日本文化の英語スピーチ原稿集

The word geisha is made of two characters meaning art and person, and that is the whole job: a person who has studied an art. A geisha trains for years in classical dance, the three-stringed shamisen, singing, and the much harder art of keeping a room of strangers comfortable.

In Kyoto the word is geiko, and a maiko is an apprentice, usually between fifteen and twenty, living in a house with an older woman who manages her. You hire them through the banquet house for an evening, for a group, and the entertainment is dance, music, conversation and drinking games.

I want to be direct about the misunderstanding, because it comes up every time. They are not prostitutes. In the Edo period the two trades were separate by law and by custom, and much of the confusion dates from after World War II, when the term "geisha girl" was used loosely for women who were not geisha at all.

A Japanese garden is built to compose a view rather than to display plants. A pond can stand for the sea, a group of stones for a mountain range or an island, raked gravel for flowing water, and a clipped shrub for a hill in the distance. Nothing is where it is by accident, and the apparent naturalness is the result of very exact placement.

Several types exist: the stroll garden built around a pond, where the path deliberately hides and reveals the view as you walk; the dry landscape garden of stone and gravel attached to a Zen temple; and the small tea garden, which is really a passage designed to slow you down before you enter the tea room. One device worth knowing is borrowed scenery, where a real hill or forest outside the garden is framed by the planting and treated as part of the design, so the garden appears to extend for kilometers.

A haiku is a Japanese poem of seventeen sound units in a five-seven-five pattern, but the count is only part of it. Traditionally a haiku must contain a kigo, a season word, which does a great deal of work: naming a frog, a cicada or a plum blossom places the poem in a season and carries centuries of association with it.

There is also usually a break, a point where the poem turns and two images are set against each other without explanation. That gap is where the poem happens. The form grew out of the opening verse of a longer linked-verse game, was raised to an art by Matsuo Basho in the seventeenth century, and had its modern name popularized by Masaoka Shiki in the late nineteenth.

It is still a living popular practice: newspapers run haiku columns, companies hold contests, and groups of retired people meet monthly to share what they have written.

Ukiyo-e are Japanese color woodblock prints from the Edo period, and the first thing to understand is that they were not art objects. They were cheap printed goods, sold in shops to ordinary townspeople at roughly the price of a bowl of noodles, and the subjects were what the public wanted: famous kabuki actors, celebrated courtesans, travel views, ghost stories, and later landscapes.

Nor were they the work of one artist. A publisher decided what would sell, a designer drew the image, a carver cut a separate block for each color, and a printer laid the colors down in sequence, so a single print might take a dozen impressions.

When Japan opened up in the nineteenth century, prints reached Europe, reportedly sometimes as packing material, and their flat color and bold cropping influenced Manet, Degas and Van Gogh. The irony is that Japan treated them as throwaway and Europe treated them as revolutionary.

Bonsai means tray planting, and the first thing to correct is that there is no such thing as a bonsai species. A bonsai is an ordinary pine, maple or juniper kept small by technique: the branches are pruned, the roots are cut back when it is repotted, and wire is wound around the branches to set their direction over months.

The goal is not simply small. It is to suggest an old tree standing in a landscape, so growers work on the taper of the trunk, the exposed roots and the empty space between branches. Most bonsai are outdoor trees and will die indoors, which catches out a lot of people given one as a gift.

The other thing worth knowing is the timescale. Trees are handed down through families and between growers, some are documented for several hundred years, and a serious bonsai is less something you own than something you look after for a while.

Wadaiko simply means Japanese drum, and there are two quite different things under the name. The older one is the drum in its traditional settings: marking time at a festival, calling people at a shrine or temple, punctuating the action in noh and kabuki. There the drum is part of something larger and rarely takes the lead.

The other is the ensemble performance that visitors usually picture, with a line of drummers, large drums on stands, choreographed movement and a piece that lasts several minutes. That form took shape in the twentieth century, drawing on festival drumming and shaping it for the stage, and it traveled abroad quickly, which is why many people meet Japanese drumming first in a concert hall in their own country.

