人が肺病やみのような咳をした」…「大和魂！ と新聞屋が云う。大和魂！ と掏摸が云う。大和魂が一躍して海を渡った。英国で大和魂の演説をする。独逸で大和魂の芝居をする」…「東郷大将が大和魂を有っている。肴屋の銀さんも大和魂を有っている。詐偽師、山師、人殺しも大和魂を有っている」…「大和魂はどんなものかと聞いたら、大和魂さと答えて行き過ぎた。五六間行ってからエヘンと云う声が聞こえた」…「三角なものが大和魂か、四角なものが大和魂か。大和魂は名前の示すごとく魂である。魂であるから常にふらふらしている」…「誰も口にせぬ者はないが、誰も見たものはない。誰も聞いた事はあるが、誰も遇った者がない。大和魂はそれ天狗の類か」
"Yamato-damashii!" cried the Japanese, and coughed like a consumptive … The newspaperman says it, the pickpocket says it, it has leapt across the sea; they make speeches on it in England and plays on it in Germany … Admiral Tōgō has it, the fishmonger's Gin has it, swindlers, speculators and murderers have it … Asked what it was, he said "yamato-damashii" and walked on; a few yards off you heard him clear his throat … Is it three-cornered or square? It is a soul, as the name says, and so it is always wobbling … Everyone speaks of it and no one has seen it; everyone has heard of it and no one has met it. Is it some kind of tengu?
Written in the year of the Russian war, and the most-quoted thing ever said about the word [19].
1937, 文部省, 国体の本義, the state's account of the national polity. 蒙古襲来以後は、神国思想が顕著なる発達を遂げて、大和魂として自覚せられた。… 近くは日清・日露の戦役に於て力強く覚醒せられ、且具現せられた, after the Mongol invasions the idea of the divine land grew and became conscious of itself as yamato-damashii … lately, in the wars with China and Russia, it was powerfully reawakened and made real. 明治天皇's poem on the manliness of the 大和心 stands above it, and 道真 is named for 和魂漢才 below. This is what the 大辞泉 means by 喧伝された [20].
1942, 愛國百人一首. The wartime card game's hundred loyal poems carries 真木和泉's 大山の峰の岩根に埋めにけりわが年月の日本（やまと）だましひ, buried in the rock at the mountain's peak: the yamato-damashii of my years, with 野村望東尼's 大和心 beside it [21].
What is not a source. Not Chinese: the compound is two native words, and 頼山陽's kanbun sentence is an argument about the word, not a source for it [12]. Not 道真's: the 和魂漢才 that carries his name is a text of the late Kamakura period or later, and its four characters are built on the Genji's pair [7]. Not 宣長's: his poem is 大和心, and the cherry that falls cleanly is a later reading of it that 和辻 called a vulgar error [9]. Not the Mongol invasions': the 国体の本義's claim that the word became conscious of itself after 1281 has no witness between the 愚管抄 and the 国学 school [20].
The word in English
1876, William Elliot Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, New York: Harper. The first edition has the word, spelled Yamato damashi, five times, four of them at the pages its index lists (318, 435, 571, 597): a band of fanatics, fired with the Yamato damashi, religiously opposed the emperor's journey east; Echizen's greatest hero, whose devotion to Yamato damashi ideals had been attested in blood, fire, and ashes; the extreme conservatives of the Yamato damashi, who dread the equality of man and woman; the Yamato damashi and warlike policy were giving way to considerations of finance; and worshipers of Yamato damashi. The twelfth edition keeps two of these word for word and adds one on the 1877 rebellion, now with the double i: knowing no greater glory than to imitate Kusunoki and the ancient models of that ferocious military virtue of Old Japan — Yamato damashii. Griffis gives the martial sense only, from the first edition on [22].
1900, Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan, Philadelphia, preface dated Twelfth Month 1899. Chapter XV: though the populace could not attain the moral height of those loftier souls, yet Yamato Damashii, the Soul of Japan, ultimately came to express the Volksgeist of the Island Realm. He translates 宣長, Isles of blest Japan! / Should your Yamato spirit / Strangers seek to scan, / Say—scenting morn's sun-lit air, / Blows the cherry wild and fair!, and asks is this flower the type of the Yamato spirit? Is the Soul of Japan so frailly mortal? Chapter XVI: It was an honest confession of the race when Yoshida Shôin, one of the most brilliant pioneers of Modern Japan, wrote on the eve of his execution the following stanza;— "Full well I knew this course must end in death; / It was Yamato spirit urged me on / To dare whate'er betide." The stanza is the 1854 poem, written in prison after 下田; the eve of his execution is the occasion of the other poem, of 1859. Nitobe's subtitle gave the word its English name, and the soul of Japan peaks in English print in 1904 to 1906, with the Russian war. His 1908 Japanese translator, 櫻井鷗村, carried the misdating back into Japanese: 刑に就くの前夜に當り [23].
1904, Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, p. 159. For this national type of moral character was invented the name Yamato-damashi (or Yamato-gokoro),—the Soul of Yamato (or Heart of Yamato),—the appellation of the old province of Yamato, seat of the early emperors, being figuratively used for the entire country. We might correctly, though less literally, interpret the expression Yamato-damashi as "The Soul of Old Japan." Hearn gives the etymology correctly, and says invented of a word the Genji already had [24].
