In my previous post about Shingen’s famous Fuurin Kazan, I remarked that the original Sun Zi quote said that the “forest” part says that “the army must march as compact/solid as a forest” (basically it has to be neat and orderly), and I said I have no idea why it became “silent as the forest” in Japan.
I’m wondering if that’s actually a mistranslation by later-date Japanese linguistic analysts, and that Shingen himself would’ve understood it correctly as “compact/orderly” in his day.
Shown above are actual Fuurin Kazan banner artifacts from the museum, and it was a direct copy of the text from the Chinese Sun Zi text. The issue with the forest part 其徐如林 is that 徐 was interpreted by modern Japanese writers as “silent”. It’s likely because 徐 can be read as “shizuka”, which, if written with a different kanji, would mean “silent”.
The shizuka that means “silent” normally looks like this in Japanese: 静(か). However, because Sengoku-era archaic Japanese sometimes uses "wrong kanji” based on its sound, not for what the actual kanji actually mean, perhaps people from later time periods thought that Shingen used 徐 as an “alternative kanji”, and thought that his intention was to say 静.
I can only assume this was a later-date (probably modern, even) error, because even today in Japanese the word 徐 does still means “slow/gradual”. The only reason I could think of as to why people would mess it up and assume that it meant something other than its literal meaning is because they don’t understand the original Sun Zi.
In the original Sun Zi strategy, the phrases are to be understood as pairs of two, as classical Chinese poetic language tends to do. Wind and Forest is one set: “When marching fast, move like the wind. When marching slow, be as compact like the forest”. Fire and Mountain is another set: “When attacking, be as fierce as the fire. When defending, be unmoveable as the mountain”.
The reason why I say it’s likely a very modern mistake because even entering Edo period the Japanese are still educated in classical Chinese literature. Some of the more classically-trained samurai and scholars can even just read the Chinese text directly themselves, while modern people would find these archaic phrasing very strange and hard to understand.
