Karada: the Japanese body as an empty shell

How do the Japanese conceive of the human body? The Japanese language can provide important clues. And the original version of the language—known as Yamato-kotoba—can help us understand the concept of the body at the beginnings of Japanese culture, which continues to inform modern-day Japanese notions of the body.

The native Japanese word for body is karada. Can we break this down, or guess at its etymology?

Body as trunk-and-limbs

One theory is that this word was originally kara-eda. The kara here is an archaic word meaning the trunk of a tree. Eda of course is limbs. Together they would have meant “trunk-and-limbs”. (According to one theory, in ancient times Japanese referred to both hands and feet as eda, and the distinction between ashi and te came later.) If we were going to write this using Chinese characters, not because the Chinese characters tell us anything about the meaning—they were applied retroactively—it would be 幹枝. Proponents of this theory point out that it was common to use terms from nature to refer to body parts, like hana, which means both “nose” and “flower” (and other things).

I don’t like this theory. It’s too mechanical and superficial.

Body as a shell

It makes much more sense that the kara part would be the word every beginning Japanese student knows, meaning empty—you know, the one written 空. But there’s “another” kara, written 殻, which means “husk” or “shell”. It's the shell of an egg. It’s the shell of a nut. It’s the molted skin of an insect (抜け殻, nukegara). It's the husk of a grain of rice (もみ殻, momigara). It can be even the withered husk of a human who has lost touch with his emotions. We find it in our old friend Ningen Shikkaku (“A Human Failure”) by Osamu Dazai, who writes:

人間が、葉蔵という自分に対して信用の殻を固く閉じていた

the humans around me had rigorously sealed me off from the world of trust and distrust.

This is Donald Keene.

It’s beyond me why Keene feels the necessity to add gratuitous bits and pieces like the “around me” in “people around me”, or leaves out arguably important elements like 葉蔵という自分に対して (which should at least get a “me, Yozo”), or use “world” for 殻 or “rigorously” for 固く, or make a simple 信用 into “trust and distrust”? But there I go again.

More importantly, Keene and other translators don’t get the nuance. It should be

Humans had completely shut me, Yozo, out of their cocoon of trust.

And yes, before you ask: the kara meaning empty and the kara meaning shell are one and the same word. After all, a shell is empty.

But where did the da on the end of karada come from? Here also we have a couple of possibilities. Some sources say this da is the word we know as “field” (田), meaning “place”, so in this case, so karada would supposedly mean “empty field”. But this seems unlikely, because this da has always had strong connotations of rice cultivation.

Another source refers to the da as a “suffix” (接尾語). But there is no such suffix in classical Japanese. This seems apocryphal.

The most convincing theory is that this word was originally karadama, the shell for the soul, and the “ma” was elided (in the phenomenon called apocope), thus becoming karada. The tama—the soul, the spirit, the jewel—which nestles in this empty shell will be topic of our next posts.