Japan Tour: Getting Tired of It in Japanese

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You may be familiar with the word “aki” ? in Japanese as meaning “fall, autumn,” but there is another “aki” ??that appears often in Japanese conversation and writing that means “sick of, tired of, have enough of, lose interest in, become bored with.” The noun aki means "boredness with something, being sick of something." The verb is akiru, as in “I’m sick of it already,” Moh akita.


The kanji for aki is made up of two components, the radical, at the left, being the character for “eat” ? and the one on the right being for “enclose, wrap” ? (originally a pictograph of a fetus in the womb). The idea being promoted here is of being sated, overly plied, of curling up in a ball and wanting it all to stop.


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Hajimatte kara ma mo naku, eiga ni akita.
[I/he/she/they] got tired of the movie shortly after it began.


There are several words and phrases worth knowing that include the kanji for akiru, which, by the way, is pronounced hoh.


For example, hohshoku, ??, the kanji for akiru and “to eat,” means gluttony: feeding yourself till you are literally “fed up”.


hohman, ??, the kanji for akiru and for "repleteness," means satiety or surfeit.


hohwa ??, the kanji for akiru and "harmony," means saturation, the idea being of things having reached the “all-is-well” point of “fed-up”ness.


Finally, there’s a yommoji-jukugo (a four-character idiom) that starts with today’s character:
???? hoh-kei-fuu-soh
which means to be an old hand toughened by life’s vicissitudes.
The second character, kei, means “to pass through,” and is the first character in the word for “experience” (?? keiken); so, hoh-kei here means “to have really had one’s fill of experience.” And fuu-soh are the characters for “wind” and “frost” respectively, as examples of the severity of the experiences the tough old bird who has seen life and survived it has been through.


Kono posuto ni moh akinakattara ii ne!
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("I hope you haven’t gotten bored with this post already!")

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