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yamato nadeshiko

People search for this as: ideal japanese woman grace femininity traditional woman

44/ 100
Think first

The idealised traditional Japanese woman. Beautiful phrase, complicated politics.

What a Japanese person actually thinks

Genuinely lovely as a phrase, and genuinely dated as an ideal. To younger Japanese women it can read as the whole set of expectations they're trying to get out from under.

Meaning

Literally
Yamato (ancient Japan) + fringed pink flower
Actually
The idealised Japanese woman: modest, graceful, quietly strong, self-sacrificing. Also the nickname of the national women's football team.

Scores

Naturalness●●●●●

Real, well-known phrase.

Coolness●●●

Four characters, elegant, with a flower at the centre. The content is the question.

Watch out

  • mediumThe ideal it names includes deference and self-effacement. Worn by a non-Japanese woman it also reads as claiming an explicitly ethnic ideal.
  • lowIt shares the 大和 element with 大和魂 and carries a faint echo of the same nationalist register.

Get this instead

  • rin
    dignified; bearing oneself with cold clarity and grace
    The quality people usually mean — composed strength — in one striking character, with none of the political freight.

On skin

Orientation: vertical

Mincho.

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