Neither version is fake. It is worth knowing the difference, because a festival drum in a village and a touring ensemble are answering different questions. If you want to try it, community groups exist in many towns and welcome beginners, since the first thing taught is posture rather than rhythm.

Visiting the family grave is one of the most ordinary religious acts in Japanese life, and many people do it regardless of what they believe. Families go several times a year: at the spring and autumn equinoxes, at Obon (in August in most regions), and on the anniversary of a death.

What you actually do is practical. You bring a bucket and a ladle, pull the weeds around the plot, scrub the stone, and pour water over the top of it. Then you put fresh flowers in the holders, light incense, and put your hands together for a moment.

Many people speak to the grave, silently or out loud, and tell the family what has happened since last time: a new job, a marriage, a grandchild. Many families share a single grave with the ashes of several generations in it, so you are not visiting one person. You are visiting the household.

The first thing to know about a pagoda is that it is not a building in the ordinary sense. It descends from the Indian stupa, a mound raised over the Buddha's relics, and its purpose is to hold something sacred at its base, not to give people a place to stand.

There are no stairs for visitors and the upper stories are hollow. What makes them remarkable is that they survive. Japan has earthquakes, and wooden pagodas well over a thousand years old are still standing, including the one at Horyuji, which is among the oldest wooden buildings in the world.

Engineers argue about why. The stories are loosely stacked rather than rigidly joined, so they shift against each other and lose energy, and the heavy central pillar moves out of phase with them. When the Tokyo Skytree was designed, its engineers drew on that pillar and built a modern version of the idea into the tower.

Gassho is the gesture of putting the palms together in front of the chest, and it arrived in Japan with Buddhism from India, where it was already a greeting. In Japan it spread well past religion. You will see it before and after a meal with the words for receiving and for finishing.

You will see it at a grave, at a household altar and at a temple. You will also see a quick, casual version used to apologize for being late, to ask a favor, or to thank someone for covering a bill, sometimes with one hand raised in a chopping motion instead.

Because the situations are so different, the gesture carries no fixed message; it marks that the person is addressing something outside themselves. One practical note for visitors: at a Shinto shrine you clap twice before putting your hands together, while at a Buddhist temple you do not clap at all.

Zen is a school of Buddhism whose name traces back through Chinese chan to a Sanskrit word for meditation, and that name tells you what it emphasizes. The central practice is zazen, sitting still in a fixed posture with attention on the breath. Zen came to Japan from China in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and two branches took root: Rinzai, which gives students paradoxical questions to work on until ordinary reasoning fails, and Soto, which teaches sitting without a goal, since the sitting itself is the practice.

Because Zen temples were supported by the warrior class, the school shaped a great deal of Japanese culture: tea ceremony, dry gardens, ink painting, and the idea that everyday tasks done attentively are practice. The English word zen has drifted a long way from this, toward calmness and minimalism, and a Japanese Zen priest would not recognize most of what is sold under the name.

Daibutsu simply means great Buddha, and two of them are on almost every itinerary. The Nara one, at Todaiji, is a seated bronze about fifteen meters high, dedicated in the year 752. It was a state project on a scale that strained the country: enormous quantities of copper, and a workforce drawn from across the provinces.

The hall that houses it is one of the largest wooden buildings in the world, and the present hall is smaller than the original. The Kamakura one is about eleven meters, cast in the thirteenth century, and it sits in the open air because the building that covered it was destroyed and never rebuilt, which is why photographs of it look so different.

Both have been damaged and repaired repeatedly, so parts of what you see are later work. At Kamakura you can go inside the statue for a small fee and see the joins in the bronze from within.

Buddhism arrived in Japan in the middle of the sixth century, sent from a kingdom on the Korean peninsula, and the court argued about whether to accept a foreign god before adopting it. From there it changed repeatedly. In the eighth century it served to protect the state: enormous temples, the Great Buddha at Nara.

In the ninth, esoteric schools brought rituals and mountain training. In the thirteenth, during war and famine, came the schools that reached ordinary people: call the Buddha's name and you will be saved, or chant the title of the Lotus Sutra, or sit in meditation. For more than a thousand years it was practiced together with Shinto and only separated by law in 1868.

