Category Archives: Japan

A seasonal Japanese matsutake (松茸 ‘pine ear’ mushroom) tasting menu at a restaurant named Yoshitsune (義経) turned up a couple of new vocabulary items that caught my fancy.

ほかほか hokahoka ‘warmth, heat’ – The menu for the fall seasonal special announced 目の前で松茸釜飯がほかほかで炊き上がります me no mae de matsutake kamameshi ga hokahoka de takiagarimasu ‘the matsutake (flavored) rice-pot cooks up warmly before your eyes’. And indeed it did. The fragrantly flavored rice finished cooking in each individual-sized cauldron perched above a can of sterno as we oohed and aahed our way through the courses leading up to the pièce de résistance.

The ideophone hokahoka does not behave grammatically like an adjective, despite its normal English translation into an adjective. It seems better to think of it as a noun, as in the postpositional phrase hokahoka de ‘from the heat’. As a noun modifier, hokahoka needs a genitive (or nominalizing) no after it—not the na that follows “adjectival nominals” like the hen of hen na gaijin ‘strange foreigner’. So a piping-hot sweet potato can be described as hokahoka no satsuma imo. And you can convey that you feel a hokahoka sense of warmth by adding the “light verb” to the ‘heat’: hokahoka suru ‘do/be hokahoka’. Let the mnemonic be ‘do the hokahoka’!

Another ideophone with a very similar form and a very similar meaning is pokapoka ‘pleasant warmth, toasty warmth, warming (weather)’.

判官贔屓 hougan/hangan biiki ‘favoring the underdog’ – Our restaurant was named after Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a famous warrior of the Minamoto (= Genji) clan whose martial feats played a key role in defeating the Taira (= Heike) clan in the Genpei War. The Genpei War (1180–85) has often been compared to the equally treachery-ridden English War of the Roses (1455–85) between the noble houses of Lancaster and York, but the latter led to a gradual centralization of authority in England, while the former led to a dispersal of power in Japan that eventually culminated in a long period of civil war before Oda Nobunaga unified the country and paved the way for the centralizing Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1868).

Despite his many heroic feats, Yoshitsune eventually sided with the Emperor Go-Shirakawa (After-Shirakawa, i.e., Shirakawa II) against his own elder brother Yoritomo, who went on to found the Kamakura Shogunate. When Yoshitsune’s forces lost, he was forced to commit suicide—a pattern that went on to become all too familiar in Japanese history. But his fame lives on, as does his Imperial Court name 判官 hougan/hangan in the expression 判官贔屓 hougan/hangan biiki ‘favoring Hougan (= Yoshitsune)’, a phrase Hatena Keyword defines as 弱いものに、弱いからと言う理由で、えこひいきしてしまうこと yowai mono ni, yowai kara to yuu riyuu de, ekohiiki shiteshimau koto ‘the act of favoring the weaker party just because it is weaker’.

The kanji for the compound ekohiiki, written in hiragana above, are 依怙贔屓, etymologically ‘relying-strength’. An impartial or fair person is an ekohiiki no nai hito ‘favoritism-lacking person’. The tendency to favor one who loses, like Yoshitsune/Hougan, with dignity and honor intact has long been deeply embedded in Japanese culture. Witness the undying popularity of stories about the 47 ronin and Saigo Takamori.

Wally Yonamine, whose interesting biography I’ve been reading, has an Okinawan surname that is neither in P. G. O’Neill’s book Japanese Names nor in my Canon Wordtank electronic dictionary. But, of course, both the English and the Japanese Wikipedia entries about him give the kanji used to write Yonamine: 与那嶺.

While consulting O’Neill’s Japanese Names, however, I came across a wonderfully archaic-sounding given name for men, 四万四五右衛門, which is pronounced Yomoshigo_emon, a name that has fewer syllables (or moras) than kanji. The kanji mean ‘4-10000-4-5-right-guard-gate’, and 右 ‘right’ is the one that doesn’t rate its own syllable. The Sino-Japanese reading for 右 is U, so it’s easy to see how the high rounded vowel -u- could get lost in the transitional glide (-w-) from a preceding round vowel (o-) to a following unrounded vowel (-e). The U does get pronounced when it starts the name, as in 右衛門 Uemon ‘right-ward-gate’.

There are many such given names ending in 右衛門 -_emon ‘right-ward-gate’ and one imagines that being a gatekeeper was a rather important function in many a feudal household: 五郎右衛門 Goro_emon ‘5-son-right-ward-gate’, 八郎右衛門 Hachiro_emon ‘8-son-right-ward-gate’, 孫右衛門 Mago_emon ‘grandchild-right-ward-gate’, 万右衛門 Man_emon ‘10000-right-ward-gate’. Only the last of these fails to provide the environment expected to encourage the -U- to glide away.

Not all ward-gates (garde-portes?) guarded the right gate, or guarded the right side of the gate. Some guarded the left as well: 文左衛門 Bun-za-emon ‘culture-left-ward-gate’ (or ‘literate’?), 権左衛門 Gon-za-emon ‘assistant-left-ward-gate’ (same gon- as in the old words gonsuke ‘manservant’, gonsai ‘concubine’), 茂左衛門 Mon-za-emon ‘lush-left-ward-gate’ (or ‘thick, luxuriant’).

These Japanese names ending in -(za)emon ‘wardgate’ sound to me even more archaic than those ending in -suke ‘servant’, though perhaps not as archaic as Aethelbert or Ealdwulf sound in English. However, they are more equivalent etymologically to English names like Stewart (< steward < ‘sty-warden’) or Lord (< ‘loaf-warden’).