Talk:Mottainai

First draft

This report is not translation from Japanese. I am the text which I considered by myself. It understands, if a Japanese report can be translated and obtained. I want to ask a check of everybody.--LongLongAgo 04:50, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

• Ah, I see. I had thought that it was a machine translation from the article in the Japanese wiki. English as a second language, eh? No worries. We'll get someone to help with it. --Blu Aardvark | ^{(talk) | (contribs)} 08:43, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

• I attempted to sort it out a bit, (adding a little based on having just seen Maathai speak) but I am afraid some of the meaning was lost in translation. I did not change the translations of the word itself, as I don't speak Japanese. --User:Windupcanary 18 March 2006

Citation

[1] (in Japanese) by the Mainichi_Shimbun.--222.5.247.120 08:04, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Intro

The intro needs to be rewritten. It starts out with very hard to understand definitions. (It's better if you get past that part but I'm not sure how many people would persevere.) RJFJR (talk) 17:10, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

"Mottainai" as an international word?

Article has turned up nicely, but what do you think about this point? "The word has also entered the English language and is also in use in other languages[dubious – discuss]." I'd definitely say no, that's just what Japanese people would like. We already have the part about Ms. Maathai effort to make the word more known, so I think the best thing would be to erase this sentence. Any opinions? --Jair Moreno 27 January 2008

I agree. I never heard the word until I came to Japan. I think it's a great word but if I used it in England no-one would know what I was on about. 219.176.20.5 (talk) 11:38, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. Mottainai simply means "wasteful" or "what a waste." I don't know of a single use of the word that couldn't be translated into English exactly as such. This article needs to be revamped. As it is, it's little more than nihonjinron 180.5.154.72 (talk) 07:41, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Agreed - this article is Mainichi Shimbun self-promotion and blatant nihonjinron. I've tried to clean it up, but it still irks me. The word has not entered the English language in an strength - a Google search on it shows several pages of, you guessed it, the Wangari Maathai promotion. Candidate for deletion imho. Cypella (talk) 07:10, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Pronunciation

How do you pronounce this word? Could someone knowledgeable add a pronunciation guide (in phonetics)? Thanks. AugustinMa (talk) 11:52, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

[mo-taj-naj] This is a very basic transcription of the Japanese sounds. There may be subtle complexities that I have not accounted for. I have used dashes to separate the syllables, which is not the IPA convention. It seems that there is no accent in this word. Each syllable is given equal time. The [j] is the semivowel that joins the [a], and has the sound of the letter "y", as in yes [jɛs]. The two together sound like the vowel center of the English night [najt] Armslice (talk) 22:15, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

[mo.tːa.i.na.i]

This is how mottainai is actuallty pronounced in Japanese. Mo is not equal to nai as two syllables. Mo is equal to na in time, since Japanese is a mora-timed language. The periods represent moraic boundaries. With how Japanese words are usually pronounced in English, it would become [moʊʔ.taɪˈnaɪ] for North American speakers. This means it would sound like the English words "moat tie nigh" with the last word stressed. Though Japanese does not have stress it has a pitch accent, and putting the stress on the same part that has the pitch accent is a way to approximate the Japanese pronunciation while speaking English. I'm not so sure about how people from England would handle it, but I think it would either be [məʊʔ.taɪˈnaɪ] or [mɒʔ.taɪˈnaɪ]. (Ejoty (talk) 00:45, 28 August 2009 (UTC))

Greenwashing?

This whole "mottainai" campaign is being pushed (and funded) by the Mainichi Shimbun and the Itochu Corporation, one of the largest companies in the world. Forgive me if I'm a bit suspicious about their sudden concern with people wasting things. Cypella (talk) 07:03, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

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Merge?

This article contains basically three segments: (i) definition, translation and etymology; (ii) Hitoshi Chiba; and (iii) Wangari Maathai.

(i) is mostly unsourced and almost certainly all wrong, and when used to fluff out this article from a single paragraph as it does violates WP:NOTDICT.

(ii) is sourced entirely to Look Japan magazine, which might be reliable for the opinion of its author but is said opinion notable? Those expat "Japanese culture" magazines are generally childish in their level of nuance, like citing a primary school textbook. And it's not even a problem of poor verifiability on some factual claims -- it's all just tagging the word "mottainai" onto general environmentalism info.

(iii) appears to be the only substantial and verifiable content, but I kinda feel like it could be merged into our Wangari Maathai article.

This article as it stands is essentially a stub-level fork of that one, yet that one doesn't even mention "mottainai" except in a see also link to this one. Yes, the Maathai article is fairly long, but one more paragraph wouldn't hurt it.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 09:41, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

(I reformatted your three points into three paragraphs; I hope that's OK.) I very much agree. The first paragraph is really incoherent; it relies for sourcing the "mottainai ('What a waste!') can't be translated" meme to yet more amateurish pseudolinguistics. I despair, basically. Imaginatorium (talk) 05:34, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

@Imaginatorium: (It's okay, but if you do that again you should probably check that you don't accidentally merge some other stuff that's "outside" the three points into the first or third! :P ) Well, we don't need an AFD consensus to delete to perform a merge, so there isn't really need to despair. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 09:44, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

additional references for expansion

Avoiding waste with the Japanese concept of 'mottainai'

Los Angeles' Little Tokyo Looks for a Sustainable Future With Some 'Mottainai'

Japan Times says "mottainai can also be used in the context of missed opportunities." [2] Dream Focus 06:56, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

@Dream Focus: None of those are reliable sources on Japanese linguistics( let alone Buddhist or Shinto or Pastafarian philosophy), and do not support the assertion that "mottainai" is some kind of unique concept. It's just a common phrase meaning "what a waste!" Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 09:47, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

I looked at the sources, not what you were quoting them as saying; JT is an acceptable source for a BLUE claim (a usage example of a common Japanese word), but what would we even want to use that claim for? Are you trying to say that "It doesn't just mean What a waste! -- it can also mean What a waste [of a good opportunity]!"? Because that would be funny if I thought it was meant as a joke. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:25, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources. If what Wikipedia considers a reliable source says mottainai is a "concept", then it doesn't matter what you personally believe. Dream Focus 11:42, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

@Dream Focus: Find a university press or peer-reviewed source by a Buddhist specialist that supports that assertion. Otherwise, the assertion of every Japanese dictionary that it is a common Japanese word stands, especially in light of the fact that none of the encyclopedias/dictionaries of Buddhism and Buddhist terms I checked mention it. Wikipedia does not, and never has, treated popular news websites as reliable sources for claims about linguistics, religion or other scholarly fields when they are contradicted by superior sources. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:59, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

BTW, please refrain from strawman and ad hominem arguments. Nowhere above or elsewhere did I cite "what I personally believe". Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 12:00, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Wait ... but it doesn't even matter if it is "a concept" or not; even if it were a noun (as you, our article and the popular sources you cite appear to use it), we already have another article on that. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 12:03, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

• I have placed some search links above. Here's an example of a source that they lead to: Sato, Yuriko (2017), "Mottainai: a Japanese sense of anima mundi", Journal of Analytical Psychology, 62 (1), John Wiley & Sons: 147–154, doi:10.1111/1468-5922.12282 This associates the topic with both Buddhism and Shinto. Andrew D. (talk) 20:47, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

@Andrew Davidson: I don't know what "played some search links above" means. Anyway, have you read that article? If you want to use it to fix the article, fire ahead. I have more important things to be doing with my time at the moment and don't actually intend to implement my merge proposal without a consensus of editors either brought here by an RFC or from WP:JAPAN, which I probably won't try to get while I'm being revenge-hounded by a couple of users who have never edited the article for some remarks I made about a certain WikiProject more than a week ago. So you've got plenty of time to actually improve the article with all these wonderful sources. (Note, however, that if I see you inserting any good-faith misinterpretations of what those specialist sources say, I will probably fix the errors.) Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 22:07, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

BTW, Sato's "associating" mottainai "with ... Buddhism", as you say, doesn't explain why neither the Princeton Dictionary nor the Routledge Encyclopedia mention it anywhere in their texts, let alone include standalone entries on it as a "Buddhist concept", so you still have not, after almost two weeks, justified your "ancient Chinese secret" claim. I'm still waiting on that. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 22:11, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

：：：：The Sato article is behind a $38 paywall. I think I was right to despair. But I wonder: is there a nihonjinron category that could be attached? Imaginatorium (talk) 11:08, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Category:Nihonjinron—haven't gotten around to it yet. It should be easy to populate. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 11:35, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

• Here's another source: Suzuki, Yasushi; Kar, Rabi N. (15 September 2017), "India-Japan Cultural Distance on the Mottainai Ethics", Towards A Common Future, pp. 155–170. Andrew D. (talk) 22:36, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

How does a Japanese source using the word as a simple adjective change anything? Yes, ex-pats in Japan and people with Japanese dealings are familiar with the word and use it in English -- we don't have standalone articles on mendokusai or yabai. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:03, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

I agree with Hijiri that all this smells of horseshit, but it's probably not worth the effort fighting it. Bushido's a better one to fight over—that article's pretty much bull from top to bottom, and fighting the mountain of "reliable" sources there would serve the world good.

The rest of you should be embarrassed that your standards are so low. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 10:41, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

I added a reference to an article in the Journal of Asian Studies from Cambridge University Press. It backs up the statements from two other sources, neither of which IMO deserved to be complained about. Editors should be able to cite where they read the information, even if it's not from academia. Also I don't get the complaints about the origins of the term. 勿体 is a Buddhist term, right? That should be easy enough to verify. I think that Hijiri88 needs to back off a bit. We can request improvements in an article without being confrontational about it. – Margin1522 (talk) 03:16, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

@Margin1522: Sorry to be late -- I said on my own talk page and RSN that I would be trying to limit my activity on this article.

勿体 is a Buddhist term, right? Is it? I checked a bunch of Japanese dictionaries, none of which define it as a 仏語 or give a definition that implies some specifically Buddhist origin of the word, and it doesn't appear in the Japanese cross-reference index of the Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Do you have a source?

Anyway, I don't think your recent addition to the article is a good idea, since Maathai appears to have misunderstood the meaning of the word (mottainasa is not something good that is "embraced" by the Japanese) and giving that quote could mislead our readers. I also can't figure out what you were talking about here -- what "Japanese sources", and what "quote marks" in those sources?

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 23:24, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

@Hijiri88: I thought I replied to this earlier. Did I forget to hit the publish button, or was it removed somehow? Anyway, the Japanese sources were the scholars quoting Maathai, and the quote marks were the ones around her statements. It's a long story, but from experience this needs to be checked. Japanese being a topic-prominent language, quote marks often have a topic marker function. Authors quote words they think are important to the topic. Thus, rather than <exact transcription>, the quote marks might have indicated <the important part of what she said>. When handling something like this, it's best to verify the original or remove the quote marks and treat it as a paraphrase. I was able to verify the original of one of her quotes, so that's what I quoted. I think for the purposes of that section, the current meaning in Japanese is less important than her understanding of it. About the Buddhism, I don't want to get into it, but see the lecture I cited below. It seems to be a wasei-kango, originally 物体, dating from the medieval period. When you see a metaphysical term like 物体, and learn that it's that old, doesn't it seem like it has to be from Buddhism? This was centuries before people started translating terms from Western physics. – Margin1522 (talk) 02:30, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

@Margin1522: I don't see how you could have replied to me already, since my last comment on this page was before your first.

Anyway, I already know all that stuff about topic markers and the like; the problem is that it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the source in question, which (a) is in English, and (b) doesn't give any of that text in quotation marks. the Japanese sources were the scholars quoting Maathai, and the quote marks were the ones around her statements What sources are you talking about? I'm talking about a particular article by Mizue Sasaki, cited in our article, written in English, in which Sasaki does briefly quote Maathai herself, but what we do is quote Sasaki's words (which Sasaki does not give in quotation marks). The problem is that without direct attribution, it looks like we are quoting Maathai. Are you saying that the Sasaki quotes should be removed and replaced with a direct quotation from Maathai?

As for the second part, I'm not sure I agree; lots of "medieval" (admittedly more Nara/Heian than Kamakura/Muromachi like this, but still) Japanese metaphysics comes from Taoism, which insofar as it can be distinguished from Buddhism probably should be. Making a talk page argument that the word is a "Buddhist word" just because it predates the Meiji period and relates to a metaphysical concept seems iffy to me.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:52, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

That's a point. The Sasaki quotes are her words, not Maathai's. I agree that they should be attributed to Sasaki. – Margin1522 (talk) 05:18, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Then why did you remove the tag? I thought the reason parameter (This section consists almost exclusively of quotes from Sasaki, presented as though they were quotes from Wangari Maathai. If we don't have actual quotes from Maathai, we should paraphrase, since it would be almost impossible to quote like this without making it look like a misattribution.) was clear enough. I actually don't think attributing the quotes to Sasaki is a good idea in this case; Sasaki notes that Maathai "explained that the meaning of the term mottainai encompasses the four Rs"? That's pretty awkward writing. Anyway, now that I've seen the "actual quotes from Maathai", I have other problems; I think paraphrasing Sasaki is the only solution here. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 05:50, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Why? Because I wanted to get rid of the template. I thought the edit summary, the template message, and the choice of the alias "quote farm" were all rather rude to the editors who wrote that section. So, since the content was essentially paraphrasing, I rewrote it slightly, removed the quote marks, and removed the tag. Apparently I didn't rewrite it enough, because that triggered a copyvio reaction and the edit was reverted and made invisible. If you want to have a go yourself, please do. – Margin1522 (talk) 09:44, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

If a source paraphrases someone else's words, that source then "owns" that paraphrase; you are not allowed copy it onto Wikipedia without quotation marks. Anyway, I might take a shot at it later, once I'm finished with the other stuff that's been consuming my attention (I'm sure you've noticed that the only edit I made to this article in the past two weeks was to remove a single piece of OR that I had already tagged earlier) assuming we are now in agreement that the quotes from Sasaki are presented as though they were quotes from Wangari Maathai and are therefore inappropriate. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 10:05, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Margin1522: I can't speak for the others, but my complaint is presenting this word as a Buddhist concept deeply rooted in Japanese culture—the lead used to tell us it's "a tradition, a cultural practice, and an idea which is still present in Japanese culture". That's worlds different from noting its etymological origins in Buddhism. Compare to how it is presented in the lead to the Japanese version of the article. People are playing fast and loose with the sources here (and some of the sources seem to play fast and loose with the facts). Keep in mind that sources are necessary but not sufficient in and of themselves for including anything in an article. There are RSes that contradict the consensus of the experts—our articles, though, must reflect that consensus. For instance, there is a mountain of RSes supporting the Macro-Altaic hypothesis, but our article correctly and prominently states that it is widely discredited. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 03:48, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

"We often hear in Japan the expression 'mottainai,' which loosely means 'wasteful' but in its full sense conveys a feeling of awe and appreciation for the gifts of nature or the sincere conduct of other people."—this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. What does the author base this on? In twenty years in Japan I have never witnessed this "awe", and I've never heard the word used in such a way. Then it goes into the whole "never leave a grain of rice on your plate", which from what I've heard was already history before I was even born (and came more from economic necessity than devotion to Buddhist principles ...) Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 04:06, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

I don't know if it should be called "awe", but it's something like an article that I worked on a while ago, by a Japanese garden designer who says "The garden teaches the suchness or intrinsic value of each thing, the connectedness, harmony, tranquility, and sacredness of the everyday. Developing a sense of respect for all things is no small step in becoming an ethical human being..." This isn't an uncommon sentiment. You also see it in lectures by お坊さん for laypeople. – Margin1522 (talk) 04:50, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Margin1522: "This isn't an uncommon sentiment."—is it a common sentiment? Because that's what the article was telling us. Presenting edge cases (Shunmyō the monk) as the common case is a violation of WP:WEIGHT, at the very, very least. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 05:03, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

More pertinent, I think, to ask whether this sentiment has any "uniquely Japanese" features (or anything in particular to do with the ordinary Japanese word alleged to be the subject of this article)? I would think it was universal: from Ghandi to Patience Strong ("You are nearer God's heart in the garden than anywhere else on earth" and all that). Imaginatorium (talk) 06:18, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

So we have a number of questions for the authors of this article, amongst them:

• Is mottainai uniquely Japanese? Do specialists, with data to back themselves up, have a consensus this is so?
• Does the mottainai presented in this article represent how the word is typically used (again, backed up with data and the consensus of experts)? If not, does the article make this clear?
• What makes mottainai worth of an entire article, rather than a paragraph or two in Environmental issues in Japan? Especially given there are so many unsourced statements in this very short article, and "Environmental issues in Japan" itself is also quite short.

Let's start with getting answers to these questions. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 06:38, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

As a matter of fact, yes, I do think it's common. More common than the idea that we are a Chosen People and the world is ours to use as we see fit because God gave it to us. But whatever. The authors of this article wanted to write about the use of mottainai by environmentalists. I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to. You don't see Nobel prize winners explaining mendokusai or yabai to the United Nations. – Margin1522 (talk) 11:06, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

"yes, I do think it's common"—great, so back it up with a citation. I can't make heads or tails of the rest of your comment. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:14, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

How about the abstract of the article mentioned above by Andrew Davidson? "The Japanese expression ‘Mottainai!’ can be translated as ‘What a waste!’ or ‘Don't be wasteful!’ However, mottainai means much more than that. It expresses a sense of concern or regret for whatever is wasted because its intrinsic value is not properly utilized. Buddhism and Japan's indigenous religion, Shinto, are integral to the Japanese psyche, accordingly the other-than-human world is also experienced and lived in daily life. In the Japanese worldview everything in nature is endowed with spirit, every individual existence is dependent on others and all are connected in an ever-changing world. Mottainai offers a glimpse of the anima mundi inherent in this worldview." Maybe the article could be edited to make this idea of "intrinsic value" a bit clearer. – Margin1522 (talk) 00:35, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Uh-huh. We know, we know—"The Japanese are such a deep, spiritual people" and all that bull. Can you work the word "ineffable" into the article, too, please? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:54, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Oh, wonderful—we also have Muda (Japanese term), Mura (Japanese term) and Muri (Japanese term), articles devoted entirely to their specialized meanings in Lean manufacturing (from which they never should have been spun off). Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 01:46, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

• I added those links because those concepts are related to this one. Here's some commentary which links them together and which may provide further inspiration. It's interesting to find that the word mu (negative) comes into it. That's another useful word with Buddhist connotations and I have across that before Hofstadter's discussion of Zen.

Margin1522 above talks about gardening. That reminds me of sharawadgi – an aesthetic concept which seems to have come from China and/or Japan but no-one is quite sure of the etymology. I started an article about that five years ago and that seed has grown quite well and so I expect that the page about mottainai will develop over the years as different contributors develop it. Natural organic development may lack order or symmetry but this is considered beautiful in such contexts. I suppose that bonsai has a similar aesthetic.

Andrew D. (talk) 10:27, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Andrew D.: I don't doubt you added those links in good faith. You continue to thoroughly miss the point—that the article confounds the everyday usage of the term with its more specialized ones. Average Japanese people simply do not walk around "in awe of nature", and their everyday usage of the word is entirely unencumbered with its specialized religious or environmentalist usages (mu, in contrast, does not have such everyday usage when not used agglunatively—it's a specialized religious term). This article cannot spread such misinformation. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 10:36, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

References

A different approach

Right now the article attempts to tell us what the word means in Japanese and how it's used (while making a botch of it). Since this article wouldn't exist if it weren't for Wangari Maathai, how about instead of leading with:

"Mottainai (Japanese: 勿体無い, frequently written in kana alone) is a Japanese term conveying a sense of regret concerning waste."

—let's have the article define the word in the context of the article content—something like:

"Mottainai is a term of Japanese origin that has been used by environmentalists. The term in Japanese conveys a sense of regret over waste; the exclamation "Mottainai! can translate as "What a waste!" Japanese environmentalists have used the term to encourage people to "reduce, reuse and recycle", and Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai used the term at the United Nations as a slogan to promote environmental protection."

Etymology and alternate uses should be kept out of the lead so as not to be misleading (), and etymological information should be reined in even in the body (more than a paragraph will need some extraordinary sourcing or risk violating WP:WEIGHT). Care should be taken as to what this article is about—it is not about the word in Japanese (which would not merit an article), but about its use by environmentalists. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 10:32, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Basically agree with the above, which is very similar to my proposal to refocus and merge into the Maathai article, just with this page left as a standalone rather than a redirect. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 10:35, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

I can also agree with this. The article should be about use of the word by environmentalists. Since Wikipedia is not a dictionary, some of the apparatus might not be needed. But basically "Don't waste things" is an environmental message, so I don't think there necessarily has to be a conflict with everyday usage. – Margin1522 (talk) 11:28, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

@Margin1522: Have you ever seen the anime Amon Saga? That film's final scene has a use of the word that is basically the opposite of environmentalist (at least, the brand of tree-hugger "hippie" environmentalism that says exploitation by man of nature is an intrinsically bad thing; it has nothing to do with sustainability one way or the other). Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:40, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Margin1522: "don't waste things" is hardly a unique Japanese concept—one could argue it's not even particularly Japanese. But mottainai doesn't translate as "don't waste things" in everyday parlance, does it? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 11:55, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

• Oppose No sources are provided to support these claims and proposals. We should work from sources rather than engaging in OR. Andrew D. (talk) 10:40, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Andrew D.: Come again? All the sources supporting this are already in the article—including multiple cites from dictionaries giving us the prosaic usage as the default. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 10:42, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Andrew D.: By the way, do you read Japanese? Just so we understand where there may be misunderstandings. Hijiri, Imiginatorium, Margin, and I do. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 10:44, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

@Curly Turkey: I normally assume editors who don't indicate proficiency in this or that language on their user pages don't, which is why I provided my own translations here. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 10:47, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

@Andrew Davidson: What claims? That this article currently makes a mess of the etymology of the word and only exists because of the word's use by non-Japanese environmentalists? Normally we don't need reliable sources to support claims about Wikipedia content that are self-evident. I'm still not even sure of the supposed religious meaning of the word; the only one I can find is something approximating "impure; profane", which is not related to the colloquial meaning of "wasteful" and has nothing to do with the "innate value of things". Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 10:47, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

The word has been used by Japanese sources, it not just Wangari Maathai and other environmentalists. The Japanese woman that wrote Mottainai Grandma for instance. [3] Dream Focus 14:54, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, of course it has. It's a common Japanese word that means "wasteful". And have you read Mottainai Grandma? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 20:23, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

• Japan's Prime Minister spoke about the word. [4] Odd that the Prime Minister of that Japan, various news sources in that country, and a bestselling writer from there all say the concept Mottainai is a real thing, but a couple of Wikipedia editors who claim to experts on everything Japanese insist it isn't. Dream Focus 15:53, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

@Dream Focus: You're reading those sources in light of your own flawed preconceptions. No one who actually spoke Japanese and had attended more than a few internationally-oriented speeches by Japanese politicians about "Japanese traditions" would interpret the sources the way you are doing. No one is saying that the "concept" of mottainasa "doesn't exist". (As an aside, please stop using mottainai as a noun if you are going to talk about it in the context of traditional Japan; mottainai is an adjective.) Please refrain from talking about other editors like you do in your last 15 words, as you were already suggested not to a few days ago on RSN. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 20:19, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Dream Focus: of course the prime minister used it—the government has been using the term to promote environmentalism. But when I do a search for "安倍晋三 もったいない" ("Abe Shinzō mottainai"), almost none of the results use the word in the context of environmentalism—it's used almost always in the way that we (and the dictionaries cited) have been telling you.

If you're going to stick to English-language sources, then you have to stick to English-language sources—in which mottainai is an environmentalist slogan. To do otherwise is irresponsible.

By the way, why do you reject the dictionary sources given that give preference to the prosaic meanings of the word (often exclusively)? Japanese—Japanese dictionaries do the same. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 21:58, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

@Curly Turkey: They don't "give preference" to the prosaic meaning; they only give it, and don't mention environmentalism, since the environmentalist usage is just a context-specific application of its prosaic meaning (in Japanese; clearly in English it is a specialized environmentalist word). (Some of the dictionaries also give a religious meaning of "impure", but that seems irrelevant.)

BTW, @Imaginatorium: @Curly Turkey: @Margin1522: did you notice the spin-off article Mottainai Grandma?

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 22:07, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

It is not a spin off article, it is an article for a bestselling novel that got enough coverage in independent reliable sources to meet the notability standards for an article. I've made articles for books before when I noticed they had enough coverage. Dream Focus 22:37, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

"bestselling novel"? It's a short picture book. You first heard about it from me a couple of weeks ago, and since then apparently came across a few references to it while Googling sources for this article. But if you got from those sources that it is a "novel" then it is clear you did not read the sources carefully enough. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 22:44, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Novel, book, whatever. I don't see how many pages it has listed. It pops up in searches for information, so I figured it has enough coverage to have an article. Dream Focus 22:47, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

You created an article on it and didn't realize it was a children's picture book?! Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:09, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

The word "novel" sometimes just means "book". Typed the wrong word, get over it. Dream Focus 23:10, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) But you just indicated above that you thought the distinction between a novel and a children's picture book was based on the number of pages, and defended your error based on your not knowing how many pages there were and thinking it to be a novel, and you also added your article on the book to a cat for Japanese novels; you didn't simply type the wrong word here. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 23:16, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

I then soon after edited the article to change it to the proper category of Category:Japanese children's literature. But feel free to pick apart and whine about every irrelevant thing you can think of, I don't really care. Dream Focus 10:34, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

I then soon after edited the article to change it to the proper category of Category:Japanese children's literature. No, I did. The beauty of edit summaries is that, even after a revdel, one does not need admin or researcher tools to demonstrate revisionist claims like the above to be false. Anyway, please answer Curly Turkey's question below (timestamp 23:26). Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:04, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Nonsense. Your edit was in the first sentence where you removed the word "novel". I changed the category before you started editing. Dream Focus 11:12, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

TonyBallioni: can you confirm who changed the category? I remember it being Hijiri, but we can no longer see afte rthe revdel.

Dream Focus: while we're waiting to confirm, can you answer the question? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 11:16, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

It was definitely the cat I changed; my edit added four bytes to the article's size, which is exactly the difference in size between the words "novels" and "literature"; if I had removed it from the lead and replaced it with "book" there would be a negative one byte difference, while replacing it with "children's book" would have been +9. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:28, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Why the hell is this being mentioned here? I see in the one edit that wasn't blocked out [5] Japanese children's novels was a category, so perhaps I changed it to that, and someone else changed it to the current Japanese children's literature. Doesn't matter. That has nothing to do with this article here, or anything else. Dream Focus 11:29, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

To be clear, Dream Focus, you are the one who has honed in on this "issue". Both Curly Turkey and I have repeatedly asked you to answer the question What are your concrete objections to [the example lead CT wrote above that reflects the sources cited in the article]?, and you have been ignoring us to focus on the "bestselling novel" in question. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 20:36, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Of course it's directly relevant—all the edits you've made to that article are in reaction to what's going on here. Why aren't you answering the question, by the way? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 11:45, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Dream Focus changed it to Japanese children's novels at 18:07 on 25 February 2018. Hijiri88 changed it to the current category on 00:44 26 February 2018. The one revision cited above was not revdel'd because it was the one revision that did not contain a copyright violation. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:21, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

And he's done such a botch on the article. He has one source translating mottainai as "don't waste" and another as "wasteful" (opposite meanings!) guess which one he chooses as a translation? Of course, the one that contradicts every dicitonary. But, hey!—"Wikipedia goes by what reliable sources say"! And now we have two shitty, counterfactual articles instead of one. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:44, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

@Curly Turkey: I guess it's a problem of necessary punctuation and capitalization. In the children's book Mottainai Grandma (if I recall correctly -- I read it with a group of children of Japanese ex-pats in Dublin nine years ago) it is primarily used as a standalone sentence that could be accurately translated with the negative imprerative "Don't waste!", and so this translation being given in sources about the picture book makes a degree of sense. The problem is that it is being cited without the punctuation and so on, in a manner that could lead readers to believe "私はもったいないです。" means "I don't waste." It's possible that some of the popular news media sources are also getting this wrong. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:31, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

No way it's an imperative—it may imply "[don't be] wastful" the way urusai implies "[don't be] noisy", but that's strictly by implication (the way "you fucknut" implies "[don't be such a] fucknut")—punctuation and capitalization wouldn't change that. The important thing to note, though, is that Dream Focus can't even be bothered to sort out the sources they themself is citing. This is a major, recurring problem, as with the conflicting etymologies they've added (is it a Buddhist term or a parent's admonishment?) Dream Focus is repeatedly proving themself to lack the basic competence to put together these articles—and disruptively so. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 03:00, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

You mean "please don't look behind the curtain"? You're in over your head, Dream Focus. You don't understand the subject, and you're cherrypicking and misusing sources to push an agenda. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:14, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

There is no agenda. Wikipedia goes by what reliable sources say. The fact that some of you want to ignore what the Prime Minister of Japan said, a nobel peace winner says, and various reliable news sources from Japan as well those from other parts of the world say, is ridiculous. Dream Focus 23:18, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

@Dream Focus: I'm not ignoring what Koizumi said; I'm interpreting it in light of his position in the Japanese political sphere and the fact that he is of the generation of Japanese who grew up in the post-War years, as anyone with a basic education in Japanese history would. Anyway, can you please stop referring to him as "the Prime Minister of Japan"? He hasn't been prime minister for more than a decade, and Japan has gone through a half-dozen prime ministers since his term ended. As Curly Turkey noted above, the current prime minister appears to use the word far more often to simply mean "wasteful". Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 23:35, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Except (a) you're rejecting what several of our sources are saying; (b) you're rejecting the fact that the vast majority of Japanese sources use the word in its non-specialized senses; and (c) you're cherrypicking from our sources what to put in the article (offhand comments, mentions in passing, etc). Besides, Wikipedia sourcing policy is not "if a source says it, we get to say it, too"—there are WP:WEIGHT, WP:FRINGE, etc to consider.

The example lead I wrote above reflects the sources cited in the article. What are your concrete objections to it? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:26, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Just so everyone knows what we are talking about, there is a video on YouTube of the original book being read aloud. It takes about 5 minutes. The "last grain of rice" thing is on the first page, so that's where that came from. And there's also a video of the Mottainai song :) With lyrics and choreography by the author. – Margin1522 (talk) 11:46, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

@Margin1522: Yes, it's a very nice little book, and despite this discussion the above-described 2009 event will remain a fond memory for me. On a more relevant note, would you consider moving the above comment (and my present response)? CT's comment had nothing to do with Mottainai Baasan, so it looks like your comment was misplaced, and I already moved an earlier comment to avoid distracting from CT's very important final question. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:56, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Tally?

So far it's User:Curly Turkey, me and User:Margin1522 in favour of and User:Andrew Davidson against the proposal. @Imaginatorium: What do you make of it? @Dream Focus: You've been pinged a few times and asked to comment on the proposal, but have been silent; is it safe to assume you are neutral? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:18, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

• Consensus isn't a raise of hands, and Andrew Davidson's oppose was based his assertion there were no sources supporting it—since there are, we currently have no valid opposes. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 10:55, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

@Curly Turkey: I know, and the consensus is already obvious. But it would still be nice to know where everyone stands. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:09, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

• I have already stated why I am opposed to it. I didn't put the word oppose before my statement above though, so perhaps it was not obvious enough. Feel free to argue from now until the end of time if you want, neither of us will ever convince the other. Dream Focus 12:36, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

@Dream Focus: It's a bit disingenuous to say you've "already" stated why you opposed it when you only did so seven minutes earlier. Your implying that our poor reading ability is to blame for not understanding your "not obvious" statement that you hadn't posted yet is noted. Anyway, would you mind citing a source that supports your assertion that Its not just used by environmentalists? Are you referring to its mundane use as an everyday Japanese word? In English, the term seems to be used exclusively in an environmentalist context. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 21:33, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

I just noticed that the comment about which I received an email notification was blanked and replaced with the above, so the reason for opposition is not apparently mentioned anywhere. So ... what solid reason for opposition is left? Virtually every other comment since the proposal has focused on the children's picture book Mottainai Bāsan. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 21:41, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Dream Focus: It's not clear what concrete issue you have with my proposal. Could you be explicit? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 21:42, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

• Its not just for environmentalists, as I said before, in the section above this one, based on what the former prime minister of Japan and various news sources have said about it. The current lead is fine. Dream Focus 22:17, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

@Dream Focus: In English? Japanese politicians reminiscing about how a Japanese word was used when Japan was a poor war-ravaged country with food shortages doesn't really count because Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 22:21, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

If I may ask, where in the world did you get this? Have you read the speech? It talks about "protecting the planet", "global; warming", solar and wind power at the Prime Minister's residence, "mass consumption and mass disposal", and "how the 3Rs [Reduce, Reuse and Recycle] be encapsulated in this one word of 'mottainai'." Does't it seem fair to say that he had environmental concerns in mind when he said that? Someone explain to me why the article is "broken" if it cites this speech. – Margin1522 (talk) 04:04, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Margin1522: this is discussed elsewhere—the article claims that the word's origin is both in ancient Buddhism and form the mouths of stern parents. An article that contradicts itself is broken. This article is extremely poorly researched and unbalanced—it is a hodgepodge of snippets from whatever sources the editors could scrape together, rather than a summary of the scholarly consensus on the topic. The Koizumi quote is a perfect example of this—its factual veracity is in question, it is taken out of context, and it is given an inappropriate WP:WEIGHT (do the other sources agree with Koizumi)? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 05:14, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Well, I'm afraid this isn't making a lot of sense. The article never mentions stern parents, and even if it did, religions influence cultural norms and stern parents enforce cultural norms, so where is the conflict? Parents still cite Moses. About the sources, these articles don't spring fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. It might take a while. And why does Koizumi's quote have a problem with its factual veracity? It's from the cabinet office. Of course, he didn't say exactly that, because it's a translation. What he actually said was 　日本には昔から物を大切にする「もったいない」という言葉があります。 ... ３つのＲを一言で言えば「もったいない」ということです。 By factual veracity you mean that he had his facts wrong? – Margin1522 (talk) 08:35, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

"昔から" and "initially" do not mean the same thing. And where are parents teaching their children mentioned in the text you quote, anyway? Because that was the clear focus of the original article-breaking text. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:43, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

I think the quote's been replaced by a different one form the same article. Now we have a new problem---how on earth does one translate 日本には昔から物を大切にする「もったいない」という言葉があります。 as "In Japan, there has long been a spirit characterized by the word mottainai, which could be translated as 'don't waste what is valuable'."??? Neither "spirit" nor "don't waste what is valuable" are credible translations of what's in the original. Not that we should be spamming articles with the words of politicians. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 11:26, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Dream Focus: The proposal does not state it is "just for environmentalists". The consensus is that the current lead is misleading—even counterfactual—and will not stand. If you have a concrete issue with the actual proposal and can propose a non-problematic fix, this is your chance. If you are obstructing for the sake of obstruction—perhaps because you hold something against the proposer—then the proposal will go through as-is. This is your chance to demonstrate you can collaborate in good faith, Dream Focus. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 22:48, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

(P.S.—it looks particularly bad when you bring up the Prime Minister's quote again—we have an entire subsection on how that has broken the article. You'd be smart to strike that comment—sticking to it destroys your credibility.) Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 22:51, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Credibility with who? You two will argue nonstop no matter how many reliable sources are found or what anyone says. And your nonsense accusations against me obstructing for the sake of obstruction is ridiculous. Dream Focus 02:07, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

So there it goes out the window. You're defending your right to write articles that contradict themselves. Honestly, I'm considering ANI—between the multiple copyvios, the misrepresentation of sources, the refusal to work collaboratively, the contradictory text, the stonewalling, and the aggressive personalization of disputes, your contributions here have been extraordinarily disruptive.

As we have three supports and no opposes that count under WP:CONSENSUS (you can't oppose for the sake of opposing), I'm going to make the change, so that we no longer have a counterfactual lead. Any concrete issues with lead can be discussed with concrete porposed solutions here, by anyone willing to participate in a collaborative spirit. If you continue to disrupt, Dream Focus, I'm taking you straight to ANI. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 02:34, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Oh how dare not everyone agree with you. I find you both very annoying and I hope to never have to deal with either of you again. Kindly stop following me around to other articles. You both distort things, twisting them around so you can play the victim, and making ridiculous accusations against any who disagree with you. Dream Focus 02:52, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

"Oh how dare" we not allow the article to contradict itself? "How dare" we not allow copyvios to fill up the article? "How dare" we not allow you to fill the article with distortions of what your sources say? "How dare" we not allow you to WP:OWN an article whose subject you have no understanding of? Please read WP:CIR. You've given the rest of us a headache-inducing mess to clean up. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 03:07, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Etymology section now contradicts itself

This is almost certainly a COPYVIO and will need to be revdelled, but even paraphrasing it seems inappropriate. I'd say it's overwhelmingly likely that Koizumi was referring (a bit oversimplistically for his non-Japanese audience) to rationing during (and shortages following) WWII, and we are reading a lot into the use of the word "initially". It doesn't seem to be related to etymology at all. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 22:30, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

The article doesn't mention World War 2 at all. People had food shortages before then. And its not a copyvio. There are so many ways to rewrite the same information. Dream Focus 22:45, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

The paraphrase is so close to the original that it definitely needs to be revdelled. Also—it's a statement made by a politician pushing an agenda, not a historian. It's not acceptable as a source. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:12, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

And, oh my god—holy shit!—the article now does contradict itself! Dream Focus, this is exactly why we reject "if a source says it, so can we". You've now broken the fucking article by having it claim that the term originates both in Buddhism and in the mouths of stern parents! Why the fuck are you doing this?! What adult could possibly think this was an appropriate thing to do?! Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:33, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

• I've revdel'd that as a close paraphrase that was in violation of the English Wikipedia's copyright policy. I have no opinion on the content, and only revdel'd in my capacity as an uninvolved administrator. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:22, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Question

Not a noun, probably not a concept, etc... – would it nonetheless be linguistically correct to indicate "mottainai!" as a maxim? Something that just crossed my mind, so I just ask the question with no other intention than trying to get my head around this. --Francis Schonken (talk) 11:03, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Not a "maxim" by any stretch of the imagination, no—it's a an adjective, but a special type of adjective that in Japanese is used in a verb-like manner, so that "Mottainai!" in Japanese can be a complete grammatical sentence on its own (meaning "[it] is wasteful").

I've proposed a wording above. Do you have any issue with it? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 11:13, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @Francis Schonken: I don't think anyone is saying it is "not a concept" -- I honestly don't know what a "concept" is as that word has been used here and on RSN in the past week, so I could hardly argue that mottainai is not one. Put simply, it's an adjective meaning "wasteful" that, because of niceties of Japanese grammar, can be used without other words to form a sentence meaning "That is wasteful", "You are wasteful", "This is wasteful", "This whole thing is a massive waste of time and effort", etc. I doubt coming up with more words that could be used to describe it ("slogan" is another; "buzzword"; "aphorism"; "cliché"; etc.) would solve the problem, and this isn't an article on linguistics, so going into detail about what exactly the word is seems like a waste. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:28, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

They mean "concept" as a shorthand for "uniquely Japanese concept". Even if such a concept exists, we don't have evidence that mottainai and that supposed concept are one and the same (compare to an aesthetic term such as yūgen). Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 11:50, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Does this correctly interpret what the source says?

The text now says:

"In the 21st century, mottainai is used in Japan as a convenient one-word encapsulation of concerns about resource scacity, food security, environmental degradation, and the throw-away culture."

This is cited to Murko Siniawer, Eiko (2014). "'Affluence of the Heart': Wastefulness and the Search for Meaning in Millennial Japan". The Journal of Asian Studies. Cambridge University Press, Association for Asian Studies. 73 (1): 165–186. On page 166, the source states:

In postwar Japan, the most predominant association of "mottainai" was with wasteful as in, "what a waste!" - with the millennial incarnation widely used to criticize waste of various kinds, including the squandering of material objects and resources such as and energy. "Mottainai" thus became a convenient, one-word encapsulation of concerns about resource scarcity, food security, the proliferation of garbage, and a throw-away culture, and the term was used to push back against the perceived prevalence of consumerism, materialism, and environmental degradation.

Mottainai may have a use as a buzzword in this sense, but the wording "is used in Japan as" implies this is the default usage, which is absolutely counter to the facts (and the source does not state that the default meaning has ceased to be the default, as the article text implies). We have an awful lot of this misinterpretation of the sources in this manner going on in the article. It's exhausting trying to protect the article against this type of distortion (which it's still full of). What can we do about this? Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 03:02, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

I would say if it feels like too much work, simply cutting material that seems dubious and putting it on this talk page (or even a talk subpage) to be brought up to standard by anyone motivated enough to do so would be a good idea. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:30, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

The article says "Japan" and "millennial". The text says "Japan" and "21st century". Isn't that what she means? Where's the misinterpretation? Or is it that you want to distinguish between "widely used" and "default"? Sure, if you like, go ahead and change "In the 21st century, mottainai is used in Japan" to "In 21st-century Japan, mottainai is widely used..." if you think that makes it more understandable.– Margin1522 (talk) 13:16, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

"widely used" does not mean "primarily used", which is the implication of our article. One could say "The word come is widely used in contemporary English to mean ejaculate", and this would be completely true; but no one would say that telling a Japanese audience that that is the primary meaning of the word in English is not misleading. Also, the paraphrasing is too close, and will need to be removed and rev-delled, as virtually every single word of our text is lifted directly from the source. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 19:21, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

The article makes no claims about primary meanings. Other than that, I'm not going to reply to this. – Margin1522 (talk) 04:21, 3 March 2018 (UTC)|

@Margin1522: I was assuming good faith, but you know it's pretty disingenuous, after you've already been told off once on this page for inserting closely paraphrased text, to defend another instance of closely paraphrased text, as supposedly not being a misrepresentation of the source, even when you just lifted the whole paragraph from the second page of the article without any clear indication that you had even read pages 167-186. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 19:42, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

The orignal was four lines and 82 words. The text is a line and a half and 27 words. It's attributed with a footnote and as a summary of what she wrote there's nothing wrong with it. Just for you, I will put one phrase in quotes. If you can do better, go ahead. – Margin1522 (talk) 04:21, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

So I go to edit it, and find that it had been deleted. So I put it back. If you want to delete it again, please take it to dispute resolution. – Margin1522 (talk) 04:44, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

When more than one editor has concrete issues with the text, you don't just get to reinsert it. Some of the problems:

"In 21st-century Japan, mottainai is widely used as a "convenient one-word encapsulation" of concerns about resource scacity, food security, environmental degradation, and the throw-away culture."

This is a special usage, and is not marked as such, which is misleading, as mottainai is used literally every day without this baggage; t

"In his speech, Koizumi refered to the 3Rs (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle), and said that they "can be encapsulated in this one word of 'mottainai'"."

Koizumi did not originate this usage, so it's misleading to attribute it to him (WP:WEIGHT issues again), and the text implies that the term mottainai itself carries the baggage of the 3Rs, which we know it does not.

This is fairly typical of Wikipedia articles—editors take a magpie approach, slapping in anything they happen to come across without regard to how it comes across to the reader, to how balanced it is with the rest of the article, or to how representative it is of actual research on the topic. It's done in good faith, but makes for fantastically distorted articles. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 05:24, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Sort of struggling to understand what this is getting at. Of course Prime Ministers don't originate every idea they talk about. They get ideas from other people and support them or not. The intention here, from both you and Hijiri88 and his "tree-hugger" comment seems to be to compartmentalize "environmentalists" and relegate their concerns to a corner somewhere. I don't think that's very wise or even accurate. By now it's a politcal, economic, and social problem that should concern everyone and to a certain extent does. – Margin1522 (talk) 08:55, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

@Margin1522: Please retract the above personal attack. I have never used the phrase "tree-hugger" unironically, and the context above in which I used it in scare-quotes had a very specific, obvious purpose that was not meant to compartmentalize anyone, but merely to show you an example of the word's being used (by a comic relief sidekick in a fictional cartoon from the mid-1980s) with a connotation of man's exploitation of nature being a good, or at least morally neutral, thing (i.e., the opposite of an environmentalist sense). Your reading it the way you claim to above is either a deliberate attempt to misrepresent what I said or a gross failure to read comments before snidely quoting them in unrelated contexts. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 09:12, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

@Margin1522: It's not enough to simply remove some of the copy-pasted words, so talking about lines and words as you do in your first sentence is meaningless. If a source includes a unique construction like a convenient, one-word encapsulation of concerns about resource scarcity, food security, the proliferation of garbage, and a throw-away culture, you are not allowed simply remove a comma and swap out "the proliferation of garbage" for "environmental degradation" (which you also lifted from elsewhere in the same long sentence in the source) and call it a paraphrase. When every single word of your sentence (even "In ... the twenty-first century" appears in the abstract and presumably elsewhere) is lifted right out of the source, that is too much. You need to summarize in your own words, not simply borrow all your favourite words from the source and slightly change the order around. If you continue to reject this basic principle I'm going to have to place a warning on your talk page, and if you reject even that this'll probably end up at CCI. Unmarked quotation and close paraphrasing are extremely serious issues, and I'm not just saying this to undermine you and "win" a content dispute: I wrote the same thing in a message to another user before either you or Dream Focus had ever edited this page. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:04, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Go ahead. I added another sentence to tell the readers who she is and that she's writing a book on it. If you still want to pursue it, feel free. – Margin1522 (talk) 08:38, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

@Margin1522: Go ahead ... and do what? Are you being deliberately evasive so that you can avoid owning your own copyright infringement? The article currently includes copy-pasted text from a copyrighted source, and both the WP:ONUS and the WP:BURDEN are on you to appropriately edit it so as not to infringe on copyright; CT and I have both indicated that we don't think the text belongs in the article at all (and I don't even have access to the source), so demanding that we do your work and paraphrase the source for you is inappropriate. Or do you mean "go ahead and remove the text again", because you have not indicated any acceptance of our arguments, making this look very much like you are trying to goad us into an edit war.

@TonyBallioni: Sorry to bother you about this again, but when you get around to looking at the text for revdel as I requested earlier, would you consider issuing another warning to Margin1522, who apparently still doesn't understand what he is doing wrong?

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 09:12, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

@Margin1522: BTW, if you still doubt the seriousness of what you are doing, note that a case related to the same thing as you are doing (just on a potentially much larger scale) is currently at the Administrators' Noticeboard: WP:AN#Our most prolific article creator is (or was) a copyright violator... If we can't trust that your contributions are written entirely in your own words (words which you are at liberty to release under a free license), then articles you have added text to will need to be examined, and if your text is found to violate copyright, it will need to be removed or rewritten, and every single version of the article edited by any other editor that happened to include it will need to be removed from the public log. Mottainai, indeed. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 09:39, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

@Hijiri88:I must say this is outrageous. You demanded an atribution, so I wrote one, which you promptly deleted, and then turned around and are trying to get me warned for lack of an atribution? What is going on here? – Margin1522 (talk) 10:25, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

@Margin1522: What are you talking about? The last time I "demanded" attribution was in relation to a completely different set of quotations more than a week ago, where the quote marks were already in place but a lack of inline attribution made it ambiguous whom we were quoting. Here the problem is you using the exact same words as your source, without marking it as a quotation. I don't see what is so outrageous about my pointing out to you that this is a violation of our copyright policy. Do you understand this or not? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 10:35, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

There are quote marks, there is a footnote, the passage is rewritten and less than half the length of the original (27 words!), and there was an atribution, until you deleted it. Is this really the fight you want? You've been banned before for WP:BATTLEGROUND, but this is ridiculous. – Margin1522 (talk) 11:11, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

@Margin1522: The quote marks are only around a small portion of the lifted text, and you added them after I commented that the text was copyvio, indicating that at least at that time you understood (to a certain, insufficient, extent) that the problem was plagiarism. "Rewriting" by cutting some of the text but not actually changing any of the words you leave in is not sufficient rewriting for copyright purposes. As for attribution: I honestly have no idea what you are talking about; attributed inline or by footnote, word-for-word copied text must be in quotation marks, and I didn't remove any attribution -- what I did was remove a PEACOCK-ish and DATED inline description of the author of the source. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:23, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

OK, OK, you win. I have blanked the passage and a related passage, which harms the article, but I don't have the patience for this. Do I think it's wrong and unjust? Yes I do. But that's life. – Margin1522 (talk) 12:25, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Etymology

Per your comment, I only used peer-reviewed academic journals, I never used NPR. And the journals do describe mottainai as a "word". You could call it two words, but I'd rather describe it the way that the sources describe it. Also I never used any dictionaries. If the material were just a dictionary definition, it would only be in dictionaries. I found the etymology in academic journals. I see no consensus to delete the material. Above, @Margin1522: favoured mentioning the etymology. The material should be restored.Martinthewriter (talk) 03:00, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Okay, so a few points probably need to be made here:

1. Normally, if someone messages you on your talk page, as I did here, it is considered best practice to either respond in the same place or on the other person's talk page. Occasionally, you will get a message that was put on your talk page inappropriately, such as to avoid the scrutiny of posting on the article talk page, but in this case I messaged you because I considered this content issue to be essentially resolved, and was offering you advice about not restoring text without restoring the citations that were attached to it.
2. I only used peer-reviewed academic journals, I never used NPR This seems wrong -- the NPR source says Mottainai is an old Buddhist word and your text said It is an old Buddhist word. Also, you didn't actually "use" any peer-reviewed academic journals: you restored text to the article that had previously been removed, leaving some of the citations intact while removing the ones that didn't look like peer-reviewed academic journals.
3. the journals do describe mottainai as a "word" Well, in English it certainly is, but you are discussing it in terms of its Japanese etymology. As I said on your talk page, in modern Japanese it is essentially a single word (one of the so-called "i-adjectives"), and so it makes sense to describe it that way in certain contexts, but given that the nai form used in the Tokyo dialect of spoken Japanese only became standard in writing in the late 19th century, it is misleading to call it an "old word" -- it was mottainashi until relatively recently.
4. As for simply referring to it as a "word" in general, as I said on your talk page I have no problem with that and don't intend to change passages like the word is also used to mean "impious; irreverent" or "more than one deserves". You don't need to cite scholarly journals for that kind of stuff, and in fact Wikipedia is not supposed to mirror the writing style of scholarly journals.
5. You could call it two words, but I'd rather describe it the way that the sources describe it. Again, you are misinterpreting my comment. (Did you post your reply in a different place because you intend to misquote me?)
6. If the material were just a dictionary definition, it would only be in dictionaries. WP:NOTDICT says we don't include encyclopedia articles on random words and phrases that might have entries in a dictionary. The generally accepted rule of thumb is that if an article topic is a "concept" and not the word itself, then including extensive commentary on the etymology of the word is inappropriate.
7. I found the etymology in academic journals. Again, no you didn't -- virtually everything you "wrote" was verbatim taken from earlier versions of this article, so at best you simply checked the citations that were already present, and removed the citations that you couldn't describe as "peer-reviewed academic journals". Anyway, the fact that academic journals go into tremendous detail on such topics as "usage of mottai-nashi in medieval Japanese literature" doesn't mean we should -- that material may, however, be acceptable for wikt:もったいない or wikt:mottainai (the latter of which curiously doesn't list it as an English word.
8. I see no consensus to delete the material. Above, @Margin1522: favoured mentioning the etymology. The material should be restored. The content was removed from the article 21 months ago, and no one challenged its removal at the time. Please provide a diff if you believe M1522 posted that he opposed the removal and I somehow missed it, since "Ctl+F"ing the page for "etymology" didn't bring it up. Additionally, there six people involved in the discussion last February, so even if M1522 had mentioned that he favoured restoring it, it should be assumed that five others saw the comment and ignored it.
9. On a related: your account was created in January 2018, since which time you've made a total of seven edits outside the mainspace. Given this background, your showing up on a relatively low-traffic article and restoring text that had been removed in February 2018 (21 months ago), seems somewhat suspicious, especially your arbitrarily choosing to ping one of the editors who was involved in the February 2018 discussion but has hardly edited Wikipedia since. I am not necessarily implying that you are the same person, but if you received a notification on some off-wiki forum such as email or the like and came here to make an edit that someone else asked you to make, you are also generally required to disclose that.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 05:12, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

No, I'm not Margin1522, but I wanted to ping the last person involved in the discussion. It seems that the NPR article does have similar information, but it's better to use peer-reviewed scholarship. I exclusively used academic materials for the new information. I would prefer this discussion to focus on academic materials, not personal opinions. All the information added comes from academic materials, and it can only be refuted with other academic materials. For example, if the etymology was insignificant, why do most of the academic papers on mottainai mention it?Martinthewriter (talk) 05:31, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

@Martinthewriter: For example, if the etymology was insignificant, why do most of the academic papers on mottainai mention it? Well, why do most academic papers on the word "water" discuss the etymology of that word? Our article on the substance water devotes a total of two sentences to that word's etymology, giving a very rough outline of the history of the word going back to Proto-Indo-European; for most Japanese words (and mottainai is no exception) such historical details are not known at the moment, and may never be ascertainable, and yet you added nine sentences discussing everything from the supposed religious significance of the root word mottai (the target audience for most scholarly papers on Japanese historical linguistics would not need to be told that the nai in mottainai is a separate element that has no religious significance) to historical usage of the word in a medieval Japanese text. Additionally, use of the idiosyncratic translation "Record of the Genpei War" makes it quite likely your source, Morrow and Izor, consulted the 2015 version of Wikipedia; the story they say comes from the Jōsuiki actually, if one reads the citation they give, comes from the more famous "standard" Tale of the Heike, meaning that unless we consult McCullough to verify either that they were right and the word is used in the Jōsuiki (say, for instance, if McCullough cited a variant text in a footnote) or that they were wrong and McCullough actually says the Heike is the oldest use of mottainai (and they wrongly conflated the two quite-different works). Neither Morrow nor Izor (he links to his blog from here) is a specialist in any of the relevant fields, so we really shouldn't be assuming they are correct when their citation appears to contradict their text.

I would prefer this discussion to focus on academic materials, not personal opinions. Nothing I said above was a "personal opinion", although it is possible that I was assuming you came to this article with a relatively similar level of background knowledge to me. If you and I are interpreting sources differently because I know that scholars use mottainai as a shorthand for the classical mottai-nashi and you don't, then I would appreciate your disclosing that fact.

Do you read Japanese? If you read modern Japanese, are you also familiar at all with classical Japanese?

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:41, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Yes, of course I'm familiar with the history of the Japanese language, but I hate to impose my own ideas on an article. I prefer to just let the scholars speak for themselves, rather than contradicting them with my own ideas. I believe that the strong focus scholars give to the history of the term mottainai means that we also should inform readers of it. Even you admit that other Wikipedia articles discuss etymology, so you were wrong to revert the entire edit. You could have trimmed it instead. The etymology and the religious significance are both important issues widely discussed in academic articles, so I prefer giving the matter full due. Your problem again is that you cite no scholarship to back up your own ideas. I just want to cite the leading scholars, not nitpick their works based on my own research.Martinthewriter (talk) 06:56, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Stop inserting unverifiable content into the article, and stop misquoting sources.

Given that you have repeatedly lied and claimed you "got your information from academic sources", when really what you were doing was tagging random GBooks hits onto old, unsourced Wikipedia text, I see no reason to continue wasting my time by assuming good faith. You claim you are "familiar with the history of the Japanese language", but your actions here indicate otherwise, and given the number of times you've lied about having got your information from sources, I see no reason to assume you aren't lying when you claim to speak Japanese. (Answering the question "Do you read Japanese?" with "Yes, of course I'm familiar with the history of the Japanese language" is either a very evasive way of saying "No" or a very roundabout way of saying "Yes".)

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 07:09, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

I actually just checked, and the relevant page in McCullough is on GBooks. The quote as she gives it is A bow is not worth a life She attributes the quote to several "veteran warriors", not to a single vassal, and does not make any mention of the language of the source text at this point. So it's possible that Morrow and Izor were actually giving their own translation of a variant text that specifies a single vassal, but if that is the case then I really would rather see a book or journal article written by a specialist in the relevant field.

Additionally, I should apologize, as it seems your text did differ somewhat from the previous version, which doesn't seem to have recounted that Yoshitsune dropped his bow. However,Furthermore, your text claims Yoshitsune was on horseback, something not verified in either McCullough or Morrow and Izor (McCullough actually says Yoshitsune was "far from the shore"). Could you explain where you got the more detailed description of the story?

I did a search for the quote you did provide; it apparently came from an earlier version of the Wikipedia article than the one I was reading. Now that I have established that you are just tagging sources onto old Wikipedia text without actually checking what those sources say, I would appreciate if you would stop wasting my time by claiming you "got your information from academic articles".

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 07:09, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

No, all the information came from academic sources. And yes, he was on horseback, the original source says "rode". However, since Morrow and Izor did not mention this detail, I will delete it. The rest should stay though. We need to stick with the scholarship, not personal opinion. If necessary, we could start a request for comment, but I believe that is unnecessary since all this material comes from high quality academic materials.Martinthewriter (talk) 07:23, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

No, all the information came from academic sources. Stop lying. You reinserted unsourced text that had been removed from Wikipedia years ago and tagged on citations you hadn't read. Then when called out on this, you WP:SYNTHesized the Wikipedia text with what I explicitly stated the sources said (given the timing, you definitely could not have gone back and rewritten the whole text -- you just took out the word "horseback" and reworded the text slightly. And yes, he was on horseback, the original source says "rode". Most people don't ride horses out to sea -- they ride "boats" or "ships". And what do you even mean by "the original source"? However, since Morrow and Izor did not mention this detail, I will delete it. Umm ... what? Which source is "the original"? You still only cite Morrow and Izor.

The rest should stay though. We need to stick with the scholarship, not personal opinion. You are not sticking to scholarship, though -- you're tagging sources you haven't read onto Wikipedia text on the assumption that it's probably all the same. And please, please, please stop accusing me of editing based on "personal opinion" -- if you make this snide remark again I will request that you be blocked.

If necessary, we could start a request for comment, but I believe that is unnecessary since all this material comes from high quality academic materials. Again, stop lying -- you restored a previous version of Wikipedia without a care for whether your "sources" verified it. If you attempt to canvas !votes with a biased RFC question, I will request that the RFC be speedy-closed and you be issued a final warning (one instance of canvassing is not really a blockable offence).

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 07:37, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

It's not clear what you mean because you never attempted to use scholarly sources to contradict the scholarship I cited. I cited Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Saitama University and Journal of Analytical Psychology. I just want to seek a consensus in good faith, but I do believe that consensus ought to be based on scholarship, not personal opinion. Just reverting outright isn't helping matters.Martinthewriter (talk) 07:43, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

It's not clear what you mean because you never attempted to use scholarly sources to contradict the scholarship I cited. I don't need to, since the scholarship you cited didn't actually verify the content you attributed to it -- you just tagged a bunch of scholarly-looking sources, without reading them, onto the text you wanted to add to Wikipedia, which coincidentally was exactly the same as the text that was removed years ago. I just want to seek a consensus in good faith, but I do believe that consensus ought to be based on scholarship, not personal opinion. I have now asked you three times to stop claiming my edits are based on "personal opinion". DROP IT NOW. Just reverting outright isn't helping matters. I know -- so you should stop doing it. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 07:48, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

All the sources I cited back up what the article text says. You can check the Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Saitama University and Journal of Analytical Psychology yourself. I have read them, and they are accurately cited. Maybe if we take some more time to go over the material line by line, we can figure out what your concern really is. Right now, it's not clear why you think this scholarship is incorrect. I don't have so much time every day to keep posting, but it's better to discuss this slowly to get to the bottom of what is wrong, and not be so quick to revert.Martinthewriter (talk) 07:57, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

I miscounted -- you are in breach of 3RR. As for going over the material line-by-line, I would rather not -- I've already sunk far more time than I should have to based on my having assumed you weren't lying about the content of the one source you cited that I had quick access to. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:01, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

I still believe that the Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Saitama University and Journal of Analytical Psychology are good sources. Between the previous version based on the personal opinion of the anonymous, and the current version based on scholarship, I still favor the scholarship.Martinthewriter (talk) 01:09, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

@Martinthewriter: So, is it your intention to continue edit-warring and making bizarre non-sequiturs like the above instead of engaging in constructive talk page discussion? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:12, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

You made some good points above but there is too much text and too much commentary on side issues such as other editors and edit warring. I don't know if Martinthewriter's text (possibly restored from 21 months ago) is suitable, but their comment that "it's better to discuss this slowly to get to the bottom of what is wrong, and not be so quick to revert" is correct. At another time, we could check if old text was found and restored, and wonder how that happened. At the moment, it would be better to focus on the disputed text, one component at a time. Johnuniq (talk) 06:40, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

@Johnuniq: I did check, and it was restored, almost word-for-word, from content that had been previously removed as a compromise in order to resolve a previous dispute. The text included some new citations, which don't appear to support the content. Regardless of why this editor who was not apparently involved in the previous dispute has shown up now to try to undo the compromise, it is still inappropriate for him to do so. Several editors, one of whom is sadly no longer editing, came to the agreement that the article could remain as a standalone piece if it didn't include misleading commentary presenting "mottainai" as an "ancient Japanese concept"; before such material is restored, there would need to be a discussion as to whether the better solution would be to redirect the entire page and add that material to the Wangari Maathai article. Furthermore, claiming that the contentious material must remain in the article while discussion takes place, and also refusing to engage in discussion, is disruptive: Martin claimed four times in a row, despite numerous warnings to drop it, that I was basing my edits on "personal opinion" rather than academic sources, which completely turns WP:BURDEN on its head. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 07:40, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

I agree with Martinthewriter. The Journal of Asian Studies is an excellent source. Most of these articles are available online, and the articles do verify what's on Wikipedia. Hijri88, what you are doing is called original research. Martinthewriter has a good point. Where are the books or articles to refute the information that was added to the article? We have to assume that the journal articles are true unless a good scholar has refuted them. IvoryTower123 (talk) 18:56, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

@IvoryTower123: The Journal of Asian Studies is an excellent source. Most of these articles are available online, and the articles do verify what's on Wikipedia. Hijri88, what you are doing is called original research. Martinthewriter has a good point. Where are the books or articles to refute the information that was added to the article? We have to assume that the journal articles are true unless a good scholar has refuted them. It appears you have misunderstood this discussion. Please re-read it, and if you still do not understand, I would be happy to explain. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 20:15, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

If we do this step-by-step, then we could certainly start with Yamaori Tetsuo, who is cited in the Journal of Asian Studies. I believe that this is a reliable source. What arguments indicate it is unreliable?Martinthewriter (talk) 19:14, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Why does what Yamaori says need to be cited? Moreover, you still have not answered my question above, which is critical to citing Japanese-language scholarship: do you read Japanese? The fact of the matter is that you didn't read Yamaori and decide he should be cited in the article; you Googled up content that could be used to reinstate content that had already been removed per community consensus. (The quote comes from Eiko Maruko Siniawer not Yamaori, who wrote in Japanese; Siniawer presents it as a paraphrase, not a quotation -- this kind of clumsy editing is what happens when you Google up sources in order to "win" Wikipedia arguments rather than actually try to build encyclopedia articles, and you can ask User:Nishidani, or rather User:CurtisNaito, about that.) It's clear you didn't actually go out and find the Journal of Saitama University source you cited either, since you reinstated the now-dead link that had been removed years ago. I actually did find it (here) -- it kinda verifies what you attribute to it, except referring to a word as part of the cultural heritage of a people who speak that language is ... not really something worth noting, and as was noted last February the religious sense of the word ("impure") is quite unrelated to the "wasteful" meaning employed by environmentalists, so I would be reluctant to take the word of an early childhood pedagogy scholar writing about environmental awareness for Japanese kindergarten students that Yamaori, a scholar of religion, was conflating the two. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 20:15, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Have been belled to drop in, read the above and perhaps comment, all that comes to mind is the following quotation from 夏目漱石, それから (1909) 新潮文庫　1968 p.33.

言葉丈は滾々として、勿体らしく出るが、要するに端倪すべからざる空談であるNishidani (talk) 21:35, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

@Nishidani: It's not entirely clear what you mean to draw attention to with the above quotation. Is all this talk of "academic sources" 勿体らしい because the "reliable" ones all happen to come from within a year or so of Maathai? Are the words (言葉丈) coming out of both sides abundant (滾々) but ultimately meaningless? Given your past interactions with me, I'm a little inclined to interpret it as meaning I am wasting my time engaging in either 端倪 or 空談 on this mess. (And you'd be right: I'm way behind on my WAM entries this year.) But then again you might be saying that the whole thing is pointless and therefore the one who instigated it should be given a slap on the wrist and the previous status quo restored? I enjoy engaging in back-and-forths with you about this stuff on your talk page or by email, but leaving that quote there in this particular context is just a little unsettling. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:01, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Shit, or do you simply mean that this conversation is 端倪すべからざる空談, and you only included the rest of the quote to pun on 勿体らしく出る and 勿体無い? (Another interpretation would be that you provided the Soseki quote using 勿体らしい to discredit by somewhat-clumsy and not-well-qualified statement further up that 勿体 by itself was essentially a dead word.) Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:05, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

What's that line by Falstaff? 'I am now about no waste; I am about thrift.'

With a topic like this, it can be the case that the available sources do not adequately address the obvious issues that an article would require for completeness. Therefore those that can perceive the obvious fact that 'mottainai's rise to prominence as an ancient Japanese value, and therefore to be redeployed as a verbal prop for a charter (in Malinowski's sense) of efficient recycling and waste disposal in the ecology of an industrial nation, feel that the description ignores the possibility that we have the 'invention of a new tradition' (per Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).

What one needs, or should look for, evidently, is material

(a) on the use of mottainai in Japanese, not just with one instance from the Genpei Jōsuiki, but a study of the Buddhist usage behind it, and the use of mottai/mottainai historically in Japanese from early times down to the present, including evidence of the semantic changes the latter underwent.

(b) Ascertaining if mottainai was a traditional key word in metropolitan waste disposal in premodern Japan. I don't think that, on having a crap, an Edoite, like Rodin's Thinker, got into a stink wracking his/her brains in the 憚りや wondering how to dispose of the resultant 下肥 in order/ordure not to waste it.

(c)From the mid 17th century the central authorities began to regulate waste disposal to increase crop productiveness, by informing farmers, who until that time had no systematic care or technology for recycling, on how to recycle waste (不浄). Buddhism and Shinto had nothing to do with it: it was a result of state efficiency informed by material on this in Chinese agricultural manuals.　Was there any harping on a value specified as mottainai in those periods? Probably not. The value argument pitched to peasants concerned kegare, filthiness, and, in rational terms, how to turn 'dirt' into gold, by making discarded matter productive.

(d) Read books like Ishikawa Eisuke (石川英輔)'s 大江戸リサイクル事情 (講談社,1997) where you would expect to find it.

In any case, unless one finds secondary RS research that is aware of the historicity of what is now becoming a cultural meme, there's not much one can do.Nishidani (talk) 13:27, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Points (a) through (d) all look very reasonable, and I intend to work on it after WAM is over. Not that I feel I should have to (see below) but to prevent this mess from ever flaring up again.

That said, I don't think I agree with there's not much one can do. It has always been my interpretation, and I would hazard to guess the interpretation of most good-faith Wikipedians, that Wikipedia's notability guidelines allow for the deletion/merging of articles on topics for which there exists not enough reliable secondary source coverage for a standalone Wikipedia policy that also complies with our other core policies of NPOV and NOR. I could go and add commentary to the article debating the reliability of this or that source for this or that claim, and pointing out how the Seisuiki and/or Heike passage in question is not expressing some kind of deep Buddhist/Shinto/Pastafarian belief in the innate value of things so much as a simple earlier instance of a now common Japanese word for "wasteful" (since the passage actually shows Yoshitsune and his men debating the relative value of bows of various levels of quality as compared with a human life and/or the notoriety one might earn for having stolen someone's bow that they were too gutless to get back), but that would violate NOR. Simply "matching the sources", though, sometimes violates NPOV -- I don't think that's the case here, since it doesn't seem like any of these sources (at least the reliable ones, since obviously a kindergarten teacher writing about child psychology is not a reliable source for Japan's religious heritage) actually support the questionable content, but it was the case with Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Samuell Benta. (Actually in that case the conflict was between NPOV and BLP, since no original research would be required to make the article NPOV, just using sources that are reliable for information on random comic books but not for biographies of living persons. But the principle is the same.)

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 13:48, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I do read Japanese. The Journal of Asian Studies article cites Yamaori Tetsuo as a scholar holding that view. I did a great deal of reading of the pertinent sources before making these edits, so I know what I'm talking about. Yamaori Tetsuo feels that this matter warrants being written about, and Eiko Maruko Siniawer felt it warranted being mentioned. For this reason, we also should be mentioning it. I don't understand why scholars would write in such detail about matters that are not important. They must be important to at least mention. And if you don't agree with these scholars, we'll just include it as the opinion of x scholar. We can't deny that certain scholars have an opinion on this and view it as important. If we Wikipedians don’t view it as important, we'll just state it as the opinion of x scholar. Finally, I see no evidence of an earlier consensus. There was never a request for comment to determine consensus.Martinthewriter (talk) 02:02, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

I did a great deal of reading of the pertinent sources before making these edits, so I know what I'm talking about. Then why did you make so many obvious mistakes? Yamaori Tetsuo feels that this matter warrants being written about I'm sorry, but have you read Yamaori 2006? It appears to be an interview, meaning Yamaori didn't actually write anything. These constant misquotations of reputable scholars are beginning to border on BLP violation; I would urge you to be cautious. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:10, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Moving forward

Okay, so at this point it seems I'm not going to get anywhere by trying to invoke the February 2018 discussions and ignoring bad-faith comments that do not address the specific content but repeat the phrases "academic sources" and "personal opinions".

So let's discuss content. I have not read either the Sato or Siniawer sources currently cited in the article, as both of them exist behind paywalls, and I learned a long time ago that it is a tremendous waste of both time and money to buy sources cited by one's opponents in Wikipedia disputes (75% of the time the sources just demonstrate that they are being misquoted in bad faith, and the other 25% either other free sources are available that say the same thing or the other party provides a quotation on the talk page that satisfies). I should not have to go out and read the sources myself, though, because the WP:BURDEN is always on the party wishing to include the content to demonstrate that their Wikipedia text is directly supported by their citations. Moreover, I have read a different Siniawer source published more recently that includes the exact same text, so either Siniawer used the same text twice, or modified it for whatever reason (in which case the new sources, accessible on GBooks, should take precedence). In that source, it is not clear at all that Yamaori was describing mottainai as an old Buddhist word rather than, say, that the concept behind it, that "the Japanese" find wastefulness regrettable, is linked to Buddhist ideas of evanescence and transience. Moreover, Siniawer calls the "assumption that there was a pure and unchanging Buddhist idea of mottainai which predated modern life" -- the whole drive of the recent changes to our present article -- "problematic". Given this, I can't believe that Siniawer 2014 could support the recent changes when Siniawer 2018 seems to reject them. (And no, Siniawer is not her "personal opinion" that got around the peer review of The Journal of Asian Studies: Cornell University Press is a perfectly good academic publisher.)

I am, however, willing to reconsider the above if a quotation from Siniawer that seems to contradict my interpretation of Siniawer 2018 could be provided.

As for Sato 2017, could one of the editors who claim to have read it (I see one above, User:Martinthewriter, directly making the claim, and the other, User:IvoryTower123, making a seemingly non-sequitur remark that the sources are "reliable", which assumes they say what they are cited as saying, and do not say anything that implies they agree with the above quotation from Siniawer 2018; assuming good faith, I guess IT123 has read the sources and takes it as a given that they verify the content, consequently changing the argument to whether they are "reliable") please provide the relevant quotations that they believe to support the present article content, as well as any information on whether they explicitly agree or disagree with the sentiment expressed in Siliawer 2018 that this notion of an ancient and unchanging "philosophy of mottainai" is problematic?

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 05:26, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Furthermore, regardless of the general reliability of the 埼玉大学紀要, this source, written by a doctor of psychology (specializing in developmental psychology and early childhood education) and a teacher (?) at オイスカ上海日本語幼稚園 is definitely a sub-optimal source for the text Mottainai has been referred to as "a part of the Japanese religious and cultural heritage." It doesn't mention "religio-", "Buddhis-" or "Shinto" -- or even "spiritual-" or "animis-" -- anywhere else in its text, and even the source it cites for this background statement, Hirose, Y. (2008). Social Psychology on environmentally conscious behavior. Kyoto: Kitaohjishobou. (Japanese) is ... weird, since there about 8,000,000 Japanese-language titles that could theoretically be translated that way and "Hirose" is a transcription of at least 16 distinct Japanese family names (admittedly most of them probably only used by one or two households throughout the country) while "Y." is not very helpful, so the only thing that can be firmly established is that this was the publisher. Through some sleuthing I was able to find this title, which is almost certainly the one Shuto and Eriguna were using, but neither this Yukio Hirose nor this Yukio Hirose is not a scholar of religion, linguistics, history, or even Japanese literature/culture; the former he is a professor of psychology and the latter is a professor of natural science. (Given that the latter appears to write about coffee almost exclusively, I think the odds are that the editor of the volume in question is the former, but I've been unable to verify it.) (Sorry, I noticed that the 関大 bio actually lists the book as one of his edited volumes.) Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:44, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Here having stumbled across this dispute at a noticeboard. My understanding from having read the discussion above is that there is a disagreement as to whether we should describe the term mottainai as a Buddhist term; please let me know if this is not correct. On review of some of the edit history, and the discussion above, I have concerns about some of the sources being used. I would concur that while academic studies on pedagogy and psychology are interesting to many of us, they are not necessarily reliable for things outside those disciplines - including origins & history of terms such as mottainai. Have reviewed the Shuto reference, a study on childhood pedagogy (outside the appropriate fields of study); the supporting text there is in the "Background" section (which I would not consider reliable) and references Hirose, Y. (2008). Social Psychology on environmentally conscious behavior. (again outside the appropriate academic field). The same issue with academic fields holds true for Sato Yuriko's article in the Journal of Analytical Psychology. These sources are not reliable in this context. Before I trawl further through the edit history of the article, are there any other sources that I've missed? - Ryk72 ^talk 07:58, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

I also consider that the Shuto & Eriguna source in isolation is not sufficient support for inclusion of content in the lead section (per WP:DUE); and that the lead should reflect the body of the article. - 08:10, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

@Ryk72: Thank you for stopping by! (And for the message you have apparently left on my talk page while I was writing this; I haven't read it yet.) As should be clear from the above, you and I are in basic agreement on "Shuto & Eriguna (2013)", which I have actually already removed based on the fact that it was cited (quoted) in the lead but not in the body. (I am refraining from reverting back entirely to the previous version, but potentially dubious content in the lead that isn't also verified in the body is a definite no-no. If one of the editors who disagree with me were to add it back to the body but not the lead, or both the body and the lead, I would not revert that pending consensus.)

Before my recent edits, there were basically four sources cited for the disputed text:

1. Shuto & Eriguna (2013)
2. Siniawer (2014)
3. Taylor (2015)
4. Sato (2017)

Of the above, I have disputed 1 and refuted 2 with another source by the same author that appears to contradict what we attribute to her. 3 is news to me (it appears to have been added in after a separate source, "Morrow & Izor (2015)", was found not to verify the content we attributed to it; I haven't checked the new source yet, but am naturally skeptical (an essay with the title "Material Flows: Human Flourishing And The Life Of Goods" sounds like an inappropriate source for a statement about medieval Japanese literature). 3 was found above to contradict the material it was cited for, and to in turn be contradicted by both its own cited source, and apparently to have taken the relevant information from Wikipedia. 4 is currently inaccessible to me, and I am requesting a more detailed quotation from the editor who claims he has read it.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:39, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

I just noticed now, but the Sato article was also briefly discussed last year.[6] Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 09:45, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

I haven't misread any of the sources. I just didn't want to impose my personal views, so I just stuck with the literal reading of the relevant scholarship. The previous version only says "according to Yamaori Tetsuo", so the point is just to reflect his general viewpoint. I'm alright with your addition of "Eiko Maruko Siniawer said", though it was hardly necessary. This just demonstrates the importance of refraining from reverting as you just did. If you have tiny quibbles like this, the text can be tweaked a little without needing to delete much.​ ​ I'm familiar with Yamaori Tetsuo's writing, and of course he is a specialist scholar of religion, so I know that Eiko Maruko Siniawer did not misrepresent him, though I don't know why Hijiri88 is so mistrustful of all these scholars. Like I said, we should just adhere to the scholarly consensus and nothing more. The tagging of that source was definitely wrong, as was the tagging of Yuriko Sato, whose article was accurately represented. Many sources likewise cite sociologist Yuko Kawanishi, who is also a reputable scholar. As far as I know, the idea that mottainai is a Buddhist term is not in dispute. The ideas of Yamaori Tetsuo, Yuko Kawanishi, and Yuriko Sato are obviously well established. To be clear, I am fine with adding an alternative point of view, if you have a good source for it. I don't want the article to include only one opinion, but again, I haven't seen a reliable source arguing that mottainai is not a Buddhist term. The preponderance of peer-reviewed articles specifically dealing with mottainai demonstrate this, and there is no source countering this point of view.​ ​ Also, I don't agree with removal of Kevin Taylor's essay. You're disputing it based on your own opinion, but there is no reliable source disputing it. If necessary, we can say "in the opinion of Kevin Taylor", though that shouldn't be necessary.​ ​ I guess the best way forward from here is to seek a request for comment.Martinthewriter (talk) 22:16, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

You're disputing it based on your own opinion, but there is no reliable source disputing it. Kevin Taylor's essay is contradicted by his own cited source! McCullough is one of the most renowned scholars of Japanese classical literature in the history of the west. The tagging of that source was definitely wrong, as was the tagging of Yuriko Sato, whose article was accurately represented. Give me the quotation. You have given me many reasons not to take your word on the matter, and you have now been asked twice to provide a direct quotation. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 23:50, 13 November 2019 (UTC)