Continuing last week’s oni theme:

渡る世間に鬼は無し
(Wataru seken ni oni wa nashi; “Across the world, there are no demons.”)

Definition:

Nobody in the whole world is an oni – i.e. a purely malicious being. “There is kindness to be found everywhere” Alternately, not all people are evil. There is no need to distrust every single person you meet.

Breakdown:

First is the verb 渡る (wataru; to cross; to span) – acting to modify the noun 世間 (seken; the earthly realm, human society). に (ni) is a particle indicating, in this case, location (e.g. “within”). Oni is as it was last week – a malevolent mythical monster (and grammatically, a noun). Wa is our topic particle. In this case one could argue that there is a contrastive nuance – in this world there are no oni, but in the Buddhist hells or other unearthly realms there are plenty of them – but I feel that the feeling is emphatic rather than simply contrastive. Finally, 無し (nashi) is an adjective of negation in sentence-final form.

Notes:

In contrast to last week’s use of oni as an exemplar of physical strength, there are quite a few kotowaza that turn on the oni‘s reputation for being malevolent to humanity, even nasty for the sake of nastiness. The creatures are, of course, used as a metaphor for people whom you wouldn’t want to meet, but here we have an optimistic affirmation of basic human goodness.

無し can be rendered in a more modern way as 無い (nai) with no change in meaning, although the feel of the former is more deliberately archaic or formal.

A more dramatic version of the phrase goes 地獄にも鬼ばかりはいない (Jigoku ni mo oni bakari wa inai); “Even in hell it isn’t only demons.”

Example sentence:

「酷い目に遭って、絶望しそうでしたが、田村さんに色々手伝って頂き、本当に渡る世間に鬼は無しだと思いました」

(“Hidoi me ni atte, zetsubou shisou deshita ga, Tamura-san ni iroiro tetsudatte itadaki, hontou ni wataru seken ni oni wa nashi da to omoimashita.”)

[“Some bad stuff had happened to me, and I was about to lose hope when Tamura-san helped me out with all sorts of things. And I thought, nobody is all bad after all.”]