Category Archives: Japan

If you found yourself in Lower Slobovia and wanted to head for Upper Slobovia, in which direction would you head?

1. upcountry
2. upriver
3. upstate
4. upmarket
5. up north (or up south down under?)
6. to the capital city

In how many places outside Japan would the last answer be most likely? Anyone who regularly rides the long-distance trains in Japan knows that all trains bound for Tokyo are ascending trains (上り列車, noboriressha), while all trains heading away from Tokyo are descending trains (下り列車, kudariressha). That’s not too surprising for train systems in centralized states. Of greater interest is the fact that old placenames in Japan show the same alignment, as I discovered while deciphering a Japanese map from a few hundred years ago.

The names that most puzzled me were 上総 Kazusa ‘Upper Fusa’ in lower Chiba and 下総 Shimousa ‘Lower Fusa’ in upper Chiba (where my use of ‘lower’ means southern and ‘upper’ means northern), along with 上野 Kōzuke ‘Upper Keno’ for what is now Gunma and 下野 Shimotsuke ‘Lower Keno’ in what is now Tochigi. ‘Upper’ Gunma lies to the southwest of ‘Lower’ Tochigi. Neither riverflow nor terrain height will explain why one member of each of these pairs is ‘upper’ and the other is ‘lower’. Nor will orientation to Japan’s current capital, Tokyo (lit. ‘East Capital’).

The key to the answer fairly leapt out at me when I factored two more sets of old provinces into the equation.

• The old provinces of 越前 Echizen ‘Near Echi’, 越中 Etchu ‘Middle Echi’, and 越後 Echigo ‘Far Echi’ run up the Japan Sea coast from southwest to northeast, corresponding to the current prefectures of Fukui, Toyama, and Niigata.
• The old provinces of 備前 Bizen ‘Near Bi’, 備中 Bitchu ‘Middle Bi’, and 備後 Bingo ‘Far Bi’ run along the Inland Sea from east to west, corresponding to parts of the current prefectures of Okayama and Hiroshima.

In both cases, the provinces whose names end in -zen ‘before, in front, pre-‘ are closer to the old capital of Kyoto, while those whose names end in -go ‘behind, in back, post-‘ are farther from Kyoto. Kyushu also had three pairs of former provinces, where the half of each pair ending in -zen (Buzen, Chikuzen, Hizen) lay to the north (and thus nearer Honshu) of its counterpart ending in -go (Bungo, Chikugo, Higo).

LATER INSERT: These old placenames still turn up in modern contexts. The 上越新幹線 Jōetsu Shinkansen, the bullet train line that runs from Tokyo through Gunma to Niigata gets its name from the Sino-Japanese reading (jō) of the first character of 上野 Kōzuke ‘Upper Keno’ (now Gunma) and an alternate Sino-Japanese reading (etsu) of the first character of 越後 Echigo ‘Far Echi’ (now Niigata). Furthermore, a native Japanese reading of the latter character, 越 koshi, shows up in the name of perhaps the most famous cultivar of Japanese rice, Koshihikari (越光), which originated in Niigata (although Koshihikari is rarely written in kanji these days). Koshi was the older (7th century!) name for the province that was later divided into Near, Middle, and Far Echi, which were in turn eventually renamed as prefectures of Fukui, Toyama, and Niigata on Japan’s Hokuriku coast.

How many other placenames that can be rendered as Upper X and Lower X, or Near X and Far X, describe relative distance from capital cities? (Far Rockaway in Queens, NYC, was apparently named for its relation to what used to be East Rockaway, now part of Nassau County, NY, and not for its relation to NYC.)

UPDATE: The title of this post does not include the usage of nobori ‘ascending’ and kudari ‘descending’ for travel toward and away from the capital city, respectively. That usage I suspect is very, very common, as two commenters have pointed out. I’m interested in placenames, where Japanese usage is unique, at least in my experience. Lower Saxony is on the coast and lower in elevation than landlocked Saxony farther inland. Orientation to Berlin, or Vienna, or Rome is irrelevant. The Prussian province of Lower Silesia was actually closer to the Prussian capital, Berlin, than Upper Silesia. There are many towns on the slopes of the Carpathians in Romania named along the lines of Făgăraş de Sus and Făgăraş de Jos, but Sus means upslope and Jos means downslope, not closer or farther from Bucharest or Vienna or wherever the capital may have been at one time. In East Asia, Korea has many provinces split into North (-bukdo) and South (-namdo) parts—Hamgyong, Hwanghae, Pyongan, Chungcheong, Gyeongsang, Jeolla—none of which are distinguished relative to the position of the capital city. China, similarly, has several sets of matching province names—Guangxi, Guangdong; Hunan, Hubei; Henan, Hebei—but all of them are distinguished by cardinal positions relative to the globe, not relative to the capital city. So the question remains: In what other country or language would the equivalent of Upper Slobovia be closer to the capital than Lower Slobovia?

