The Cultural and Linguistic Significance of the Japanese Sword

Our article today comes from the August/September issue of Black Belt magazine contributing columnist Dave Lowry on how the samurai katana is used as a linguistic device in contemporary Japan.

In Japan, the sword was the weapon that dominated. Whether you were a samurai who carried two swords or a member of another class who wore a single long or short sword, the blade played an enormous role in your culture. As a result, the Japanese language absorbed a number of idioms – some of them just a dated as ours related to firearms – that refer to the sword. These idioms also illustrate the deep influence of the martial arts in Japan.

For example, if you don’t get along with someone, it’s a case of sori ga awanai. Sori is the curvature of the sword. A scabbard must be custom-crafted so it matches that curve perfectly. Awanai means “doesn’t match.” So the sword and scabbard don’t match.
A thin metal plate that fits in front of and behind the hand guard of a sword is called a seppa. “Spacer” might be a good translation. To be seppa tsumaru is to be in a difficult, drastic situation. It means the spacer is stuck – it’s preventing the sword from being drawn, a potentially dangerous condition if a fight is imminent.
Nukisashi naranu is a related expression. It refers to being unable either to draw or reseathe your sword. In other words, you’re completely frustrated.

Many Japanese who use these idioms have no idea what they originally meant, just as Americans who say that something was done “lock, stock, and barrel” might not be conscious of the original meaning (parts of a flintlock rifle). Few Japanese may know, for example, that one term for the central street in a town, menuki dori, came from another part of the sword’s furniture.
A menuki is a small, molded ornament that fits into the hilt of the sword, wedged under the silk wrapping. It helps keep the wrapping tight and allows the swordsman to get a firm grip on the weapon. As such, it’s vital to keeping the hilt and the blade together. So the “menuki street” – dori is Japanese for “street” – means the central element that keeps the town together.
Futokoro-gatana is the small dagger that was concealed in the folds of the kimono. Women often carried them. The word has come to mean someone who’s secretly advising someone else – in other words, a person who can be depended on behind the scenes.

To engage in heavy combat, whether on the battlefield or in business, is sometimes called shinogi wo kezeru. Kezeru means “to shave”. The shinogi is the ridgeline that runs the length of the Japanese sword. If you’ve been in strenuous combat, the ridge of your sword will have been scraped.
Want a great insult? Tell someone he’s katana no sabi – “a sword’s rust.” It means he’s so insignificant that it wouldn’t be worth risking getting blood on your katana to kill him because that might lead to rust on the steel.

Another ancient insult is used to describe a person who’s lost his skills: Mukashi tsurugi, ima no usuba. “He was once a sword, now he’s a vegetable chopper.”

Remember, though, that katana no kizu wa naosenai. Sword wounds may heal, but wounds inflicted by words may not.

To reconcile after a fight or disagreement can be expressed as “moto no saya no osamaru”. Osamaru is “to settle” or “to restore”. Moto no saya is “to return the sword to the scabbard.” So returning the sword to its original place means making things right and coming to an accomodation. The saya or scabbard also figures in the expression “to hit the saya” or saya ate. In the days of the samurai, you had to be very careful moving in a crowd because you don’t want your scabbard to smack against that of another warrior. It was a serious insult, a challenge of sorts. Swordsmen who wanted to test their skills would deliberately move so it appeared that another person had intentionally hit their scabbard. That gave them the right to draw their weapon and begin a fight. So saya ate is a way of saying that picking a quarrel or fighting over something trivial.

“To cut to the chase” can be expressed in Japanese as tanto chokunyu. It means “to charge straight ahead with a short sword” It’s a way of saying you’re committed, you want to get straight to the matter at hand.
Tsuba zeriai is familiar to fans of Japanese period dramas. A pair of samurai are locked in combat, the hand guards of their swords touching, each pushing and struggling within inches of the other’s face. It looks very dramatic, but in reality, it rarely happened. That close, someone would either use the hilt to smash his opponent’s head, or drop his sword and start grappling. Tsuba zeriai, however, occurs frequently in kendo bouts, in which neither the sharp sword edge nor the possibility of grappling is a factor. The expression means “to be fighting in a determined way, furiously, with complete intent.”

If you feel inclined to unleash any of the aformentioned idioms on an unsuspecting Japanese person, remember that many of the expressions are dated. Younger Japanese people are likely to look at you the way an American kid would if you suddenly started speaking Shakespearean English.

– From “Supremacy of the Sword as Reflected in Japanese Culture” by Dave Lowry, Black Belt Magazine, August/September 2015, Volume 53, #5