Under the Tokugawa every household had to register with a temple, which is how temples came to run funerals, and that is still their main role. Many Japanese people will tell you they are not religious, and in the same breath tell you which Buddhist school their family belongs to.

There is a simple trick to reading Buddhist statues, and it works almost everywhere. Look at what the figure is wearing. A nyorai has reached awakening and needs nothing, so it wears a single plain robe, has no jewelry, and has tightly curled hair with a bump on the crown of the head; the great bronze Buddhas are of this rank.

A bosatsu has postponed awakening to help others and is still shown as a prince, with a crown, necklaces and bracelets; Kannon is the one you meet most often. A myoo looks furious, with bared teeth, weapons and a wall of flame behind, and the anger is directed at the obstacles in your path rather than at you.

A ten is a guardian taken into Buddhism from older Indian religion, usually armored, and the two muscular figures at a temple gate are of this rank. After that you can start on the hand positions, which name the particular Buddha.

Japanese professional baseball has twelve teams in two leagues, and the season runs from late March to October, ending in a championship series between the two league winners. The first thing visitors notice is the names: teams carry the name of the company that owns them, not just the city, so you get a newspaper, a railway, a food company and a mobile phone carrier competing on the same league table.

The second thing is the noise. Each team has an organized cheering section with trumpets and drums, and most regular players have their own song, which the home cheering section sings while he bats, standing, for the whole at-bat, and then sits when the side changes.

Nobody sings for the away team's batters, and the away fans are seated together in their own block doing the same thing in reverse. Beer is carried through the stands by young staff with kegs on their backs. It is loud, organized, and completely unlike watching baseball anywhere else.

A sumo wrestler steps into the ring wearing exactly one piece of clothing: the mawashi, a long strip of cloth wound around the waist and groin several times and knotted at the back, with no shirt, shoes or anything else. Lower-ranked wrestlers train and compete in a plain cotton mawashi, but wrestlers in the top two divisions, sekitori, wear a much heavier silk version for official bouts instead.

There's a third, purely ceremonial version too: the kesho-mawashi, an elaborate silk apron embroidered with dragons, tigers or a hometown landscape, worn only for the pre-match ring-entering ceremony. What looks like a simple belt is central to the sport, since gripping an opponent's mawashi and forcing or throwing them by it is how many matches are actually won.

Rajio taiso is a short exercise routine that has been broadcast in Japan since 1928, and its reach is remarkable. Most Japanese people, of any age, can perform the first routine from memory, because they did it at school and again during summer holidays. The music is a piano accompaniment that functions as a national sound.

There are two routines, the first gentle enough for anyone and the second noticeably harder, and they take about three minutes each. You will see it done at school, at company morning meetings, on construction sites before work starts, and in parks at half past six in the morning, where groups of mostly elderly people gather daily.

The summer holiday version is the one people remember most fondly: children go to a local park early each morning and get a stamp on a card for attending, which is also a way of making them get up.

A kiai sounds, to an outsider, like an aggressive yell, but it's really a breathing technique with a sound attached. The shout is timed to a sharp exhale exactly as a strike, cut or throw lands, which tightens the torso and is said to add power to the technique while also using the breath more efficiently than holding it or breathing shallowly. In kendo scoring, a valid point technically requires the striker to demonstrate proper spirit and follow-through, and referees do listen for a kiai as part of judging whether a hit was clean and committed rather than accidental.

The exact sound varies by school and even by person; some arts favor a single hard syllable, others allow a longer shout, and a few traditions deliberately mix in unpredictable timing so an opponent can't read the attack from the sound alone. Newer students often feel embarrassed shouting loudly in front of others, and instructors sometimes spend real time just getting beginners to commit to a full, unselfconscious kiai before worrying about anything else in the technique.

Kata looks, at first glance, like a martial art performed against nobody, and in a sense it is: a fixed sequence of strikes, blocks, throws or cuts, memorized and repeated exactly the same way every time, often with no real opponent in front of the practitioner at all. That's the point rather than a shortcoming. Sparring tests whether a technique works under resistance, but it also lets bad habits and shortcuts creep in under pressure; kata strips the resistance away so a student can drill correct stance, timing, breathing and transitions with total precision, without an opponent's unpredictability to blame for a sloppy movement.

