Stoicism vs. Bushido: When One Language Isn’t Enough
(Originally published on Medium on July 18, 2020)
I was recently having a conversation with one of my Japanese friends about philosophy, and was surprised to learn that the English adjective “stoic” (ストイック, sutoikku) is now common parlance in Japan — not only in reference to the Greco-Roman school of philosophy (known in Japanese as sutoa-ha (ストア派) or “Stoa school”) but also as a word to describe calm, serene determination in the face of great hardship.
It’s not the presence of an English loan word like this in Japanese that surprised me. The Japanese language is, of course, teeming with Japanized English words, ranging from the obvious (ラジオ or rajio for “radio”) to the far less obvious (トラブルシューティング or toraburushūtingu for “troubleshooting”). As I’ve written about elsewhere, the Japanese language has taken on so much English language terminology since 1945 (prior to which imported concepts or objects were accorded fully Japanese nomenclature, like yakyū (野球) for baseball or jitensha (自転車) for bicycle) as to make pre-1945 writings quite challenging for modern-day Japanese outside academic circles.
What surprised me about the word sutoikku, however, was that if there was ever a culture that didn’t need an imported word for the concept of stoicism, it would have to be Japan. This is the country that invented bushidō — the way of the samurai — and the bazillion-hour workweek. This is a country that had to invent a term for “death from overwork” (過労死, karōshi) — an all-too-frequent occurrence in this country’s high-pressure work culture. This, too, is the country where not that long ago military commanders would commit seppuku (suicide by disembowelment) rather than surrender, and were expected to do so with, well, stoic calm.
For the Japanese to find themselves wanting for a term to describe this kind of resilience in the face of hardship seems akin to the Spanish feeling the need to import a term for exaggerated masculinity or the Germans needing a new word for precision in engineering. Utterly absurd.
Not surprisingly, the Japanese language is replete with words that hearken to stoic values. Among the first words any foreign worker in Japan learns are ganbaru (頑張る) and gaman (我慢). The first a verb that literally means “stand firm” but is typically in situations where in English one would say either “good luck” or “do your best”, although neither of these English phrases come close to capturing the warrior ethos behind ganbaru. The second term, gaman, is a noun that refers to calm endurance of hardship and suffering — a quality that many in Japan would consider quintessentially Japanese. When combined with the adjective tsuyoi (強い) it becomes gamanzuyoi (我慢強い) — literally “strong in the face of suffering and adversity”. In other words, stoic and then some.
So why, then, would anybody in Japan bother with an English loanword like sutoikku when the equivalent term in Japanese strikes me as even stronger in its implied stoicism?
My theory is that it’s all about context — and indicative of a certain weariness and resentfulness on the part of the Japanese people to having terms like gaman and ganbaru shoved down their throats by parents, educators, bosses, and other figures of authority. While my evidence of this is purely anecdotal, I suspect that the term “stoic” as it is employed in the west implies a more individually driven toughness and resilience, whereas gaman implies, to most Japanese ears at least, the sort of resolve and endurance driven not from within but by social pressure and the sort of hive-like conformity that Japanese educational and corporate culture has always tended to foster.
Baseball and Stoicism: The Uncanny Allure of Ichiro
The most frequently cited exemplar of a “sutoikku” individual I’ve heard mentioned by Japanese is baseball superstar Ichiro Suzuki. Aside from being arguably the greatest ballplayer of his generation on either side of the Pacific, Ichiro was best known for his indomitable work ethic, which began as a child, and continued throughout his astonishingly long 28-season career, which began with the NPB Pacific League’s Orix Blue Wave at age 18 in 1992 and ended at the ripe old age of 45 in 2019 with the Seattle Mariners — his team for no fewer than 14 MLB seasons.
Of all major global team sports, few if any have produced icons of stoicism like baseball has. Civil rights pioneer Jackie Robinson defined stoicism like few professional athletes ever have, enduring unrelenting abuse from “fans” and opposing players alike in stone-faced silence as he broke the colour barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947. Lou Gehrig embodied the term a generation previous until the disease that would be named after him took him out of the game forever, as more recently have the likes of Derek Jeter and, of course, the indefatigable (currently free agent) relief pitcher Fernando Rodney, who, following Ichiro’s retirement, became the oldest active MLB player at age 43.
To most American baseball fans, Ichiro probably seemed like the quintessential Japanese — humble, mild-mannered, studious, and hardworking to a fault. However, to his Japanese fans, Ichiro was always an anomaly, a not-so-typical Japanese star whose quirky nature arguably contributed as much to his enduring popularity as his athletic abilities. His first-name-only moniker “Ichiro” (which he wore on his uniform in both Japan and the USA) immediately set him apart from mainstream Japanese society, where family names are king. His diminutive stature and unorthodox batting style made him an oddity early in his career, and his perpetually studious nature as a batter set him apart from the rank-and-file Nippon Professional Baseball crowd and quickly made him a household name.