1927, Arthur Waley, A Wreath of Cloud, being the third part of The Tale of Genji, London: Allen & Unwin, the page after the running head 96. Genji's sentence: For the truth is, that without a solid foundation of book-learning this "Japanese spirit" of which one hears so much is not of any great use in the world. Waley renders the Heian word with the modern one in quotation marks, and adds of which one hears so much, which is 1927 and not in the Japanese [25].
1994, Michael Carr, "Yamato-Damashii 'Japanese Spirit' Definitions", International Journal of Lexicography 7(4): 279–306. The lexicographic history of the word through Japanese and bilingual dictionaries; the text is behind a paywall [26].
Today. JMdict has the Japanese spirit; Yamato-damashii [2]. The house's title Japanese Spirit is Waley's 1927 rendering of the Genji line and JMdict's gloss. What a rendering must keep: that it is the Japanese spirit, a national noun and not a personal one; and that the noun has two histories, which a reader should be able to choose between.
A reading
This sense is about two hundred years old; its first attestation is a novelist calling it shallow; it was made by the 国学 lecturers and the loyalist poets out of a Heian word for the opposite quality, the worldly good sense that book-learning is the base of; a bureaucrat, a novelist and a philosopher each said so in print while it was being made; and for forty years the state taught it as the root of the national polity, which is why the 大辞泉 writes 喧伝された into the definition.
The old sense is inside the characters: the sense to be of use, the wit that kept 時平 in power and that 善澄 lacked at the gate. The brave-to-death sense carries its own history, of when it was made, by whom, and what was said against it.
Waley's aside, this "Japanese spirit" of which one hears so much, is the one English sentence that holds both senses at once.
Notes
Hearn gives the etymology of the compound correctly — 大和 the province, 魂 the native word for the soul — but his word invented is wrong about the whole: the Genji already had it.
Nitobe's misdating of the 1854 poem to the execution eve is repeated by his Japanese translator and, from there, by later English books that take their account of Yoshida Shōin from Bushido; the two poems are printed in one line in an 1898 collection, which is how they get confused.
References
- 「大和魂」, 精選版日本国語大辞典 · デジタル大辞泉, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/大和魂
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- 紫式部, 源氏物語, 乙女, c. 1008, at ja.wikisource. https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/源氏物語/乙女
- 大鏡, c. 1100, at ja.wikisource, and in 国文大観 四鏡, 1903, scan 21. https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/大鏡_(國文大觀) · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/991359/1/21
- 今昔物語集, 巻二十九, c. 1120, in 国史大系 16, 1901, scan 735. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/991106/1/735
- 斎藤正二, 「大和魂」, 世界大百科事典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/大和魂
- 菅家遺誡, late Kamakura or later, cited in 精選版日本国語大辞典, 「和魂漢才」, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/和魂漢才
- 黒川春村, 碩鼠漫筆, Edo period, scan 47. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2553942/1/47
- 本居宣長, poem, 1790, in 正氣歌俗解, 1867. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2538656
- 曲亭馬琴, 椿説弓張月, 1807, scan 111. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2557124/1/111
- 平田篤胤, 霊能真柱 (1813) · 古史成文 (1823) · 講本気吹颫 · 出定笑語. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2562763 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2599452 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2582738/1/36 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2562857
- 頼山陽, 書後, 1836, scan 28. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2564898/1/28
- 吉田松陰, poem, 1854, in 少年伝記叢書 吉田松陰文, 1897, scan 22. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1169675/1/22
- 吉田松陰, 留魂録, 1859, in 松陰先生遺著及事蹟, 1898, scan 4. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/782152/1/4
- 前島密, 漢字御廢止之議, 1866, at ja.wikisource. https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/漢字御廢止之議
- 外山正一, 抜刀隊, in 新体詩抄, 1882, at ja.wikisource. https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/新体詩抄/抜刀隊の詩（丶山仙士）
- National Diet Library Digital Collections, full-text search on 大和魂, counted by decade, 1860s–1945. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/
- 福本日南, 愛国本義, 1904, scan 52. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/754609/1/52
- 夏目漱石, 吾輩は猫である, 1905, at ja.wikisource. https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/吾輩は猫である
- 文部省, 国体の本義, 1937, at ja.wikisource. https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/国体の本義
- 愛國百人一首, 1942, at ja.wikisource. https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/愛國百人一首
- William Elliot Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Harper, New York, 1876 (first edition) and twelfth edition, at the Internet Archive text layer. https://archive.org/details/mikadosempire00grif_0
- Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan, Philadelphia, 1900, ch. XV–XVI, at Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12096
- Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, 1904, p. 159, at Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5979
- Arthur Waley, trans., A Wreath of Cloud, Allen & Unwin, London, 1927, at the Internet Archive text layer. https://archive.org/details/AWreathOfCloud
- Michael Carr, "Yamato-Damashii 'Japanese Spirit' Definitions", International Journal of Lexicography 7(4), 1994, pp. 279–306. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/7.4.279