Mottainai

Etymology, usage, and translation

Kōjien, widely considered the most authoritative Japanese dictionary, lists three definitions for the word mottainai (classical Japanese terminal form mottainashi): (1) inexpedient or reprehensible towards a god, buddha, noble or the like; (2) awe-inspiring and unmerited/undeserved, used to express thanks; (3) an expression of regret at the full value of something not being put to good use. In contemporary Japanese, mottainai is most commonly used to indicate that something is being discarded needlessly, or to express regret at such a fact. Kōhei Hasegawa, then a professor at Nagano University, noted that the definition (3) in Kōjien was the one used most frequently by modern Japanese. The second sense is seen in Japanese newspapers when they refer to members of the imperial family as having been present at such-and-such an event, not necessarily implying wastefulness but rather gratitude or awe. Daigenkai, another Japanese dictionary, gives a similar ordering of these definitions.

Hasegawa traces this increase in the frequency of meaning (3) to a historical semantic shift in which the original meaning, meaning (1), became less prominent. Citing the Kyoto University Japanese literature scholar Kōshin Noma, Hasegawa states that the word originated as slang in the Kamakura period, and that by the mid 15th century had perhaps already acquired the meanings of (2) and (3).

An archaic Japanese dictionary dates the use of the term "mottainai" back to the 13th-century. Two frequently-cited early examples of usages of mottainashi, given in both Kōjien and Daigenkai, are the Genpei Jōsuiki and the Taiheiki. A form of the word, motaina (モタイナ) appears in the late-14th or early-15th century Noh play Aritōshi, apparently in a sense close to (1).

The word nai in mottainai resembles a Japanese negative ("there is no mottai"), but may have originally been used as an emphatic ("tremendous mottai"). Mottai itself is a noun appearing as such in, for example, the dictionary Gagaku-shū, which dates to 1444. Daigenkai gives buttai as an alternate reading of the word, and it appears written with the kanji 勿躰, 物體, 勿體, 物体, or 勿体. It means (i) the shape/form of a thing or (ii) something that is, or the fact of being, impressive or imposing (モノモノシキコト; monomonoshiki koto). The compound that is pronounced as mottai in Japanese appears in Sino-Japanese dictionaries as a Chinese word in a sense similar to (ii), but mottainashi does not, as it is an indigenous Japanese word.

The 18th-century Kokugaku philologist Motoori Norinaga, in the preface to his 1798 treatise Tamaarare ('Ice Crystals (like) Jewels'; 玉あられ) designed to stir people up from their sleepy acquiescence in acquired customs that were not authentically native, and was critical of the use of the word to express gratitude. He felt its use for such a purpose (along with those of katajikenashi and osoreōi) was vitiated by its ultimate derivation from imitating forms of Chinese rhetoric and greetings. In his 1934 essay Nihon-seishin to Bukkyō, the Buddhologist Katō Totsudō (加藤咄堂; 1870-1949) included the "aversion to wastefulness" (mottainai) in a putative series of what he considered to be "core Japanese personality traits".