I was having a discussion with someone earlier about the meaning of the word “backstab” in English, and we were talking about how it sorta made sense intuitively that a “backstab” and a “betrayal” were synonymous. Save for an assassin or something, the only one who’d be able to literally “stab you in the back” was someone you trusted to have be near you (especially if you were like, royalty or something, you’d REALLY have to trust someone to let them be in such a position relative to you).
As I expected when looking into the origin of the term in English it was related to Julius Caesar. But, that got me thinking, was there a different origin for “to backstab” 「裏切る」「うらぎる」 or “backstabber/betrayer” 「裏切り者」「うらぎるみの」in Japanese? It seems relatively likely to me. I think that in history and/or in mythology in general there tend to be some pretty infamous betrayals.
While I have an incredibly limited knowledge of Japanese history and mythology currently, considering how there were many people in higher positions of power like Shoguns or Emperors over the years, but also lots of people in (lower) positions of power but positions of power nevertheless (like feudal lords) that would be potentially subject to a traitorous subordinate’s attack, it makes sense to me that it would’ve happened a decent number of times and wouldn’t have been a forgotten event.
Does anyone know the specific origin of this phrase / verb in Japanese (and if it was something from Japanese history or a myth, or was something that was an idea lifted from somewhere else, like the story of Caesar’s betrayal), and maybe a good resource for Japanese etymology? Usually when I try to look for where a Japanese word came from I have difficulty finding more than just the kanji it’s made up from.
Thanks for sharing if you do! I think it’d be interesting if the word had a separate “story” behind it in Japanese despite it ultimately being the same idea as it is in English.
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Japanese words usually don’t have clear etymology, unlike English or whatever else that can be tracked to Latin and stuff. Anyways, usually you just google the word in question and “由来” and hope the search result includes a competent source.
And generally speaking, it’s just abstract concepts turning into a word. Not like there’s some kind of specific incident that lead to the word. If you’re looking for such words and expressions, you need to go (specifically) for 故事成語.
First off, 裏切り does seem to be a Japanese creation, since it doesn’t share the metaphor of ‘cutting’ with any of the Chinese words for betrayal I could find – I don’t speak any form of Chinese though so take that with a grain of salt. There’s a decent amount of words relating to swordsmanship that have picked up metaphorical emotion-related meanings specific to Japanese, so you could well be onto something with drawing from Japanese history. That said, 切る is already used in so many emotion-related metaphors as is – compare something like 縁を切る ‘cut ties’ – it makes it hard to be certain that the word arose specifically out of any kind of literal backstabbing incident.
One important thing to consider is that 裏 rarely means ‘back’ as in the back part of the body, 背中. More often than not 裏 refers more to the hidden underside, inside, or generally ‘flip side’. In earlier Japanese the character 心 could be read うら as well, referring to hidden internal emotions. A lot of old compounds referring to emotions contain this element: うらやむ・うらやましい are from literally うら + 病む – to be sick on the inside.
So it’s not unlikely that うらぎり came more from the idea of betraying someone from the ‘inside’ of their shared social sphere/内側, whether that be their private life or their ‘side’ more generally, and thereby ‘defecting’ to the 外側.
Another possibility that comes to mind is just that the word might have been created in Japanese more recently specifically as a loan-translation of ‘backstab’ and equivalents in other European languages. If you wanted to look into how early the word was attested, that might shine some more light on its origins.