How the chief ("osa") brings peace and order to his group ("osameru")

Do you know the word osa? It means “chief”. It could also be “head”, or “leader”. It’s the person in charge of a tribe or group. It’s written using the character 長, meaning “long” (or “old”), which we studied in a recent post.

The word osa is not too common in modern Japanese. Many Japanese learners might not have encountered it. Have you? The character 長 is taught in second grade, but osa is not one of its “official” readings (which are just nagai and chō).

But actually you have run into osa, in the form of the common verbs osameru and osamaru. To put it simply, osameru is what an osa does. osamaru is what happens under an osa. Looking at these words and their meanings will help us understand the Japanese concept of “chief”, what they expect of a “chief”, what a “chief” does and accomplishes. Although you’d be hard pressed to find a native speaker who connects osa and osameru (or the name Osamu, more on that later) in their mind, actually the connection could not be clearer, and has been established linguistically.

Try asking a native speaker exactly what osameru and osamaru mean. If your native informant is anything like mine, they’ll stumble and then start producing a bunch of sample sentences, but be unable to come up with any all-encompassing definition. That’s because, like so many other Japanese words we’ve seen, these words have an incredibly broad range of meaning. I’m guessing most Japanese learners just pick up the various meanings from context. It might seem like these words have a bunch of separate, unconnected meanings. But as we have seen so many times before, there is a core meaning underlying all the seemingly different senses of these words.

That core meaning of osameru and osamaru is to put or keep something in its proper or fitting state or place. That is the common thread running through all the individual meanings and the different kanji they are represented with. Understanding this is more than just of intellectual interest: it can help us master and remember the words.

The connection with osa? An osa governs their small tribe. They guide the society into its desired state and maintain it there. Under their guidance, the society is peaceful and calm and organized. They heal its dysfunctions.

But if we look up osameru in the dictionary, we will find many other “meanings” listed, in addition to this one of governance.

As usual, the Japanese scholars who integrated Chinese characters into their language and culture have done a lot of the hard work for us. They split apart the shades of meanings of native words like osameru and assigned different Chinese characters to each of them.

The meaning related to governance is that written 治める, meaning to govern (wisely), but also to calm, to pacify. That of course is the same character as found in 政治/seiji/politics. It also means to heal, or cure, as in a disease.

The meaning of placing something in its desired, ideal, or proper position or location is written as 納める. This is the character used in 納品/nōhin/deliver. You are delivering some work product to its desired location—the client! You deliver your taxes to where they belong—the government (納付/nōfu).

修める is most often used in relation to learning or developing a knowledge or skill, tucking it into the container which is yourself, where it belongs, 身につける/mi ni tsukeru.

Finally we have 収める, which is, basically, something fitting—again, being inserted into some location or placed in some state that is exactly right.

Osamu as a man’s name

But without noticing it, you’ve also seen osa in people’s names—namely Osamu. Like other names we’ve examined, this one actually has a specific meaning. It is the classical Japanese form of the verb osamaru. It was written as をさむ/wosamu, and had the same meanings—to govern/pacify/put in order/put away. Japan’s inventive parents have come up with 87 different ways to write this name, but the most common are 修 and 治, the latter of course being how DAZAI Osamu, the post-war author known for “A Human Failure” (No Longer Human), whose works we’ve visited several times in this publication, wrote his name. The renowned manga artist TEZUKA Osamu wrote his name as 手塚治虫.

Lessons from osa and osamaru: the Japanese notion of leadership

But let’s go back to the original meaning of osameru and its relationship to the word osa for “chief”. Here, we see the Japanese notion of leadership directly represented in its lexicon. A chief or boss is not something that yells at his subjects, or orders them around, or punishes them; it’s someone who ensures that the society is organized and aligned exactly as it should be, resulting in a peaceful, organized, conflict-free tribe functioning at its best. And this is consistent with what we know about the Japanese style of management—it’s about finding consensus and guiding the organization towards order, not imposing your will from above.