夢実現 yume jitsugen Realize Your Dreams
夢実現 (yume jitsugen), dream realization, is 夢の実現, the realization of a dream, with its particle dropped the way a headline drops it. The full phrase is in print from 1903 and the short form from 1918, and by 1925 the short form is itself a headline.
Abstract
夢実現, yume jitsugen, is a headline compression of 夢の実現, the realization of a dream, not a coinage. In the National Diet Library's full-text index the full phrase is first in 1903, as the title of a lecture, and is in 1,303 items by 1946, among them 堺利彦's rendering of William Morris and the success books that followed. The short form is first in a volume of Tolstoy's letters in 1918, and the index has it in 45 items to 1944, nine of them a heading, a title or a headline.
Overview
The sense. The realization of a dream: a hope made real, said the way a headline or a poster says it.
The words. 夢 yume, dream, here in its modern sense of a hope, which the dictionary first cites from 1914 and which print has earlier, in this very phrase [1]; and 実現 jitsugen, a Meiji word, set against Realization in the 哲学字彙 of 1884 [2] and first cited from 漱石 in 1907 [3]. Between them the particle の is dropped.
The text in English. In the Google Books ngram, realize your dreams is rare until the 1980s and peaks in 2010, and make your dreams come true is there from 1895 [4]. The English is an instruction, the Japanese a noun phrase.
The historical record
1903 to 1944. 夢実現, a headline compression. It is 夢の実現 with its particle dropped. The full phrase is first in the index in 1903, when an engineering magazine reports a lecture titled (夢の實現), which argued that the elements of matter can be reduced to one, energy [5]; then in 1904, when 堺利彦 rendered William Morris's News from Nowhere (其の樂しき夢の實現) [6], and in 1907 in Marden's 成功の基礎, where a fortune made overnight on the stock market is 痴者の夢, a fool's dream, and 時に此の夢の實現なきにあらざるもそは只一瞬時のみ, this dream is sometimes realized, but only for a moment [7]. The string is in 1,303 items of the index to 1946.
The short form, with no particle, is first in a volume of Tolstoy's letters in 1918: 私は胸に手を置いて、この夢實現せよとのみ願ふ, I would lay my hand on my heart and wish only that this dream come true [8]. The index then has it in 45 items to 1944, and nine of them are a heading, a title or a headline: a navy journal's news item of 1925 on a new shell, whose heading ends 多年の夢實現, a dream of many years realized [9]; the title of a 1940 newsreel item on the first prize draw of a national bond, 一萬圓の夢實現, a ten-thousand-yen dream come true [10]; and a newspaper headline quoted in a farming journal of 1943, 佐竹藩主の夢實現, a Satake lord's dream realized, on a canal nearly finished [11]. The rest is running prose, as when 桑木彧雄, writing in 1936 of the alchemists, says やがて斯の夢實現の時節が到來したのである, at last the time came for that dream to be realized, printed in his history of science in 1944 [12]. Another twenty-one items carry it only as the tail of another word (靈夢, 吉夢, 迷夢) or as two words across a comma.
A reading
A headline, 夢の実現 with its の dropped, and a Japanese reader reads it as a poster reads; that is a register, not a fault. The index first has the full phrase as a lecture's title and in a socialist's translation of a utopia, and then in the success books; the short form is the same hope said faster, and within a few years of its first appearance it is set as a heading.
References
- 「夢」, 精選版日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/夢
- 井上哲次郎・有賀長雄, 改訂増補 哲学字彙, 東洋館, 1884, p. 105, scan 59 (Realization 實現). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/994560/1/59
- 「実現」, 精選版日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/実現
- Google Books Ngram Viewer, English 2019, 1800–2019, "realize your dreams" and "make your dreams come true". https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=realize+your+dreams%2Cmake+your+dreams+come+true&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019
- 工業雑誌 19(272), 工業雑誌社, July 1903, scan 18 (the index's text layer; the page is open in Japan only). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1561357/1/18
- ヰリアム・モリス, 理想郷 (tr. 堺利彦), 1904, scan 17. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/798702/1/17
- マーデン, 成功の基礎 (tr. 内外出版協会), 1907, scan 51. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/757460/1/51
- トルストイ書簡集 (石田三治), 1918, scan 19. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/933065/1/19
- 有終 12(6), 海軍有終会, June 1925, scan 16 (the index's text layer; open in Japan only). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1555792/1/16
- 文化映画, 文化映画協会, September 1940, scan 12 (the index's text layer; open in Japan only). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/4420279/1/12
- 耕地, 帝国耕地協会, June 1943, scan 13 (the index's text layer; open in Japan only). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1505517/1/13
- 桑木彧雄, 科学史考, 河出書房, 1944, p. 480, scan 248 (the essay dated November 1936). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1063016/1/248