While watching a video, I encountered this anecdote:
When the novelist Soseki Natsume (1867–1916) was an English teacher, one of his students translated the English phrase “I love you” as 我君を愛す / ware kimi o aisu. Soseki pointed out that Japanese people don’t say 愛す / aisu (to love), and that the best translation would actually be 月が綺麗ですね / tsuki ga kirei desu ne (the moon is beautiful, isn’t it?).
This anecdote has become widespread as an example of how translation challenges are not just about words, but about culture. In its most reductive form, people have taken away that "In Japanese, 'the moon is beautiful, isn't it?' means 'I love you'."
 |
| Moon after rain, Kiyomizudera Temple, Kyoto |
I first encountered this story many years ago, where I sort of accepted it as a curiosity and moved on. Upon encountering it again, I felt much more skeptical. For one, plenty of Japanese media use rather direct translations of "I love you", ranging from the more low-stakes "suki desu" to the serious declaration of "aishiteru."
Secondly, while I understand that high-context cultures exist, "the moon is beautiful, isn't it?" is quite vague. No example is given of the text that the student was trying to translate. If he's a teacher of English, then I presume that his student is Japanese and not a native English speaker, yet in this example it sounds like he's telling someone who is not a native Japanese speaker how to translate this phrase.
The phrase itself also confuses me. Am I to believe that any shared appreciation of the moon is tantamount to a declaration of love? Or are there special conditions that turn lunar love into shared love? If it's about the context, why is the context absent from this anecdote? Are there actual examples of Japanese translations of English text where "I love you" is rendered as something non-literal, and if so, what are they and what are the circumstances? In short, the whole thing sounded oddly pat and exoticizing while also lacking crucial detail on what would make such a translation work.
After googling the phrase and following Reddit links, I found that the original anecdote is a misattribution. Soseki Natsume never said such a thing.
The earliest citation found for this formulation is from a 1961 book:
さらにいえば、日本の社交の基本は「見る」ことで成立する。
若い男女の恋人同士が愛の告白をするとき、西洋人のように、
「私はあなたを愛しています（I love you）」
などとはけっしていわない。
そんなことばを口に出さなくとも、満月を仰ぎ見て、
「いいお月さんですね」
そして、二人でじっと空を見上げるだけで、意思は十分通じるのだ。
Furthermore, the foundation of Japanese social interaction is established through “looking.” When young men and women confess their love to one another, they do not, like Westerners, say things like: “I love you.” Even without putting such words into speech, they simply gaze up at the full moon and say, “What a beautiful moon.” And by quietly looking up at the sky together, their feelings are fully understood.
There is also a book from 1922 that claims that "I love you" cannot be translated into Japanese:
日本語には英語の『ラヴ』に相當する言葉が全く無い。『戀』とか『愛』とか云ふ字では感じがひどくちがう。" I love you "や" Je t'aime "に至つては、何としても之を日本語に譯すことが出來ない。
Japanese has no word that truly corresponds to the English “love.” Words like koi or ai feel quite different in nuance. As for “I love you” or “Je t’aime,” there is simply no way to translate them into Japanese.
Neither of these are by Soseki Natsume, but he does have the following:
「漱石文庫」に残された漱石のメモ書きの中に、ジョージ・メレディスというイギリスの小説家の作品を取り上げて、
"I love you,Signora Laura."―Vittoria p.113.
此 I love you ハ日本ニナキformulaナリ
と記した一節がある
In Sōseki’s notes preserved in the “Sōseki Bunko,” there is a passage where he takes up a work by the English novelist George Meredith and writes:
“I love you, Signora Laura.” — Vittoria, p.113.
“This ‘I love you’ is a formula that does not exist in Japanese.”
A hatelabo user surmises that the story that Soseki believed "I love you" could not be translated to Japanese was conflated with the story that someone translated "I love you" as "What a beautiful moon," to create the hybrid story "Soseki said that 'I love you' should be translated as 'the moon is beautiful, isn't it'."
The comments on the hatelabo post are quite revealing. Many of the users seem to think that it's quite normal to say "I love you", with one even talking about Japan's "confession culture," and some speculate that this may be a relic of a different Japanese culture. In short, the idea that 'ai' cannot be used to express "love" may have been true at one point in Japanese history and culture, but continued exposure to Western cultures has moved the meanings of those words closer, and Japanese culture itself changed to make direct declarations of love more acceptable.
これは評価すべき増田だな。 しかしこれ読んで思ったが、『"当時"の愛という単語』は love に直訳できなかったが、 現代の日本語においては愛にloveの意味がおおむね正確に取り込まれているので、 "I love you"＝私はあなたを愛しています、で問題なさそうだ。
ホンマや。隔世の感ありやね。むしろ現代の日本人には当時の日本人の感性がよくわからんてこっちゃなぁ。
True. It really feels like a world away. If anything, it means modern Japanese people don’t really understand the sensibility of Japanese people back then.
As for the significance of the moon, one person I discussed this with suggested that the moon may be significant because it was historically an image associated with lovers - two young people would meet clandestinely under the moon. This would make referencing the moon a way to make salient the fact that they're doing something a little dangerous for love. An interesting bit of speculation.
In any case, this zombie story has taken on a life of its own such that saying "the moon is beautiful, isn't it" has become reinterpreted as a covert love declaration. It seems that this story is so sticky that it memed its way into reality!