Nicola Esposito sent in the following observations and questions:<\/p>\n
What is the etymology of ukiyo \u6d6e\u4e16, the \"floating world\" known in the West mostly thanks to its depictions by artists such as Hiroshige, Hokusai and others?<\/p>\n
While perusing the website of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, I discovered that the origins of ukiyo lie in a homophone of \u6d6e\u4e16 denoting the \"transient world\" of Buddhist tradition.\u00a0 The page does not offer any other detail, but from what I gather that homophone should be ukiyo \u6182\u4e16, whose literal meaning should be closer to something like \"unhappy world\".\u00a0 Unfortunately my knowledge of Japanese is too shallow to be able to to tackle Japanese sources, and I was wondering if you could offer insight on this etymology and in particular how this substitution happened, if it indeed happened. Was it some kind of pun?<\/p>\n
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Nicola is indeed correct to connect ukiyo \u6d6e\u4e16 (\"floating world\") with an earlier ukiyo \u6182\u4e16 (\"world of sorrow\").\u00a0 But how and when did the one evolve into the other?<\/p>\n
The Wikipedia article on ukiyo-e<\/a>, or ukiyo-ye \u6d6e\u4e16\u7d75 (<\/span>\"pictures of the floating world\"), a term and a genre of painting that are fairly well known in the West, states:<\/p>\n The newer term at times was used to mean \"erotic\" or \"stylish\", among other meanings, and came to describe the hedonistic spirit of the time for the lower classes. Asai Ry\u014di<\/a> celebrated this spirit in the novel Ukiyo Monogatari<\/i> (\"Tales of the Floating World<\/i>\", c.<\/abbr>\u20091661):[15]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n \"living only for the moment, savouring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking sake, and diverting oneself just in floating, unconcerned by the prospect of imminent poverty, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the river current: this is what we call ukiyo<\/i>.\"<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n It is curious how the ukiyo<\/i> that meant \"world of worry and grief\", a Buddhist concept, is inverted to mean \"world of diversion and pleasure\".\u00a0 One can still sense the connection between the two, however, since even (or particularly) when one is immersed in pleasurable pursuits, the evanescence of the moment lends a peculiar poignancy to one's escapist epicureanism.<\/p>\n The term f\u00fash\u00ec<\/i> \u6d6e\u4e16 (lit., \"floating world\") already existed in medieval Chinese with the meaning of \"ephemeral, mundane world\", so this notion would have been available for Japanese who wanted to make a pun with the ukiyo<\/i> meaning \"world of sorrow \/ worry\".<\/p>\n The notion of a sorrowful world (\u6182\u4e16), seen in texts from the latter part of the Heian period (794-1185) on, shifted to that of a floating world (\u6d6e\u4e16) in the late 16th century. But, of course, even when one writes \u6d6e\u4e16, the older meaning of \u6182\u4e16 is still accessible through the duosemic pun \u2014 because life is short and painful, it is best to float along and enjoy it. The pair of words is often pointed to as representative of the change in worldview from the medieval to the early modern.<\/p>\n The difference between the two ukiyo<\/i> — the sorrowful world (\u6182\u4e16) and the floating world (\u6d6e\u4e16) — may be highlighted in a clever pun thought up by Nathan Hopson, who talks about two \"edo<\/i>\" periods. The first was the latter half of Heian, which he calls the \"edo<\/i>\" (\u7a62\u571f [\"impure earth \/ world\"]) period. The second is the more familiar \"Edo\" period (1603-1868), when the Tokugawa shogunate<\/a> ruled Japan from the city of Edo \u6c5f\u6238<\/a> (lit., \"bay-entrance; estuary\"), the name of what is now Tokyo.\u00a0 During that period, Edo became one of the largest cities in the world, with an urban culture centered on the idea of the ukiyo<\/i> (\"floating world<\/a><\/sup>\") under discussion here.\u00a0 For a vivid recreation of the life in the pleasure districts of Edo, see the works of Cecilia Segawa Seigle and colleagues on Yoshiwara<\/a> and related topics here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a> (the latter discussing \"The institution of the 'Great Interior,' or Ooku, [which] was the residence for the Tokugawa shoguns\u2019 wives, concubines, mothers, daughters, and their female servants for close to three hundred years\", a kind of mirror opposite of the loose life in Yoshiwara).<\/p>\n To recapitulate, ukiyo<\/i> \u6182\u304d\u4e16 is a mid- to late Heian word related to the rising sense among aristocrats and elite of living in the Latter Days of the Law (mapp\u014d \u672b\u6cd5<\/a>), a pessimistic Buddhist notion.<\/p>\n In contrast, the first half of the Edo period was particularly bright and optimistic from the viewpoint of the cities. The era was characterized by population and economic growth, urbanization, an efflorescence of creativity and culture, and lasting peace. In this context, ukiyo \u6182\u304d\u4e16 was reread as \u6d6e\u4e16, transposing the meaning and largely stripping the word of its Buddhist implications.\u00a0 The concept of the Buddhist ukiyo \u6182\u4e16 (\"lamentable, melancholy world\") pretty much disappeared after the end of the 17th century.<\/p>\n Uku \u6d6e\u304f (\"float\") retains the nuance of levity and high-spirited merriment today, as in fukareru \u6d6e\u304b\u308c\u308b<\/a>, or ukiuki \u30a6\u30ad\u30a6\u30ad<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the transformation from ukiyo<\/i> \u6182\u4e16 (\"world of sorrow\") to ukiyo<\/i> \u6d6e\u4e16 (\"world of pleasure\"), we may examine the materials assembled in Kotobank<\/a> (see here<\/a> and here<\/a> [in French] for an introduction to this marvelous resource).<\/p>\n The explanation here is that the two combinations\u00a0\u6d6e(\u304d)\u4e16 and \u6182\u304d\u4e16 began as separate Buddhist terms, \u6d6e\u4e16 originally read as fusei<\/i> or fush\u014d<\/i> and meaning the ever-changing, inconstant world while \u6182\u4e16 had more implications of the world of sadness and suffering. \u00a0Those meanings were in play by around 900 CE according to Japan Knowledge<\/a> and by the seventeenth century \u6d6e\u4e16 came to have connotations of the (ever-changing) pleasure quarters and the \u201cfloating world\u201d represented in woodblock prints.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For ukiyo<\/i> \u6182\u4e16 (\"world of grief and worry\") Ross Bender adds:<\/p>\n\n