UPDATE 2: In the comments, Nathanael of Rhine River notes the conflict between the German usage of upper and lower to signal the highlands and lowlands of German-speaking lands and the (North) American tourist usage of upper and lower to distinguish northern and southern Germany, plus similar conflicts in usage that afflict those who equate ‘upper’ with ‘north’ and ‘lower’ with ‘south’ in reference to both the Nile and the Mississipi, which flow in opposite directions.

UPDATE 3: Well, this post prompted me to consult my hitherto underutilized electronic Super Daijirin and solve a few onomastic problems that have nagged at me for a long time. (And just in time, too, since I leave Japan tomorrow.) As noted above, Tochigi Prefecture used to be called 下野 Shimotsuke ‘Lower Keno’ while Gunma used to be called 上野 Kōzuke ‘Upper Keno’. It turns out there are several ways to write both province names. In fact, the Keno portion is rendered more accurately by adding the syllable for ke ‘hair’, as in 下毛野 ‘Lower Hair Field’ and 上毛野 ‘Upper Hair Field’. (I wonder if those names refer to the bearded wheat and barley that still dominate the agriculture of the region.)

Not only are there multiple ways to write each placename, there are also multiple ways to pronounce each kanji in the placename. Older placenames seem to have been pronounced in native Japanese form (like Koshi instead of Echi/Etsu for 越), but the kanji originally used to write them have contributed Sino-Japanese pronunciations to the same placenames, and the latter readings usually show up in abbreviations. So the old name of Gunma is alluded to in the 上 Jō- of 上越新幹線 Jōetsu Shinkansen, and a slightly longer version appears in the name of 上毛電鉄, Jōmō Electric Railway, which runs from the Gunma border city of Kiryū, which abuts Ashikaga City in Tochigi Prefecture, to Maebashi, the capital of Gunma Prefecture. Two local newspapers also conjure up the old placenames: Jōmō Shimbun (“Upper Hair News”?) in Gunma and Shimotsuke Shimbun (“Lower Field News”) in Tochigi.

Now, finally, the pièce de résistance: The JR line that runs through Ashikaga is known as the Ryōmō line. It runs between Oyama City in southeastern Tochigi, and Takasaki City in central Gunma. The Tōbu railway express train that runs through Ashikaga and terminates at Akagi in central Gunma is also called the Ryōmō. Ryōmō is written 両毛 ‘Both Hairs’, a strange name that doesn’t make much sense unless you know that it refers to the combination of regions formerly known as ‘Upper Hair’ (上毛, now Gunma) and ‘Lower Hair’ (下毛, now Tochigi). Weird, huh?

凸凹 dekoboko ‘unevenness, roughness, bumpiness’ – Today I went to my neighborhood barbershop, not so much because my hair was getting too long for the increasingly muggy weather, but because my beard was getting too scraggly. Well, instead of looking up ‘scraggly’ in my electronic dictionary, which would have returned 不揃い fuzoroi ‘uneven, not uniform, irregular, mismatched’, I looked up ‘uneven’ and found the wonderfully graphic 凸凹 dekoboko ‘unevenness, roughness, bumpiness, inequality’.

The barber seemed to understand fine what I meant when I characterized my beard as dekoboko. He might have had more difficulty processing the Sino-Japanese pronunciation of the combination, tatsuou, but someone who works with lenses might have found it more familiar, as 凸 also translates ‘convex’ and 凹 translates ‘concave’.

割烹 kappou ‘fine cuisine’ – To celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, the Far Outliers treated themselves to an elegant dinner at nearby 割烹 懐石 蝶や Kappou Kaiseki Chou-ya ‘fine-cuisine tasting-menu butterfly-shop’. Wikipedia’s “tasting menu” is a good characterization of kaiseki, which has an interesting etymology in its own right, but I want to examine 割烹 kappou, which was new to me. At one level, it’s just a synonym of 料理 ryouri, but the respective etymological ingredients of the two words bring out different flavors.

While 料理 describes cooking in the abstract, as Ingredients Management, 割烹 describes cooking as concrete actions, Slicing and Simmering. You can see the ‘sword’ (刀) radical (刂) down the right side of 割 waru ‘divide, cut, halve; separate; split, rip; break, crack, smash; dilute’ (Sino-Japanese katsu), and the ‘fire’ (火) radical (灬) flickering under 烹 niru ‘boil, cook’ (Sino-Japanese hou). (The usual way to write niru ‘boil, cook’ is with 煮, Sino-Japanese sha.)

Perhaps it’s not too misleading to propose a rough analogy along the lines of 割烹 : 料理 :: cuisine : cooking. At first I suspected kappou was only used for fine Japanese cuisine, but then I found 中華割烹 Chuuka kappou ‘Chinese fine-cuisine’, to label a Chinese-style “tasting menu” approach (to judge from the images).

