Talk:Yagyū Munetoshi

Muneyoshi or Munetoshi? A case and a proposal...

Throughout Wikipedia, 柳生宗厳 is referred to as Yagyu Muneyoshi, and his grandsons 三厳 and 利厳 are known as Mitsuyoshi and Toshiyoshi, respectively. This represents common usage in English sources, and in many Japanese sources as well.

The problem is, common usage is most likely wrong. Among the Yagyu family, these names are "Munetoshi", "Mitsutoshi", and "Toshitoshi", as can be seen here.

The case for Muneyoshi When historians came across the name 宗厳, they weren't exactly sure how to read it. The first character was probably "Mune", but the second one was difficult. No furigana was provided in any Yagyu family records. In the Kansei Choshu Shokafu, a record of family lineages made in the late 18th century, furigana reading "yoshi" was provided for 宗厳 (Imamura, 1973). In the Dai-Kanwa Jiten, the largest Japanese Chinese character dictionary, 厳 is given possible name readings kane, tsuyo, and yoshi, among others. As a result, many Japanese publications use the "yoshi" reading of the character for these names. In fact, Japanese Wikipedia uses that reading.

The case for Munetoshi In his 1973 book Yagyu historian Imamura Yoshio actually suggests that "Munetoshi", etc., be used rather than "Muneyoshi." There are a number of very good reasons for this. For one, the Yagyu family uses the "toshi" reading. This by itself might not be very persuasive (although perhaps it should be), but as a check of the Shinkage Ryu lineage will show, the 厳 element, and it's reading as "toshi", goes all the way back every generation to 宗厳 himself (indeed, even past him to his own father, Ietoshi).

A most interesting example concerns Yagyu Hyogonosuke (Toshitoshi)'s second son, Toshikata (利方). This "toshi" is written 利, which is very common, and comes from Hyogonosuke's own name, 利厳. However, in the Renya-ou Ichidaiki (Life of the Venerable Renya), written in 1846 by many times removed descendant of Renya, "Toshikata" is mistakenly written 厳方, using the 厳 character for the "Toshi".

Of similar interest is that the Edo Yagyu line, after Yagyu Muneari, also begins a tradition of a "toshi" element in their names, although this "toshi" is rendered using the character 俊.

In his case for using "toshi" rather than "yoshi", Imamura further mentions that the hiragana よ is derived from a broken-down, cursive calligraphic form of 与. But one reading of 与 is "to". It's possible that, back in the 1780s, when Japanese orthographic rules were actually more just a number of common conventions, that someone wrote shorthand 与之 intending it to be read as "とし" toshi, but modern historians, following the stricter orthography of their day, misread it as "よし" yoshi. If that's the case, even the lone attested historical example of "yoshi" would actually reflect usage within the Yagyu family.

These days, the "toshi" reading is making inroads in Japan, particularly after some publications by the Yagyu family have gotten the "toshi" readings out there. I would say that "Muneyoshi", etc., is still in the majority in the Japanese literature, but it is by no means universal anymore.

My feeling is, at the moment the literature, in both English and Japanese, is so small and specialized that this is a situation where "ignore all rules" can be applied. The "yoshi" spread when information on Shinkage Ryu and the Yagyu family was still sparse. There's more information out there now, and the case for "toshi" seems much stronger. This is not a case, like Sun Tzu/Sunzi, where an alternate romanization for the same pronunciation is more widely known, but a case when early information was mistaken, and is in the process of being corrected. Re-directs for "yoshi" variants will solve the issue of any people using outdated material, and a small note in each entry can explain the discrepancy.

I'll copy this post into the Yagyu Jubei Mitsuyoshi and Yagyu Hyogonosuke Talk pages. After a period of time, if there are no objections, I'd like to edit to reflect the "toshi" reading.

My sources are 柳生遺聞 Yagyū Ibun, 1973 Imamura Yoshio (K.K. Elm), and for the 連也翁一代記 Renya-ou Ichidaiki, I referred to 資料　柳生新陰流 Shiryō Yagyū Shinkage-ryū, a collection of historical documents compiled and edited by Imamura Yoshio, and published in 1967 by K.K. Jinbutsu Ouraisha. —Preceding unsigned comment added by JReyer (talk • contribs) 13:27, 2 September 2008 (UTC)