Wordcatcher Tales: Kabure, Hamanasu
Japanese translation | General interest
10 August 2008
Sometime during my high school years in Kobe, Japan, I heard the term seiyo- kabure used to describe Japanese people who were ardent Westernizers. I never learned the real etymology of kabure, which I thought came from the verb kaburu 'to wear (on one's head), cover one's head', so that seiyo- kabure suggested to me people who donned their Western thinking caps rather than their Eastern (to-yo) ones.
It wasn't until I decided to blog about an extremely seiyo- kabure establishment at the top of Mt. Hiei, one of Japan's leading early centers of to-yo- kabure (when it was importing Buddhism from China 1200 years ago), that I discovered a more direct source for kabure. It's from kabureru 'to break out in a rash; be (noxiously) influenced by (lacquer, poison ivy, communism, Western goods/values, etc.)'...