So here’s how our kaiseki meal progressed. We sampled two local brands of sake as we ate, both served in a small teapot of clear glass with gold trim. Our sake cups were also of glass. Mine had gold flakes on the bottom, and with twelve delicate, alternating green and white vertical lines. My wife’s was slightly smaller, made of cut glass of a purplish hue.

1. Starter: tiny scallop on half shell, fresh ginger shoot (myoga), and a slice of chicken on fishcake
2. Hashiarai: clear soup with noodles made of fish cake (surimi) in lacquer bowl
3. Sashimi: slices of snapper (tai), scallop (hotate), and yellowfin tuna (maguro)
4. Mushimono: I can remember the dish, but not what was on it!
5. Nimono: simmered pork kakuni hidden under a scoop of rice in covered lacquer bowl
6. Yakimono: whole celebratory red snapper (tai, implying mede-tai)
7. Hassun: clear broth with daikon, shiitake, takenoko, broccoli, green fishcake, and shrimp
8. Agemono: oily shrimpcake
9. Sumono: vinegared tomato with sesame-flavored bean threads
10. Udon: thin Akita noodles and thin chirashi nori
11. Dessert: fresh local strawberry gelato bursting with flavor, paired with bitter green tea

Our rather unpretentious hostess didn’t describe each dish as she presented it, but was only too happy to answer my questions when I asked. Here‘s a photo gallery of a more elaborate kaiseki dinner.

花菱草 hanabishisou ‘California poppy’ – The common, vulgar, lowly, ubiquitous (but not somniferous) California poppy has a most impressive moniker in Japanese: 花 hana ‘flower’ + 菱 hishi ‘water chestnut’ + 草 sou ‘grass’. Almost makes you want to ingest it.

蛍袋 hotaru-bukuro Campanula punctata ‘cherry bells‘ – One flower that seems to bloom with the sprightly bluebells is what looks like its depressive cousin, the hotaru-bukuro ‘firefly sack’. One can win many points with dowager gardeners by learning this obscure plant name.

The specific cultivar ‘Cherry Bells’ was developed in Japan. It is really one of the most pleasing campanulas for tidiness of basal leaves & beauty & colorfulness of large longlasting pendulous flowers. The stems have an appealing flowing tilt which does not look floppy, but permits the “bells” to dangle naturally, so that staking is never required.

蓼 tade ‘smartweed, knotweed’ (Polygonum spp.) – At Uotami (‘Fish Nation’) izakaya in nearby Kiryu, Gunma Prefecture, over the weekend, the Far Outliers were served an unusual blue-hued dipping sauce for our tasty whole ayu (鮎) ‘sweetfish’ on a stick. The waitress said the sauce was made from tade, which The New Nelson defines oversimply as ‘smartweed’ (also known as ‘smartass’), a plant with a nasty reputation. But the blue hue turns out to offer a subtle hint. The Japanese variety, also known as dyer’s knotweed (Polygonum tinctorium), is one of several secondary herbal sources for indigo dye (Indigofera tinctoria), along with woad (Isatis tinctoria), a favorite of the Picts, who got their Latin name from their fondness for body-dye.

UPDATE: Matt of No-sword adds a tade-related proverb that I neglected to mention: 蓼喰う虫も好き好き Tade kuu mushi mo sukizuki ‘Even bugs who eat tade are quite fond of it’—corresponding to “There is no accounting for taste” or De gustibus non disputandem est. I wonder if the smell of tade, like other indigo dyes, is supposed to repel mosquitoes.

Among the things I’ll miss when I leave Japan at the end of this month are NHK nature shows. The photography is often spectacular, of course, but the spare and clear narrative style, with equally spare but clear captions on screen, are perfect for an obsessive language-learner who watches Japanese TV with denshi jisho in hand—and a mute button within easy reach if it’s a commercial channel. Here are three animal names I learned while watching a show about Hokkaido wildlife recently.

丹頂 tanchou ‘Japanese crane, red-crested white crane’ – The 丹 is ‘red’ (as in cinnabar or vermilion), while the 頂 is ‘crest, peak, summit’, so the prosaic version of the name is ‘red crest’.

ももんが momonga ‘Eurasian flying squirrel’ – A rare, nocturnal creature of the far north whose image graces Estonian postage stamps. It’s possible to write the name much more obscurely in kanji, but I don’t see the point, and neither did NHK.

くろてん kuroten ‘sable’ – There are at least three kinds of てん (a native Japanese word that can also be written 貂): 黒てん kuroten ‘sable‘, 白てん shiroten ‘ermine‘, 松てん matsuten ‘pine marten‘. (These flesh-and-blood creatures are not to be confused with the animé “Black Angel” Kuroten. Nor should ermines be confused with ferrets!)