As the overview article noted, Genkai’s compilation began not as Ōtsuki Fumihiko’s personal idea, but as an order from a state institution, the Ministry of Education. Here we read, in the original, the passage that tells that story.
“Ōtsuki Fumihiko, alone” — a fact recorded at the close of the preface
The “Preface to Genkai,” at the front of the book, is written in classical Chinese by Nishimura Shigeki, head of the Ministry of Education’s compilation bureau. At its close, Nishimura writes:
本篇任編輯之事者、大槻文彦一人。而若余者、特止監視其事業爾。
(The one entrusted with the task of compiling this book is Ōtsuki Fumihiko, alone. As for someone like myself, I merely oversaw this undertaking.)
Signed and dated April, Meiji 18 (1885), “Nishimura Shigeki, Head of the Compilation Bureau, Ministry of Education, Senior Fifth Rank, Third Order of Merit” — this sentence confirms, in the supervisor’s own words, that while this project began under the name of a state institution, the Ministry of Education, every bit of the actual work was entrusted to a single person, Ōtsuki.
A candid self-assessment: “too soon to stand beside the West”
Nishimura’s preface leaves an even more candid assessment on record.
此書盖追逐西國辭書之第一歩、而至其與西人並鑣而馳者、猶有待於後來焉。
(This book is, in short, the first step in pursuit of the dictionaries of the West; as for reaching the point of running neck and neck with Western works, that must still await a later generation.)
There’s no exaggeration in this sentence, only a plain self-assessment. Genkai is deliberately positioned, not as a finished work standing on par with Western dictionaries, but as a modest “first step” in that direction. At the time this preface was written, in 1885, the main text hadn’t even been finished — actual publication slipped four more years, to 1889.
A connection to national-language policy, and the next generation
The very fact that Genkai’s compilation began as a Ministry of Education project reflects the Meiji government’s push to build a “national language” as a foundation for the modern state. Pre-Edo Japan had barely any concept of a unified “standard language.” For a government that urgently needed schools, newspapers, and legal documents written in language understood nationwide, building a standard-setting national dictionary was an unavoidable task.
This national-language policy would later be carried forward, more systematically still, by a slightly younger generation — figures like Ueda Kazutoshi, covered elsewhere in this feature set, through the establishment of a “standard language” and the movement to unify spoken and written Japanese (genbun’itchi). And Ōtsuki himself kept working, into his final years, on a vastly expanded revision of his own book, Daigenkai — left unfinished at his death, and published afterward by his students. A task begun by one pair of hands went on to cast a long shadow — over the next generation, and over the rest of Ōtsuki’s own life.
Summary
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| The project’s character | A dictionary compiled as a state project, ordered by the Ministry of Education |
| Who did the work | Nishimura, the supervisor himself, records it plainly: “Ōtsuki Fumihiko, alone” |
| Self-assessment | A modest positioning — matching Western dictionaries “must await a later generation” |
| What followed | The Meiji government’s national-language policy, and Ōtsuki’s own later work on Daigenkai |
In a nutshell — Genkai was a task the state ordered and one person carried entirely on his own shoulders. Exactly as its own candid self-assessment predicted, that “first step” was handed on to the generation that followed.