In the previous article, we saw how the meaning of itoshi moved over a thousand years. The word of this article, haikara, is far more recent. Yet the way its meaning moved is strikingly similar. In his 1937 lecture “Kokugo to minzokugaku,” Orikuchi Shinobu tells this story as a word that people of his own generation remembered.
Today’s haikara
Today haikara is used in a favorable sense — stylish, modern, chic — as in “a haikara café.”
Originally an insult
But in Orikuchi’s telling, when the word was born it meant something quite different.
According to Orikuchi, the word haikara started with people returned from abroad. The names Orikuchi gives are Takekoshi Sansa and Mochizuki Kotarō. After coming back from overseas, these men wore high collars and gave speeches in shrill voices. Newspapermen disliked it. “What an affected fellow,” they said.
So the newspapermen called them “haikara,” meaning “high collar” (hai, “high,” + kara, “collar”). That is, haikara was originally a word mocking “the high collar.”
Orikuchi adds that, at this time, in the papers, the written form “灰の殻” (“husk of ash”) was given to haikara. Ash husk conjures something worthless, like ash residue — a thoroughly contemptuous ad-hoc spelling, Orikuchi says.
Orikuchi himself, though, doesn’t assert which newspaper first gave this spelling. He names the Nihon Shinbun but rephrases: “perhaps it wasn’t that they coined the word, but that they gave the spelling.”
An insult turns into praise
So how did the word become praise? Orikuchi explains like this.
- At first it had a bad sense: “insufferable,” “affected,” “makes your skin crawl.”
- But the word gradually came to carry good content.
- And the original bad sense faded away bit by bit.
Orikuchi is describing the fact that bad content was gradually replaced by good. He doesn’t dig into why. A word that began as an insult turning into praise — in a direction opposite to itoshi, but with a similar mechanism.
What Orikuchi wanted to say with this story
Orikuchi didn’t bring up this story merely to tell an interesting word origin. People who actually lived through the era a word was in use have a clear feel for it. Once the era passes, that feel can’t be regained. To make that point, Orikuchi used as his example the haikara that his own generation remembered.
Where the in-between feel of itoshi, a thousand years old, has been lost, the people of Orikuchi’s generation still remembered the feel of haikara mid-change. For Orikuchi, change in a word’s meaning was not a tale of the distant past but something that happens in front of your eyes within your own lifetime.
Summary
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| Today’s meaning | Praise: new and stylish |
| Origin (Orikuchi’s telling) | An insult coined by newspapermen mocking the high collars of men back from abroad; the contemptuous spelling “ash husk” was also applied |
| Change | The insulting sense gradually vanished; it took on good content |
| Orikuchi’s point | The feel of a word is known only to those who lived in its era; change happens before your eyes too |
In a nutshell — haikara was an insult mocking the high collars of men back from abroad. In use, it became praise for what is new and stylish. Orikuchi Shinobu told of that change as his own memory.