Stoicism vs. Bushidō: When One Language Isn’t Enough

When our own cultures constrain us we reach out to other languages — often in surprising ways.

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…