Different arts treat kata very differently: karate has dozens of named forms passed down through different schools, judo has kata specifically for techniques too dangerous to practice at full speed in randori, and kendo pairs students together for kata using wooden swords in a scripted attack-and-response sequence. Competitions exist purely for kata performance, judged on precision, power and presence rather than on defeating an opponent, treating the form itself as worth mastering on its own terms.

A gyoji is the referee who runs a sumo bout from inside the ring, and he looks nothing like a referee in any other sport: his robes are modeled on the formal wear of medieval samurai, and he points a fan called a gunbai at the winner the moment a bout ends. What surprises most visitors is the short sword at his waist.

One theory traces it to the age of warlords, when samurai sometimes refereed the sumo matches their lords loved to watch. By the Edo period, the sword had come to symbolize a gyoji's readiness to take full responsibility for a wrong call. No referee has ever actually been made to prove it, and today a disputed call can simply be reviewed by the ringside judges.

Judo was created in 1882 by a schoolteacher named Jigoro Kano. He took the throwing and grappling techniques of older jujutsu schools, removed the strikes and the most dangerous joint attacks, which made free practice risky, and built a system in which two people could train at full intensity without injuring each other.

That decision is why judo spread worldwide. The principle he taught is that yielding overcomes force: rather than meeting a push, you take the opponent's balance and let their own movement carry them down. But Kano was a teacher first.

He wrote that the point of judo was the development of the person, expressed in two mottos, maximum efficiency with minimum effort, and mutual welfare and benefit. Judo entered the Olympics in Tokyo in 1964, the first sport from Asia to do so, and today the majority of the world's judoka are outside Japan.

Sumo looks like a simple wrestling match, but most of what you see is not the fight. Two wrestlers try to force each other out of a straw circle or make the other touch the ground with anything but the soles of the feet, and that part is often over in five seconds. What takes the time is the ritual around it.

The wrestlers throw salt to purify the ring, stamp their feet to drive out evil spirits, and squat facing each other several times before finally starting. The roof hanging over the ring is modeled on a Shinto shrine, and the referee wears the clothing of a Shinto priest.

This is because sumo has roots in rituals offered to the gods for a good harvest, and it has never fully separated from them. Six tournaments are held each year, each lasting fifteen days. Tickets can sell out quickly, so it pays to book early, but even the cheaper upper seats give you a perfectly good view.

One of the first things visitors notice at a sumo tournament is the salt. Before a bout, each wrestler takes a handful from a container near his corner and throws it onto the ring, sometimes in a big arc. The reason usually given is purification.

In Shinto, salt is used to make a place clean, and the sumo ring is treated as a sacred space. That is why a roof in the style of a Shinto shrine hangs above it. The salt is said to be a prayer for safety, too.

Only the wrestlers in the top two divisions, called sekitori, throw salt, so it is also a sign of rank. Lower-ranked wrestlers normally go straight into their bouts. Watching how each wrestler throws it is one of the small pleasures of a day at the sumo.

A dojo is a training hall for a martial art, and the word carries more weight than the English word gym. It began as a Buddhist term for the place where one attains the way, and martial arts borrowed it, which tells you how the practice was understood.

Certain customs are near universal. You bow when you enter and when you leave, to the room itself, not to a person. The hall has an upper end, often with a small shrine or a portrait of the founder, and you do not turn your back on it carelessly or sit with your feet toward it.

Students clean the floor themselves before and after practice, and that is treated as part of the training rather than as a chore. Visitors are usually welcome to watch, but ask first, sit at the lower end, and do not photograph without permission.

Dogi is the umbrella term for a martial arts uniform, but it's really several very different outfits depending on the art. A judo dogi is heavy, thickly woven cotton reinforced at the collar and knees, built to survive being grabbed, twisted, and thrown to the floor hundreds of times.

A karate dogi is thinner and cut more loosely, since the sport is built around fast strikes rather than grappling. Kendo practitioners wear something else entirely: a simple top and a wide, pleated hakama, both usually dyed indigo or black, worn underneath body armor.

