Kinmyaku Jinmyaku

LANGUAGE IS ALIVE and changing, especially in Japan. New words appear; unnecessary ones die; some phrases flourish briefly, vanish, and reappear after years or decades, with fresh vigor and a different nuance. But the language as a whole is always thriving – growing, stretching, yet remaining the same at heart. So, too, with Japan's political traditions. Democracy may languish or luxuriate. Surface styles may be as evanescent as fashion fads. But somehow the thing itself, the essential nature of Japan's political life, seems to always remain constant.

Seldom does evidence to support these two facts converge more clearly than it did late last year when the words kinmyaku and jinmyaku came into popular use in connection with the political style of Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei. Taken literally, kinmyaku means “gold deposit” or “money vein,” while jinmyaku, though not found in most dictionaries, means “human vein.” Translated into everyday English, the two words sometimes appear in print as financial-human “webs,” “connections,” “relationships,” or sometimes simply as Tanaka's “money and men.” No brief translation, however, can be quite adequate, for the two words refer to the entire subsurface network of human and financial affairs that give life and vigor to the body of Japanese politics. Myaku, the second half of both of these words, means vein, or, in more limited usage, blood vessel, while kin connotes money or gold and jin means people.

Just as blood circulates through a profusion of vessels too numerous and intricate to trace, so money and acts of human endearment (or enslavement) flow from agent to agent, group to group and man to man in the behind-the-scenes world of Japanese politics. At least that is what the phrase-coiners seem to have in mind. As blood vessels support the stuff of life, so traditional politics depends on kinmyaku and jinmyaku for its very existence. As veins carry blood both to and from the heart, so political favors and fortunes, debts and duties benefit both giver and receiver. As blood vessels become an object of concern only when they rupture, cease to function properly, or when a clinician begins dissecting the human body, so too with kinmyaku and jinmyaku.