I was prompted to write this article after I began following Arashi’s television shows over the winter break.
In interviews, Jun Matsumoto and Sho Sakurai have both made remarks along these lines:
優しさと強さは同義語と思います (“I think gentleness and strength are synonyms.”)1
—やさしいといえば？
—強さ。
—When you hear “gentle,” what comes to mind?
—Strength.
The theme song for Mumon: The Land of Stealth, starring Satoshi Ohno, also has the line “本当の優しさと 強さ求めて” (“Seeking true gentleness and strength”).
This got me thinking: the extremely frequent use of yasashii (優しい), and its pairing with tsuyoi (強い, “strong”), are clearly a cultural phenomenon unique to Japanese.
So what exactly is the difference between Japanese yasashii and Chinese wēnróu (温柔, “gentle”)? Enter wēnróu into a Chinese–Japanese translation dictionary, and yasashii comes up straight away.
Translate it back, and wēnróu comes up again.
In fact, though, this similarity is only relative:
-
The two words are similar only in conceptual meaning; if we examine their affective meanings, we find considerable differences.
-
The two words are similar and comparable only in their shared sense of “gentle.” In other senses, such as “friendly” or “approachable,” they cannot be translated into one another.
By comparing examples from the CCL Corpus of Chinese Texts, a corpus of classical Chinese, and Japan’s Shōnagon corpus search interface, I have attempted to identify several differences between yasashii and wēnróu:
1. Japanese yasashii describes both men and women; Chinese wēnróu is not commonly used for men
Almost anyone with even a little exposure to Japanese can intuitively sense that yasashii is used regardless of gender. Calling a man yasashii is a compliment. In Chinese, however, calling a man who is not one’s elder wēnróu has a slightly effeminate ring.
We can prove this by comparing the corpus data:
In the Chinese examples, a particularly high proportion of uses of wēnróu describe women. These include family members—wives, grandmothers, mothers and younger sisters—as well as models, domestic workers and women in other occupations. For some speakers, wēnróu is almost another word for “woman.” As Gan Yongbai writes in “The River”: “The river is the most feminine, and therefore the gentlest, of nature’s living beings.”
By contrast, very few Chinese examples use wēnróu to describe men directly: only 3 of the 168 CCL examples, compared with 24 that directly describe women. Yet although direct descriptions of men are rare, there is no reluctance to use wēnróu for men’s voices—including speaking voices, singing voices and melodies—hands—including arms, fingers, palms and other parts of the limbs—or gazes.
In Japanese, yasashii is not restricted to women. The expression yasashii otoko (優しい男, “a gentle man”) is also widely used of men. For example: “ヨンジュンは柔らかいイメージの代名詞。彼はデビュー時から柔らかいほほ笑みを持った優しい男でアピールした” (“Bae Yong-joon is synonymous with a gentle image. Ever since his debut, he has been a gentle man with a soft smile”).
2. Japanese yasashii describes a wider range of things
In the Chinese CCL corpus, the things frequently described as wēnróu include voices (12 occurrences), hands (10), water (7), wind (6), light (5), smiles (4), gazes (4) and words (4). Japanese yasashii, meanwhile, can describe almost anything, with a range of variants in meaning depending on the context.
As with Chinese wēnróu, Japanese yasashii often describes smiles, eyes, words and light. But it also appears in expressions such as “優しい味” (a mild flavour), “優しい雰囲気の花柄コーデ” (an outfit with soft floral patterns) and “優しい皺” (“gentle wrinkles”). Yasashii means more than “gentle”: it also encompasses “friendly”—extended to “environmentally friendly” in “環境に優しい”—“kind,” as in “彼は子猫を守ってくれて、本当に優しい人です” (“He protected the kitten; he really is a kind person”), and “good-natured,” among other meanings.
3. Gentleness and strength?
Image source, as credited in the watermark: Lanyou Huishe (岚友会社).
To return to our opening question: what exactly is the relationship between “gentleness” and “strength” in Japanese? We can find many examples of the two appearing together through Shōnagon.
Besides the Arashi examples mentioned earlier, there is also a line in “Summer Snow, Winter Flowers” by Aimer, whom I really like: “あなたに出会えなければ、強さも優しさも 知らないまま” (“Had I not met you, I would still not know the meaning of gentleness and strength”).2
There are others, too, such as “昨日より 強さと優しさ，大人になってる” (“Gentler and stronger than yesterday, becoming an adult”).3
In Chinese, by contrast, the words that frequently appear alongside wēnróu in the modern Chinese corpus are, in descending order of frequency: honest and kind-hearted; tranquil / demure / still / serene and peaceable; elegant; obedient; and virtuous and capable in the home. Most of these describe women. In the classical Chinese corpus, the corresponding list, again in descending order, is: honest and kind-hearted; elegant; and peaceable / gentle and compliant. Chinese does sometimes pair “gentleness” with “strength,” expressing qualities of life in which yielding and firmness complement and transform one another. But wēnróu dūnhòu (温柔敦厚)—being “mild, gentle, sincere, and broad-minded”—is a more important strand of Chinese culture.4 It is bound up with an aesthetic tradition concerned with poetry’s sound, rhythm and meaning, and embraces ideals of character expressed in concealing one’s brilliance and remaining unobtrusive, softening one’s radiance and mingling with the dust of the everyday world.
In short, we can see that Japanese yasashii—borrowed into Chinese as yàsāxī (亚撒西)—has a broader range of meanings than Chinese wēnróu, describes a broader range of things, and applies to a broader range of people.
In everyday conversation, we might also hear a friend say, “I’m a very yàsāxī person,” but generally not, “I’m a very wēnróu person.” Here, a phonetic transcription of yasashii has entered Chinese, carrying a meaning close to “kind and friendly towards others.” This is not an isolated case. Japanese also has sabishii (寂しい), which translates literally into Chinese as jìmò (寂寞, “lonely”), but is less intense in its affective meaning than the Chinese word. It has something of the tone of “あなたがいないなら、ちょうどつまらないね” (“Without you, things are a little dull”). People commonly say “a little sābíxī” (撒鼻息) instead of “a little bored.”
In fact, even two words with exactly the same referent can differ in affective meaning from one region to another. A word contains the sum of its pragmatic uses and historical experience; in this sense, no translation is exhaustive. For example, the Chinese “moon” evokes reunion and gives off a gentle, pale-yellow light. In Western culture, the “moon” often has nothing to do with reunion and more readily evokes frightening associations; the Western “moon” is often blue.
One response, used since ancient times, to translations that “do not convey the full meaning” has been to achieve a “transplantation of culture” through phonetic transcription. For example, “do not translate terms with multiple meanings” is one of Buddhism’s “five kinds of terms not translated.” The phonetic forms sābíxī and yàsāxī are just such instances of spontaneous and conscious cultural transplantation. If the meaning of a source-language word—both conceptual and connotative—can be fully conveyed by a single word in the target language, then the foreign word is “redundant” and need not be “grafted” into the target language. But when no corresponding Chinese expression can carry the full meaning in context, phonetic borrowings such as yàsāxī and sābíxī bring the cultural associations carried by these Japanese adjectives into Chinese.
At the same time, in subcultures where language contact is intensive, the meaning of Chinese wēnróu is also influenced by the phonetic loan yàsāxī, giving rise to expressions such as “He is gentle and strong” (他是一个温柔而强大的人).
Editor’s note: This perspective brings a fresh insight—nice.