Believing in Japanese

Original Japanese has no word for “believe”.

Huh? What about 信じる/shinjiru? No, that's a Chinese word with jiru tacked on the end to make it into a verb. The jiru evolved from zuru, which comes from suru. Got it?

OK, but still, why is there no native Yamato-kotoba word for “believe”?

All of us aficionados of Japanese, one way or another, are trying to understand the mentality and the psychology and the culture of the Japanese via their language. This applies whether you believe that language shapes culture, or that culture shapes language, or that both evolve in tandem.

And the old Yamato-kotoba language can cast light on the worldview of the inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago fifteen hundred or two thousand years ago, a worldview which we can reasonably presume continues to infuse that of the modern Japanese to some extent, as it does their language.

To understand why there was no word for “believe” in the ancient language, we have to think about what it means to believe, and what the objects of belief can be.

The English word “believe” dates back to 1300, with the meaning of being persuaded of the truth of a doctrine, theory, religion, or concept. Later on it came to mean to accept something without proof, and eventually just “be of the opinion”.

(It turns out the word “believe” is indirectly related to “love”. In other words believing an idea is loving the idea.)

But we seek in vain for any words in original Japanese for the kinds of things that one might believe in, whether it be God, or religion, or a theory, or a concept. We had to wait for Chinese to give Japan words like 宗教/shūkyō/religion or 概念/gainen/concept for these things, along with the word 信/shin for believing in them.

These ancient forebears of today's Japanese did not believe in religion or God, and if by some miracle we were able to meet them we could probably not even explain these notions to them. The closest thing to what we think of as believing in a religion is that they honored the mountains and the rivers and the trees that defined the landscape in which they found themselves.

All the things that one might believe in can be considered specific cases of abstractions. Belief is applicable when you are dealing with abstractions. The human ability to form abstractions can be considered to be the driving force behind all of Western civilization, dating back to ancient India, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Europe. Human progress can be explained as a dynamic interaction between people who believed in certain abstractions and those who did not.

It seems likely that for the Yamato people abstractions did not exist, or at least did not play the same role in their society as they did in the elsewhere in the world. The Yamato people were more focused on the concrete. Concrete facts and accounts could be correct, or incorrect, but they were not things that one believed in or did not believe in. People might state falsehoods or inaccuracies (偽り/itsuwari), or lie about things (嘘/uso, a fine Yamato-kotoba word!), but that was not a matter of belief, but rather of objective truth and falsehood. There was a physical reality that was the main focus: that was 現/utsutsu (did you know that reading?). Its opposite is 夢/yume/dream (yu-me from what you see at night, 夜目, get it?), or 幻/maboroshi/illusion.

Rather than viewing things in terms of the consistency between your own reality and someone else’s, as in “I believe what you're saying” or “I don't believe what you're saying”, their approach was to identify it as true (まこと/makoto, the “real thing”) or not, in the context of a unique shared reality.

The word ま/ma, often written as 真, is often thought of as meaning “true”, but it is closer to true in the sense of “true north", meaning exactly north. 真上/ma-ue means exactly above. Makoto means “the exact thing”. Masaka means exactly the opposite; that's right—-this is the saka of slope, or sakasama/upside-down.

Did the Yamato culture have no abstractions, and thus no notion of believing in them or not, and therefore no word for belief, simply because it was so early in human history? Perhaps, but Plato was dealing heavily in abstractions one thousand years earlier.

What do you think? Does current Japanese culture continue the ancient focus on the concrete?