JapanesePod101.com Blog

Welcome to summer! With the longest days upon us, it seems fitting to take a look at the character for “long”:

長 (CHŌ, naga(i): long)

This kanji can also mean “chief, head, leader,” but today, for the most part, I’m only interested in its length. I love how 長 elongates the following things in the most charming of ways:

穴   (ana: hole)		長穴   (naga-ana: slot)
円   (en or maru: circle)		長円   (chōen: ellipse, oval)
靴   (kutsu: shoes)		長靴   (nagagutsu: boots)
椅子   (isu: chair)		長椅子   (nagaisu: couch)

The compound 椅子 (isu: chair) breaks down as chair + noun suffix relating to objects such as furniture. Wow, that breakdown was long even without 長 there to elongate it!

Here’s my favorite 長 transformation:

芋     (imo: potato)

長芋             (nagaimo: yam)

Yes, that’s true! A yam is longer than a potato! I’d never thought about it before.
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When you feel uneasy, where do you sense it in your body? Perhaps you feel “butterflies” deep in your belly. Maybe you become lightheaded. You could even get cold feet!

Two Japanese expressions about uneasiness make use of a kanji we’ve seen for two weeks running:

騒 (SŌ, sawa(gu): clamor, noise, disturbance; to make a fuss)

Both expressions locate uneasiness in the chest:

心騒ぎ (kokoro sawagi: uneasiness)     heart + disturbance

One could see this expression as referring to a disturbance in the heart. Or given the many meanings of 騒, one could interpret 心騒ぎ as noise in the heart! Not an ear-splitting noise, of course. Rather, it might be like the irritating static when a radio station isn’t coming in clearly.

胸騒ぎ (munasawagi: uneasiness)     chest + disturbance

The chest and the heart go hand in hand, you might say. So 胸騒ぎ essentially has the same meaning and breakdown as 心騒ぎ. In fact, the two breakdowns might be identical, in that 胸 can mean “heart” or “feelings,” just as 心 can.

A Guide to the Mind and Body …

Sample Sentence with 胸騒ぎ …

The Thing About Noise

For more unsettled feelings, we can look to the following compound:

物騒 (bussō: unsettled, troubled, dangerous)
     thing + disturbance

Sample Sentence with 物騒 …

In some words, 騒 seems to mean both “disturbance” and “noise.” Take 物騒 and add okurigana:

物騒がしい (monosawagashii: noisy, boisterous; turbulent)
     thing + noise

Now the yomi has completely changed (from on-on to kun-kun), and there’s more of an emphasis on noise. Still, the last meaning, “turbulent,” indicates a feeling of inquietude.

Thoughts on Inquietude …

These two kanji, 物 and 騒, combine in two more words:
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How odd it is that “She’s a riot!” means someone’s funny. English speakers even say that something’s “riotously funny.” I’ve never been to a riot, but from the photos I’ve seen, nothing amusing happens at such events.

Riot After an Election
Photo Credit: Daniel Meyer

In Japanese, too, there seems to be a fine line between riots and merrymaking. Take this word, for instance:

騒乱 (sōran: riot, disturbance)     clamor + disorder

Last week we saw how 騒 (SŌ, sawa(gu): clamor, noise, disturbance; to make a fuss) plays a part in 大騒ぎ (ōsawagi), which means “shocking events.” Now we see that in 騒乱, the same kanji helps to cause a riot.

If you flip 騒乱 and add a “foolish spirit” to it, your riot turns into a party:

乱痴気騒ぎ (ranchiki sawagi: boisterous merrymaking)
     disorder + foolish + spirit + clamor

And if you’d like to “make merry” in a different way, here’s another option:

底抜け騒ぎ (sokonuke sawagi: boisterous merrymaking)
     bottom + to remove + clamor

Ah, 底抜け (sokonuke) breaks down as bottom + to remove and means “bottomless”! And no, even though there’s boisterous merrymaking at hand, we’re not talking about bottomless pants (a la David Lee Roth).

Further Notes on Bottomlessness …

Boisterous merrymaking is one thing, but what about when the fun becomes disorderly? Then you have this situation:

悪騒ぎ (warusawagi: disorderly merrymaking; making a fuss without considering the annoyance it causes others)     bad + clamor

Disorderly merrymaking? Not allowed! First, you need to clean off your desk and get your files in order, aligning your stapler just so and disentangling your paper clips. Only then is it OK to have fun!

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Here’s a quiz for you. If you combine a horse and an insect, what do you get?

A fly on a horse?

Flies
Photo credit: Erin Tyner

A fly’s view of a horse?

View of an Approaching Fly
Photo credit: Bill Adams, HawaiiToday.com

A horsefly?

