Lightning, The Wife of the Rice Plant

Posted on 16. Apr, 2009 @ 11:32 pm by in Culture, Language Views: 962


In Japanese kaminari 雷 is “thunder”, and inazuma 稲妻 is “lightning”. For a long while I think I was referring to both of them as kaminari… Anyway, I recently realized that inazuma is in fact the correct way to refer to lightning.

Then, like any good language geek, I checked it out in my dictionary.

The cool thing about kanji is that they usually make sense. I tell people, “It’s hard at first, but once you know hundreds of them they become very helpful, because you can guess at the meaning of words even if you have never seen them before.” Then they usually nod while thinking I’m crazy. Hundreds huh. I make an aside that it’s similar to knowing Latin roots for Romance languages (though I know nothing about this). I realize I’m digging a deeper hole.

For example, just glancing at the front page of Nikkei now, I see 売却. Not a word I use everyday, but the first character means “sell”, and the second means something like, to dispose of, to get rid of, to dump… It’s the same character that appears in 却下 which means “to reject”. So hrm… put the two together, maybe its like, “sell and get rid of” or something? “sell off” maybe? In the business sense?

Why yes indeed. That’s exactly what it means. See? Kanji are nice.

So, when I saw that the characters for inazuma, “lightning”, were 稲妻, I broke my brain.

The character 稲 means “rice plant”. And the character 妻 means “wife”.

So “wife of the rice plant” means lightning.

Oh I see. Moving on now – No, hold on a second. That makes no sense at all. There has to be a reason for this. And there is!

Follow me down the kanji and Japanese culture rabbit hole…

First of all, back in the day, the kanji 夫 otto, which means “husband”, used to be read tsuma as well.

It turns out that in ancient times there seemed to always be a lot of lightning during the period when the rice plants were ready to be harvested. Therefore they believed that the flashes of lightning are what made the rice plants mature. So, they called the lightning inazuma meaning, 稲の夫, “FATHER OF THE RICE”.

Now the characters 夫 otto and 妻 tsuma have come to be pronounced differently, so the 妻 character is used instead.

A lot of other lightning related words use the “rice plant” 稲 character as well. For example…

稲光 inabikari is “a flash of lightning.

稲鬼 inadama is the god that is believed to live in the rice fields.

稲交 inatsurubi is apparently another word for inazuma. Check that if you can and let me know. This is Greek to me.

I got most of this explanation from gogen-allguide.com.

I also used gogen-allguide.com to solve the mystery of 笑い上戸 a while ago. Useful site!

If you read all this, I bet you’ll never forget get the kanji for “lightning” again!

- Harvey

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  • http://www.rockinginhakata.com Deas

    Great post, Harvey! I love this kind of thing despite really hating kanji. (It’s natural since I’m attempting to learn another 903 from the Kanzen Master book for the JLPT1. Hate, hate, hate.) Ha ha.

  • http://mixi.jp/show_friend.pl?id=325306 hilo

    あぁ･･・　このためだったのね

  • Bobby

    いなつるび appears to actually be 稲交. My dictionary merely says this about it:

    いなびかり。稲妻。「和名抄」

    I presume that means it was found in the Wamyou Ruijusyou (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wamy%C5%8D_Ruijush%C5%8D)

  • http://www.japannewbie.com harvey

    Hey Thanks Bobby, that would make more sense for inatsurubi! I’m going to edit the post to reflect. Tried a strike through, but it’s to tell :-) Looks like another stroke in the character!

  • http://www.theothereast.net Shichi

    You know what’s Greek to me? Greek.

  • http://www.rockinginhakata.com Deas

    Shichi – I’m pretty sure Greek is Greek to everyone else, too. Greek people included. Cause…well, it is. :-P

  • http://www.jamaipanese.com Jamaipanese

    thank you for this very interesting kanji lesson

  • http://michaeldowney.net Mike

    Great lesson! I really enjoyed learning about the meaning for 稲妻 ^^ My general impression is that Japanese people use the word 雷 to refer to both thunder and lightning and any rumbling storm. I feel as though 稲妻 is used when we want to specify the jagged lightning part of storms.

  • Luke

    Very cool Harvey. Made me think back to my days in 庄内 rice country- We did get a lot of 雷 around harvest time. 懐かしい昔を思い出させる。

  • Chaerii

    ^^ Wow! Great post, especially for someone like me that is just starting to learn japanese all together!

  • http://www.somethingsomeplace.com Black Travel

    Excellent post! If my Japanese instructor from back in the day could relate like this, maybe I wouldn’t be speaking Spanish now. (smile)

  • Joe

    Anyone have a similar Japanese expression for “this is Greek to me?”

    Somehow, “私にとってこれはグリス後だ。” doesn’t quite cut it.

  • Bobby

    That would be ギリシア語.

    My dictionary gives as a Japanese equivalent: それはわたしには全くちんぷんかんぷんだ。

  • http://i-cjw.com/ Chris (i-cjw.com)

    Fascinating post – I did not know this! But you know what’s Greek to the Greeks? Arabic:

    http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/362-greek-to-me-mapping-mutual-incomprehension/

    As Bobby pointed out, the Japanese is ちんぷんかんぷん (chinpun-kanpun) – which apparently comes, rather ironically, from the Chinese 聴不看不 (tenpu-kanpu), meaning “I can’t comprehend it by sight nor sound”.

  • http://www.blogspot.blastitwonner.com michael

    In case anyone’s interested, the kanji for
    ちんぷんかんぷん (gobbledygook) is 珍糞漢糞 (or, more politely, 珍紛漢紛), which is literally rare/strange+shit, Chinese+shit.

    Presumably, the sound mimics how Chinese sounded to the Japanese, while making a joke with the actual meaning. So if the origin is 聴不看不, perhaps the Japanese changed it for humorous purposes.

  • bx

    The word 交 means to have an exchange or a relationship.

    eg. 外交 which refers to diplomacy. The kanji literally means to have an exchange with the outside.

    eg. 社交 which refers to socialization or social life. The kanji literally means to have an exchange with the society.

    You mentioned that 稲妻 refers to lightning because in the old days, people believe that lightning helped the rice plants to mature and thus called it “the father of rice plants”.

    Thus I think it’s possible that people also used 稲交 to refer to lightning because the kanji would mean “to have an exchange or relationship with the rice plants”.

  • bx

    I did further research and found a chinese website that explained that people also referred to lightning as 稲交 because they thought that the lightning helped the rice plants mature by having sexual relations with the rice plants and making them pregnant, in a sense ripening the plants.

    The website is in chinese: http://jp.hjenglish.com/page/28903/

    The character 交 also means having a sexual exchange or sexual relations eg. 性交.

  • http://www.japanesewords.net Japanese Words

    Great lesson. Kanji seem difficult at first, but they actually have a lot of reasoning, and once you understand that getting the meaning isn’t too difficult.

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