This feature began with an overview and has traced the invention of gojūon order, the method of explaining Japanese in Japanese, a close reading of the preface, the connection to the Ministry of Education as a state project, and Genkai’s influence on later dictionaries. To close, let’s grade this more-than-130-year-old dictionary from today’s vantage point.
What has genuinely held up
Arrangement by gojūon order, and the structure combining pronunciation, part of speech, and definition for every word — as another article showed, both are inherited, as a matter of course, by every Japanese dictionary today. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that the very act of looking a word up rests on the skeleton Ōtsuki designed. And the method itself — explaining Japanese in Japanese — remains, unshaken, the basic stance of Japanese lexicography today.
What was rewritten
On the other hand, quite a few of the individual definitions in Genkai carry, when viewed from more than 130 years later, the plain limits of the Meiji era. Definitions reflecting the social assumptions and state of knowledge of the time, etymological explanations that need correction by modern standards — these have naturally been rewritten, again and again, by the ongoing progress of Japanese linguistics and lexicography since. Ōtsuki’s own Daigenkai, covered in the previous article, was itself the first step in exactly this kind of rewriting.
The weight of having “no model to follow”
One premise shouldn’t be forgotten in reaching this verdict. As the overview article showed, Ōtsuki had to begin this work with almost no precedent to draw on. The skeleton of a dictionary we take for granted today — gojūon order, pronunciation notation, part-of-speech classification, definitions in Japanese — is something Ōtsuki designed from scratch and carried out, single-handedly, over fourteen years. Later generations were only able to correct Genkai’s individual content because the skeleton Ōtsuki built was there to correct it on. Building the foundation itself from nothing, and refining the content built on top of that foundation, call for different kinds of difficulty entirely.
Summary
| Verdict | Subject |
|---|---|
| Genuinely held up | Gojūon order, the pronunciation-part of speech-definition structure, explaining Japanese in Japanese |
| Rewritten | Individual definitions and etymologies — reflecting the Meiji era’s state of knowledge |
| Background worth keeping in mind | This was a task whose skeleton one person had to design from scratch, with almost no precedent to draw on |
In a nutshell — what Ōtsuki Fumihiko truly accomplished wasn’t writing correct definitions. It was answering, from zero, the question of what a Japanese dictionary should even look like. The skeleton of that answer is still alive today, unrewritten, more than 130 years later.