Upon making the jump across the Pacific to the MLB in 2001, Ichiro quickly became a beloved figure in his new home in Seattle, a connectivity with fans that persisted in his later stints with the New York Yankees and the Miami Marlins. Much of this was, of course, due to his extraordinary feats year after year on the baseball field, but there was certainly more to it than this. His command of the English language (and to a certain extent Spanish), which grew steadily over the course of his Major League career, further exemplified his hardworking nature and endeared him to both fans and teammates. His longstanding friendship with the late Negro League star Buck O’Neil and his odd affinity with the rapper Snoop Dogg — and his occasional use of English profanity — further set him apart from his fellow ex-pat Japanese ballplayers in the United States.
In other words, Ichiro, while clearly an exemplar of “stoicism”, is probably not best described as gamanzuyoi in the classic Japanese sense. While it is hard to imagine a harder working athlete than Ichiro, he was clearly not a rule-follower to a fault. While his early childhood baseball training was typical of many Japanese boys, Ichiro himself has spoken publicly about his father’s treatment of him in those early years, which he bluntly described as “bordering on hazing”. As many have observed, the “stoic” work ethic exemplified by so many Japanese institutions comes at great cost, ranging from squandered creative capacity to catastrophic mental health problems, in turn contributing to Japan’s alarmingly high suicide rate. Ichiro, by contrast, has never been afraid to speak out, and in doing so demonstrated a level of courage that Seneca or Marcus Aurelius would no doubt have applauded.
Language is highly contextual, and in a country like Japan — a place whose culture has long been influenced by geographical, cultural, and at times political isolation — terms like ganbaru and gamanzuyoi invariably gain a level of meaning that is inextricably braided to institutions and social grammar that is uniquely Japanese, thereby limiting their applicability to people and circumstances that defy cultural norms. By becoming a mono-named American sports hero who was famously not above trash-talking his fellow ballplayers, Ichiro simply outgrew the cultural underpinnings of the gaman ethos, thereby requiring a different adjective to describe the man’s legendary work ethic. Sutoikku was therefore the only logical choice.
These sorts of linguistic limitations go both ways, of course. Since returning to Canada after many years in Japan, I still find myself saying ganbaru rather than “good luck” because, well, it’s a better expression when you don’t simply want to wish somebody “luck” but rather help instill them with the pluck and, indeed, stoic determination needed to succeed. I suppose the equivalent expression in Canadian English would be “Keep your stick on the ice,” but as a hockey expression this too has its limits. I myself still like “ganbatte kudasai” as an energizing call to action and hard work.
The term gaman is a slightly different story. A product of Zen Buddhism, gaman is variously translated as “perseverance”, “patience”, or “tolerance” and is generally used to refer to strength and calm in the face of unpleasantness and adversity — much like the English and their famous “stiff upper lip” ethos. The virtue of gaman was frequently cited in reference to the awe-inspiring resilience (and good behaviour) that the people of northeastern Japan demonstrated in the aftermath of the horrific 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. In this sense, it’s more or less a cognate for “stoicism”.
Where gaman diverges from western stoicism, however, is in its implied conformism and deference to authority. The related term yase-gaman (痩せ我慢), which translates to something like “feigned stoicism”, refers to when a person endures something not out of a deep, internal drive but out of a sense of external duty or peer pressure. While on its own gaman essentially means the same thing as stoicism, the term has, for socio-cultural reasons, gained a context that hearkens to the dark side of Japanese society’s famed good behaviour, namely a lingering authoritarianism and pressure to conform — the vein in which we find karoshi and other toxic consequences of Japan’s traditionally hidebound culture of discipline and rule-following.
It’s worth noting, too, that other cultures similarly underpinned by Confucianism appear to have close cognates with gaman in their languages, including the Chinese jianren (堅忍), the Korean cham-a (참아), and the Vietnamese kiên cường. It’s definitely an East Asian thing — for better and for worse.
It has always been my sense that many Japanese, especially the youth, resent being hectored about gaman spirit by their older compatriots. As a former high school teacher in Japan, I have sat through many interminable school assemblies in which principals and other authority figured droned on about gaman spirit while the students were rolling their eyes. It is therefore unsurprising that younger Japanese especially would cleave to a word like “sutoikku” as a fresh, more individualistic alternative to what is at its core an admirable notion — albeit a culturally loaded one.
Bushido, Sisu, and Stoicism Gone Global
It should be said, though, that this relationship goes both ways. Whereas the Japanese found their language wanting for a satisfying cognate for “stoic”, there really is no English equivalent to the term bushidō (武士道). A term that literally translates to “the way of the warrior”, the only European term that comes close is “chivalry” but even this feels feeble and paltry next to the Spartan virtues of bushidō. While the word chivalry may once have embodied bona-fide notions of knightly conduct, nowadays it’s more or less synonymous with men holding doors open for women.