Horsefly
Photo credit: Mike Keeling

A horse that flies?

Actually, it’s none of those. I was just playing with you. Horsing around, you could say. OK, let me rephrase the question and give you slightly more legitimate choices. If you combine a horse and an insect, what new animal do you get?

1. a bird
2. a wolf
3. a rabbit
4. a cow

With most quizzes, I give the instant gratification of an answer. This time, you’ll have to wait a bit, while I assemble the various components of an explanation.

For now, I can show you how a horse (馬) and an insect (虫) mate, producing the following kanji:

騒 (SŌ, sawa(gu): clamor, noise, disturbance; to make a fuss)

On the Etymology of 騒 …

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Recently, when I logged onto JapanesePod101.com to listen to some podcasts, a photo with big, bold, striking kanji stopped me in my tracks.

The lesson was about 過労死 (karōshi), “death by overworking,” but none of those kanji appeared in the photo. I knew 残業 (to remain + work) as zangyō, “overtime.” And I knew 風 (FU-, kaze) in several ways, often having to do with wind. But how did 風 factor into overtime? And what was 呂敷?

What Does サービス Mean Here? …

Because the characters appeared in a photo, I couldn’t copy and paste them into Breen, and somehow all other methods of kanji investigation failed me. What would the radical of 呂 be? It couldn’t be 口, could it? (Yes, it could and it is.) I refused to think that was possible, so I didn’t even try looking it up that way, instead preferring (why???) to flail around with utterly ineffective alternative methods. I got nowhere.

Searching for 敷 in Breen finally did the trick, but only after a loooong time, because I had assumed that this character would be a Jōyō kanji, which is true, only Breen hadn’t classified it as such, which hampered my search.

Anyway, I eventually deciphered 風呂敷 as furoshiki, which means “wrapping cloth” or “cloth wrapper,” which is what the ever-so-practical people on the resource-limited Japanese islands have used to wrap presents, purchases, and whatever else might need carrying.

Shibori Omiyage
Credit: Glennis Dolce
Shibori artist Glennis Dolce makes incredible silk shibori cloths for
a variety of applications, including furoshiki.
The kanji for shibori is 絞り.

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One might think of a jumble as a negative thing: a massive ball of knotted string that takes forever to untangle, a scrambled mind that keeps nothing straight, a mess of feelings and problems that you can’t sort out, a messy house where you can’t locate what you need.

But there are also positive jumbles, and for some reason (hunger?!), I can mostly think of examples related to food: an appetizer sampler plate, variety packs of candy bars for Halloween, a stew. In fact, when you cook and mix things together, a jumble is often the goal.

Hence the Term “Jambalaya”? …

Chaos of Color, the Big Hodgepodge
Photo credit: © John W. Hammond

Kun-kun 混 combinations formed with the yomi ma(zeru) often have to do with jumbles. They even sound like jumbles. Take, for instance, this word:

混ぜこぜ (mazekoze: jumble (of two or several things); mix)

Japanese usually write this word in hiragana.

The consonants z and k in mazekoze create the impression of chaos, just as the ateji term mechakucha (目茶苦茶: disorder, confusion) has the onomatopoetic feel of disorganization. Why should this be, when the repetition of syllables (ze in mazekoze, cha in mechakucha) create some semblance of order?

More on Mechakucha …

Loopy Glass Jungle
Photo credit: © John W. Hammond

With the yomi of ma(zeru), 混 plays into at least one compound with a pejorative sense, bringing us back to the downside of jumbles:

混ぜ返す (mazekaesu: to banter, make fun of (what a person says), jeer at; to stir up)     to toss + to repeat

Ma(zeru) can also mean “to toss.” Given the breakdown, I suppose 混ぜ返す is like throwing words back in someone’s face.

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Do you think of Old Japan as an orderly or disorderly place? My gut reaction is to think of orderliness: the constant cleaning of already spotless houses, the exquisite presentation of shōjin ryōri (精進料理: vegetarian Buddhist food served at temples, meticulous + to offer + cuisine (last 2 chars.)), the dainty washi wrapped around purchases, and the minute attention to detail in the tea ceremony.

