「全然大丈夫」は誤用じゃない？ 芥川『羅生門』にもある“全然＋肯定”、ダメ出しは戦後生まれ

Many Japanese students learn one rule at school. The word "zenzen" must come with a negative, like "not at all" in English. But this rule is quite new. About 100 years ago, writers used "zenzen" with positive words, too.

Akutagawa used it this way in a famous story from 1915. A newspaper in 1938 wrote "zenzen ... sansei," which means "totally agree with the idea." People started to call this wrong only after World War II.

In Japanese classrooms, students are often told that the adverb "zenzen" has to be followed by a negative, just as "at all" is used in negative sentences in English. The linguist Naoya Niino checked old newspapers, magazines and academic journals to see whether that had always been true. He found that from the Meiji era to the early Showa era, "zenzen" usually meant "completely," and writers used it freely in positive sentences.

A 1938 newspaper article, for example, said "zenzen sono shushi ni sansei," or "I totally agree with the idea." Even Akutagawa used it without a negative in his 1915 story "Rashomon." The belief that this use is wrong can only be traced back to the early 1950s, and it spread quickly after that.

When a Japanese speaker says "zenzen daijobu" ("totally fine"), someone nearby may object that "zenzen" belongs only in negative sentences. The linguist Naoya Niino decided to test that claim against the historical record. Working through newspapers, magazines and specialist journals from the Meiji era onward, he found that "zenzen" meant "completely" and combined freely with positive words until well into the Showa era.

Journals on Japanese language and education published between 1935 and 1944 contained a fair number of such examples, and none of them called the usage a mistake. One discovery is almost comic. Between 1965 and 1974, two respected scholars wrote that the positive use had not existed in earlier times, yet one of them had used it himself in an article written before 1945. According to Niino, the rule that "zenzen" needs a negative first shows up in the early 1950s.

Researchers do disagree about today's usage. Another linguist argues that "zenzen oishii" is a plain intensifier and "zenzen daijobu" brushes aside a listener's worry, so both differ from the old sense of "completely." In English terms, the prewar word behaved like "totally," and the postwar rule treated it like "at all."