Bushidō, by contrast, is a philosophical system on par with stoicism. While it existed for centuries as an unwritten (and unspoken) code, it was formalized during the Edo (Tokugawa) period and extrapolated most famously by the great author, educator, and “explainer” of Japanese culture to the western world, Nitobe Inazō. According to Nitobe, bushidō centred on the following eight pillars:
Righteousness (義, gi)
Heroic courage (勇, yū)
Benevolence (仁, jin)
Respect (礼, rei)
Honesty (誠, makoto)
Honour (名誉, meiyo)
Duty and loyalty (忠義, chūgi)
Self-control (自制, jisei)
With its mixture of Buddhist and Confucianist values distilled through Japan’s unique history and Galapagan isolation, bushidō is a phenomenon unto itself, and a term that is truly untranslatable into English — or any other western language for that matter. Much like stoicism in Japan, bushidō merits its own presence within English vocabulary.
The subtle but important distinctions between a word like “stoic” and a word like “gaman” (or bushidō for that matter) demonstrates, if nothing else, that no one language is ever sufficient to express the fullness of human experience, and that certain languages have better and worse ways of describing certain experiences or states of being.
The Japanese language is famously replete with words that are virtually untranslatable, some of which now do fairly heavy lifting in English and elsewhere. Consider the word umami (うま味), which a generation ago was nearly unknown outside Japan but is now common parlance in English to describe “brothy” or “meaty” flavours rich in glutamate. Until very recently the word “savoury” would have been used in its place, but this was never quite right. In a similar vein, the English language lacked a good, concise term for “continuous improvement” until the term kaizen (改善) became a staple in North American corporate speak.
In Japan, the situation regarding loan words (especially from English) is somewhat different. While I’ve never been a fan of the onslaught of katakana words like sutoikku that has swamped the postwar Japanese language, I understand the impetus behind them. Japan has always been a very isolated country — geographically, linguistically, socially, and politically — and for this reason the Japanese language itself has had a tendency to be ossified and ill-equipped to expand to the needs of a fast-evolving world. By contrast, English has long been a flexible language that coughs up new and useful expressions all the time, and for the Japanese it has become far easier to simply adopt English vocabulary in a whole-cloth fashion.
Other languages take the opposite approach, and that favoured in pre-1945 Japan, by creating “indigenous” words for new and foreign concepts. Consider the Icelandic language, a living fossil of a tongue that would be more or less comprehensible to an ancient Viking transported into the 21st century. The Icelandic people remain fiercely protective of their unadulterated ancient language, a fact reflected in their staunch rejection of loan words from English or any other language. Compare the Icelandic word for radio (útvarp) with the Norwegian radio, or university (háskóla) versus the Norwegian universitet. The same is true of Irish Gaelic, which also favours indigenous words for things like computer (ríomhaire) and Internet (idirlíon).
Returning to the word “stoic”, some languages prefer to translate even this. Interestingly, the Turkish language employs the term zenon’un (so named after Zeno of Citium, the founder of Greek stoicism) to describe the phenomenon. The Arabic term is rawaqi (رواقي) for the adjective and rawaqi mudhhab (رواقي مذهب) for the school of thought, a term that comes from a literal translation of the Greek word stoa, which also translates as “porch” or “portico”.
While these are essentially translations of the Greek word (by cultures with considerable proximity to and shared history with the Hellenistic world), other languages have words that, like gaman, mean essentially the same thing but within a specific cultural context. The Finns have a long-cherished term that closely resembles stoicism, sisu, which literally means “go” (as in “get up and go”) but is more usually translated to “grit”, synonymous with calm determination amid hardship, and is considered by many Finns as integral to their country’s national character. This term, however, like gaman, is more or less culture-specific (synonymous with Finland’s harsh climate and hardy, outdoorsy spirit) and perhaps equally less suitable for export than the term “stoic” (or stoalainen in Finnish).
Sisu, like bushidō, might still be a good word to borrow, especially for us Canadians who similarly pride ourselves on our national grit in the face of subarctic weather and the great outdoors (much as the Danish word hygge for “coziness” has taken on a life of its own outside Denmark). The world we live in is now an open book as far as linguistic borrowing is concerned. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, Canada’s indigenous languages have terms and phrases with no equivalent in English, such as the Cree words wahkohtowin (“interconnectedness” but with a strong spiritual underpinning) and miyo-wicihitowin (“looking after one another”), which embody cultural understandings that we would all be better off absorbing. Oftentimes our learning grows beyond the parameters of our own languages, meaning we need to look beyond.
As for stoicism and all its many local permutations, 2020 has been a trying year for us all — one in which our collective patience and, indeed, stoicism has been put to the test. Amid pandemics and institutionalized racism run amok, we need all the stoicism, sisu, gaman, and bushidō spirit we can muster, together with way more miyo-wihicitowin and hopefully some hygge when all is said and done. In this sense, we need more cultural appropriation, not less. Our world is desperately in need of healing, and that requires that we all put our linguistic shoulders to the wheel and apply the requisite stoic resolve.