And yet kanji calligraphy tends toward chaos! Only highly trained practitioners can read the flowing lines. And there’s the matter of twisting, narrow roads in Tokyo and how easy it is to get lost there, with the unclear or nonexistent indication of streets and building numbers. As Donald Richie wrote so beautifully in A Lateral View: Essays on Culture and Style in Contemporary Japan, plots of land follow natural topography, rather than grid lines:

One … sees this from the air, a good introduction to the patterns of a country. Cultivated Japan is all paddies winding in free-form serpentine between the mountains, a quilt of checks and triangles on the lowlands—very different from the neat squares of Germany, or that vast and regular checkerboard of the United States. The Japanese pattern is drawn from nature. The paddy fields assume their shape because mountains are observed and valleys followed, because this is the country where the house was once made to fit into the curve of the landscape and where the farmer used to cut a hole in the roof rather than cut down the tree. (19–20)

I can only conclude that Japan, old and new, presents an enticing combination of order and disorder. The following picture (which reminds me of a circuit board) is of Tokyo. On Flickr, the photographer’s caption says, “Japanese have a way of making even disorder neat, somehow.”

Neat Disorder
Photo credit: Poagao

We saw last week that 混 (KON, ma(jiru), ma(zeru), ma(zaru)) can mean “to confuse” and “to mix.” As ma(jiru), “to be mixed or blended,” 混 shows up in several terms that remind me of cooking, seeming to contain a dash of this word, and a dash of that word—true mixes! Take, for example, this word:

混じり気 (majirike: a dash of (something), impurity, mixture)
     to mix + a trace

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When I came upon the compound 混沌 (konton: confusion, chaos, disorder), I couldn’t fathom why this word had taken on so much water (). I wondered whether the moisture had anything to do with the “swirling waters of confusion” to which English speakers refer. As it turns out, yes! Check out some of the meanings of these kanji (the second of which happens to be rare):

混: confused
沌: swirling water, to be blocked, primeval chaos

Primeval chaos?! Burbling bodies of water must have terrified some early people!

Swirl
Photo credit: Ray Byrne

Henshall says that 混 originally referred to water rushing and swirling with no fixed course, as in a flood. Then “confused waters” came to mean “confused” in a broader sense. He also says the 昆 inside 混 means “multitude” and acts phonetically here to express “to spin, swirl.” The element 昆 even lends its own idea of confusion, because people in a crowd mill around chaotically.

Swirling Waters
Photo credit: eatzycath

If this sounds entirely negative, never fear. The kanji 混 also means “to mix.” This associated meaning came about because impure elements often find their way into the swirling waters of confusion. This idea of “mixing” is not inherently negative. Just consider these appealing mixes:

雨混じりの雪 (ame majiri no yuki: snow mingled with rain)     rain + to mix + snow

混合酒 (kongōshu: cocktail, mixed drink, blended liquor)
     to mix + to join + alcohol

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In English, “tail of the yak” and “tale of the yak” both make sense but mean very different things. This is nothing compared with the profusion of Japanese homonyms. When you type YAKU in hiragana and convert it to kanji, any of the following characters could pop up, as all have the on-yomi of YAKU:

約 (to promise, shrink, about)
訳 (to translate)
薬 (medicine)
役 (service, serviceability)
厄 (misfortune)
躍 (to leap)
疫 (epidemic)
益 (benefit, profit)　

This leads to a plethora of homophonous YAKU compounds.

There are three more types of yaku:

焼く (to burn, roast, grill, bake)

In this case, ya(ku) is the kun-yomi. Some compounds include the kun-yomi of this kanji, but the form is always yaki or yake. This kanji therefore doesn’t factor into the YAKU homonym confusion.

妬く (to become jealous)

This kun-yomi is uncommon and seems to play no part in any homonym problem.

ヤク (yak)

I believe this word also causes no compound confusion.

Yak Near the Sacred Yundrok Yumtso Lake, Tibet
Photo credit: Dennis Jarvis

Yakity Yak
Photo credit: Valerie Abbott

Yet Another YAKU …

YAKU Words with Great Internal Rhymes …

Kanji with Both EKI and YAKU as On-Yomi …

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Last week we saw how the 約 in 約束 (yakusoku: promise, promise + to bind) can imply a binding contract. I don’t usually associate contracts with any sense of contracting, which is to say “shrinking.” But just as “contract” has these two meanings, so does 約, strangely enough.

“Contract” in English (and Latin) …

In fact, Halpern says that “shortening” is the original meaning of 約. When does 約 convey a sense of shrinking? I can think of no better example than this one:

括約筋 (katsuyakukin: sphincter)
     to constrict + to shrink + muscle

Oh, come now. There are several sphincters in the body!

What’s With the Breakdown of 括?! …

Whereas 括約筋 conveys a drawing together, other 約 words are more about condensing something long:

要約 (yōyaku: summary, abridged statement)
     important + to shrink

約言 (yakugen: contraction, summary)     to shrink + speech

Two more 約 compounds have to do with restricting or regulating people’s rights:

制約 (seiyaku: restriction, limitation, condition)
     rule + to contract

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