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A fun read. The "Commuting Five Directions Operation" (通勤五方面作戦, tsukin-gohomen-sakusen). That last character "sen" means battle. That word means more like "war

by xrd 5y ago

A fun read. The "Commuting Five Directions Operation" (通勤五方面作戦, tsukin-gohomen-sakusen). That last character "sen" means battle. That word means more like "wartime/military operation" which reflects the urgency.

ojii 5y ago
while 戦 does indeed mean "war/battle", 作戦 means "tactics/strategy" which can be used in a military context but doesn't have to be. Japanese has a lot of compound words, so looking at just a single character can be a bit misleading.
- hsn915 5y ago
  Just like "Crusade" in modern usage has little (if at all) to do with physically fighting a religious war.
  - rob74 5y ago
    Actually, when you say that someone is on a crusade, you usually do mean that he is involved in some kind of holy war (be it for an actual religious topic, e.g. against abortion, or for something that can be considered a religion, such as an extreme adept of a programming language - see also "evangelist"). So it's not about physically fighting, but still "fighting for some strongly-held belief" in a more general sense. ...maybe you mean "cruise"?
    - hsn915 5y ago
      The GP comment was highlighting that 作戦 includes the character for "war". Now, in the case of "crusades", the word has very negative connotation in Arab/Muslims countries. So, when George Bush said the war on terror was a "crusade", the vast majority of political commentators in the Arab world took this literally as religious war between the Christian and Islamic civilizations.
    - justsomehnguy 5y ago
      Actually, when someone means the religious crusade when this is not implicitly understood from the context it is usually spelled as 'religious crusade'.
numpad0 5y ago
It’s more or less motivational use in same sense as how “campaign”, “battle” or “war” is used in civilian use cases, but “五方面作戦” indeed sound militaristic. I’d use the word “front” in place of “direction” had I not known the context. On top of the challenges they faced, I guess JNR had enough veterans with memories from previous careers and it reflected that.
mlindner 5y ago
作戦 is a single word and can't be broken down further. I'll use this moment to remind people that Japanese is not Chinese and bears little relation to it despite borrowing parts of it's writing system and some vocabulary. (China also reverse-borrowed Japanese invented vocabulary.)
- karatinversion 5y ago
  It's important not to take this kind of thinking too far. 作戦 can't be analyzed into make-war, but it is quite clearly because of semantic drift of the compound. Very much like the English word "strategy" derives by hops from the greek "strategos", a certain military leadership position, but can be used to refer to non-military matters.
- xrd 5y ago
  Without question this "word" can be broken down further. Each of those characters can be broken down further into their radicals. And, those radicals tell you a lot about the meaning. When I lived in Japan I could identify anything botanical by the tree radical even if I didn't know the character. Every single native Japanese speaker will look at that character and see that "word" contains the word for war (it's a beautiful and striking character). Every single word in every single language has a long history with dozens of influences. Japanese is not Chinese. But, the influences of that language are all over Japanese. Almost every character has a Japanese and at least one or more Chinese pronunciations. It is absolutely not correct to say "it is a single word and cannot be broken down any further." Source: I'm not a native speaker, but I've got a degree in Japanese, and lived there for two years, and have been studying it for thirty years.
  - mlindner 5y ago
    > Each of those characters can be broken down further into their radicals. And, those radicals tell you a lot about the meaning. When I lived in Japan I could identify anything botanical by the tree radical even if I didn't know the character. This is only partially true and only for some words. In some words characters were chosen almost at random to match a loan word's sound from some other language than chinese (before katakana began to be used extensively). In other words the meaning has heavily drifted from the originally chosen characters and the current meaning bears little resemblence to it's original meaning. In other cases yes you can determine the origin of the word but it's not helpful to determine it's modern uses (for example the over use of the 女 (woman) radical in many words that were thought to be "related to women" with a sexist meaning). Also in some words the kanji were dropped and replaced with other kanji of a similar sound so as to simplify the number of kanji down to the current "2000" core kanji used in all official documents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform

by xrd 5y ago

ojii 5y ago

while 戦 does indeed mean "war/battle", 作戦 means "tactics/strategy" which can be used in a military context but doesn't have to be. Japanese has a lot of compound words, so looking at just a single character can be a bit misleading.

hsn915 5y ago
Just like "Crusade" in modern usage has little (if at all) to do with physically fighting a religious war.
- rob74 5y ago
  Actually, when you say that someone is on a crusade, you usually do mean that he is involved in some kind of holy war (be it for an actual religious topic, e.g. against abortion, or for something that can be considered a religion, such as an extreme adept of a programming language - see also "evangelist"). So it's not about physically fighting, but still "fighting for some strongly-held belief" in a more general sense. ...maybe you mean "cruise"?
  - hsn915 5y ago
    The GP comment was highlighting that 作戦 includes the character for "war". Now, in the case of "crusades", the word has very negative connotation in Arab/Muslims countries. So, when George Bush said the war on terror was a "crusade", the vast majority of political commentators in the Arab world took this literally as religious war between the Christian and Islamic civilizations.
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
    Actually, when someone means the religious crusade when this is not implicitly understood from the context it is usually spelled as 'religious crusade'.

numpad0 5y ago

It’s more or less motivational use in same sense as how “campaign”, “battle” or “war” is used in civilian use cases, but “五方面作戦” indeed sound militaristic. I’d use the word “front” in place of “direction” had I not known the context. On top of the challenges they faced, I guess JNR had enough veterans with memories from previous careers and it reflected that.

mlindner 5y ago

作戦 is a single word and can't be broken down further. I'll use this moment to remind people that Japanese is not Chinese and bears little relation to it despite borrowing parts of it's writing system and some vocabulary. (China also reverse-borrowed Japanese invented vocabulary.)

karatinversion 5y ago
It's important not to take this kind of thinking too far. 作戦 can't be analyzed into make-war, but it is quite clearly because of semantic drift of the compound. Very much like the English word "strategy" derives by hops from the greek "strategos", a certain military leadership position, but can be used to refer to non-military matters.
xrd 5y ago
Without question this "word" can be broken down further. Each of those characters can be broken down further into their radicals. And, those radicals tell you a lot about the meaning. When I lived in Japan I could identify anything botanical by the tree radical even if I didn't know the character. Every single native Japanese speaker will look at that character and see that "word" contains the word for war (it's a beautiful and striking character). Every single word in every single language has a long history with dozens of influences. Japanese is not Chinese. But, the influences of that language are all over Japanese. Almost every character has a Japanese and at least one or more Chinese pronunciations. It is absolutely not correct to say "it is a single word and cannot be broken down any further." Source: I'm not a native speaker, but I've got a degree in Japanese, and lived there for two years, and have been studying it for thirty years.
- mlindner 5y ago
  > Each of those characters can be broken down further into their radicals. And, those radicals tell you a lot about the meaning. When I lived in Japan I could identify anything botanical by the tree radical even if I didn't know the character. This is only partially true and only for some words. In some words characters were chosen almost at random to match a loan word's sound from some other language than chinese (before katakana began to be used extensively). In other words the meaning has heavily drifted from the originally chosen characters and the current meaning bears little resemblence to it's original meaning. In other cases yes you can determine the origin of the word but it's not helpful to determine it's modern uses (for example the over use of the 女 (woman) radical in many words that were thought to be "related to women" with a sexist meaning). Also in some words the kanji were dropped and replaced with other kanji of a similar sound so as to simplify the number of kanji down to the current "2000" core kanji used in all official documents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform