A gathering of silver threads

The Little Mermaid II

百川帰海
hyaku.sen.ki.kai

Literally: hundred – river – return (home) – ocean

Alternately: Things that were scattered or disparate coming together, like how rivers and streams start here and there but all end up in the sea. By extension, a large group of people in accord with each other, especially in terms of feelings or opinion.

Notes: This saying comes to us from the Huainanzi (淮南子, Enanji or Wainanshi in Japanese), a mid-Han-dynasty essay collection.

HyakuSenChiimu

Maybe not a large enough crowd to really illustrate the phrase, but you get the idea.

About Confanity

I love the written word more than anything else I've had the chance to work with. I'm back in the States from Japan for grad school, but still studying Japanese with the hope of becoming a translator -- or writer, or even teacher -- as long as it's something language-related.
This entry was posted in Japanese, Yojijukugo and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to A gathering of silver threads

  1. Pingback: Melting pot, ethnic stew | landofnudotcom

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s