In judo and karate, the belt tied at the waist matters too, since its color is one of the most visible signs of a practitioner's rank. If you ever wonder why someone's uniform looks strangely bulky or worn through at the shoulder, it's usually years of being grabbed exactly there.

If you visit Japan, it's a good idea to carry a handkerchief. Many public restrooms, even clean ones in stations and parks, have no paper towels, and some have no hand dryer either.

So people dry their hands with their own small towel, usually a square of soft terrycloth that fits in a pocket or bag. In English, a handkerchief often means a thin cloth for your nose, but in Japan it's mainly for your hands and for wiping sweat in summer.

Many children are taught to carry one from kindergarten, and a handkerchief and a pack of tissues are a basic set in a school bag. They're also a popular small gift because they're useful and not too expensive. I always keep one in my bag, and I feel strange without it.

A tenugui is a plain rectangle of thin cotton, and it is one of those objects that does far more than it looks capable of. It is a hand towel, a face cloth in the bath, a headband for a festival, a cover for a lunch box, a wrapper for a bottle, a cloth to wipe a table, and, since the designs are often beautiful, something people hang on the wall and change with the season.

The short ends are deliberately not hemmed. A hem holds water and breeds smell, and an unhemmed edge dries fast and can be torn to size or torn into a bandage. The threads fray for the first few washes and then stop.

The traditional dyeing method soaks the color right through, so the pattern looks the same on both sides, which is how you tell a traditionally dyed one from a printed souvenir.

The question I am asked most often about kimono is whether Japanese people wear them every day. We do not. Almost nobody does. A kimono today is formal clothing, worn for weddings, funerals, the coming-of-age ceremony, graduation, tea ceremony and sometimes New Year. There are practical reasons.

A formal kimono involves many layers, a stiff sash, and a set of cords and pads underneath, and most people cannot put one on without help. Professional dressers exist, and schools teach it as a skill. It is also expensive: a good one can cost as much as a car, and they are often inherited. One rule matters more than any other.

The left side always goes over the right. The other way around is how the dead are dressed, so getting it backwards is immediately noticeable. If you want to try wearing one, rental shops in Kyoto and Asakusa will dress you for an afternoon, and Japanese people are pleased rather than offended.

One of the most common mistakes visitors make in a yukata is crossing it the wrong way. In Japan, both men and women wear a kimono with the left side over the right. Confusingly, this is called migimae, which sounds like "right in front."

The "mae" here means "earlier," so the right side goes on first, closest to the body. The reverse, hidarimae, is how the dead are dressed for a funeral, which is why people will quickly fix it for you. The custom goes back a long way.

A court order in 719 told ordinary people to wear their clothes this way, reportedly following the style of Tang China. An easy check is to see whether you can slip your right hand into the front of the collar. If you can, you're wearing it correctly.

For most people today, wearing a kimono means renting one, not owning one. Kimono rental shops, especially common in sightseeing areas like Kyoto and Asakusa, offer a full package: the kimono itself, an obi sash, undergarments, sandals, and staff who actually dress you, since tying a kimono correctly is a skill that most Japanese people never learn even at home. A simple cotton or polyester set for casual walking around town can start around three thousand yen for a few hours, while a formal silk kimono with professional hair styling can run past ten thousand yen.

This shift has changed the kimono from something tied to family occasions and ownership into something closer to a costume experience, which some see as a loss of tradition and others see as exactly what has kept the kimono visible and popular at all. Either way, it's now completely normal to see tourists in rented kimono walking past temples that predate the whole industry by centuries.

If you watch a Japanese school sports day, you will notice that many children wear a headband, usually red or white to show their team. This is a hachimaki. It is simply a strip of cloth tied around the head, but it carries a clear message: I am focused and ready.

In the past, warriors tied cloth around their heads under their helmets, and people also wore headbands during festivals and religious events. Today you see them on festival crowds carrying portable shrines, on some fishmongers and sushi chefs, and on students studying for entrance exams.

Some have words printed on them, such as "hissho," meaning "certain victory." For me, tying a hachimaki works like a switch. The moment it is on, I feel it is time to get serious.