Can Meaning Survive Translation? A Japanese Philosopher Born in 1991 on the Heat That Travels

Because I write in Japanese, I can never possess certainty regarding how readers in the English-speaking world will interpret my words. Yet I write in full awareness that, once translated, a vast portion of authorial intent inevitably becomes impossible to convey.

Taking that weight upon myself, there is one thing of which I remain certain: whether netsu (熱)—heat—has been poured into the transmission of the information.

The crux of twenty-first-century global communication, then, does not lie in refining the technical fidelity of machine translation to the highest decimal. It hinges on the netsu of those who speak—on the philosophical maturity of the thinkers themselves.

Anyone who reads Japanese immediately recognizes that Kawabata's sentence possesses no grammatical subject whatsoever. When translated into English, however, an explicit subject ("the train") must be installed, and with it, a copula necessarily arises. In that instant, the unique literary space Kawabata crafted dissolves, making it far harder to access that universal image in the way Murakami allows.

The unspoken, evocative sensation I feel when reading Murakami in Japanese is, I suspect, precisely what readers feel when experiencing him in whatever language he is rendered.

Whether words carry netsu is tied directly to how one thinks and lives in everyday life.

One of the main reasons Japanese is considered difficult is that it belongs to an entirely different linguistic lineage.

In other words, belonging to a separate lineage from Indo-European is why native speakers of English or French find Japanese difficult to learn: its linguistic architecture is fundamentally different.

The philosopher Tetsuji Yamamoto illuminated this as the contrast between the "subject-based language" of English and the "predicate-based language" of Japanese. When the underlying mode of language differs so radically, everything—thought, agency, action itself—diverges with it. Here has always stood the true wall to mutual understanding.

What matters is that he first translated "philosophy" as "kitetsugaku" (希哲学), with "kitetsu" taken as "philo" (希) and "sophy" (哲), and later put forward "tetsugaku" (哲学). We need to note that in the course of this translation the concept of "philo," from the Greek, disappeared.

Through the important process of "translation," he showed, as no one else has so well, that translation is not merely a means of understanding another country but carries a power of destruction great enough to overturn existing concepts.

He returned in 1865, and what he brought back from the West was philosophy.

Fukuzawa confessed that it was extremely hard to render liberty into Japanese, and said that however he thought, no word in Japanese or Chinese expressed the meaning of the original. That is because, while studying abroad, he sensed that liberty was a concept created bound by place.

In Japanese, freedom is written jiyu (自由). The characters mean "to arise from oneself," to live by one's own heart and truth as one's ground.

The listener, in turn, is tasked with the discipline not of reading mere translated surface data, but of seizing upon the netsu coiled within it.

Only when armed with this mutual awareness—and willing to cross physical distances in the flesh to bridge the residual semantic gap—does genuine dialogue for a new era become possible.