natsukashii

What it means

You are back in your hometown for a funeral and take the long way to the station. As you pass the primary school, the lunch chime plays, the one it played in 1994. You say “natsukashii” to nobody, out loud. A Japanese speaker says the same word when an old classmate walks into the izakaya, when a song from middle school comes on in a shop, or when a sweet that was discontinued turns up at a corner store.

Natsukashii is the pleasure of the past arriving in the present. Digital Daijisen defines the main modern sense as recalling people or things you were once close to and enjoying the feeling of being back in that time, with the example of familiar faces gathered after thirty years. The stress falls on the enjoyment. Nothing has to be gone for it to work: the friend is standing right there.

It is an everyday word, not a literary one. Jisho.org marks it as common and lists it at JLPT level N2. It is often said on its own, as an exclamation.

Where it comes from

Both Kotobank dictionaries derive the word from the verb natsuku, which Wiktionary glosses as “to become fond of” or “to keep close”. It is an i-adjective, the class that inflects by itself without a helper word: natsukashikatta in the past tense, natsukashiku as an adverb.

In its oldest uses, in the eighth-century poetry anthology Man’yōshū, it meant drawn to something and wanting it near. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, quoted on Kotobank, says the sense of fondness for the past arose after the medieval period, and its earliest example is the Noh play Hagoromo, in a text of about 1548. Wiktionary gives the same two dates. A related compound, natsumero, from “natsukashii melody”, means an old hit song.

How to use it

Kono kyoku, natsukashii ne. (この曲、懐かしいね。) “This song takes me back, doesn’t it.” Casual spoken Japanese; the ne at the end invites the other person to agree.

Ekimae no kissaten ga mada atte, natsukashikatta. (駅前の喫茶店がまだあって、懐かしかった。) “The café by the station was still there, and it took me right back.” Casual narrative; the past form natsukashikatta shows the i-adjective inflecting on its own.

What it is not

Anemoia. Anemoia, John Koenig’s coinage, is nostalgia for a time you never lived through, set off by other people’s photographs. Natsukashii requires that you were there. A Japanese twenty-year-old looking at 1960s Tokyo street photos may feel something, but natsukashii is the wrong word for it. The same person hearing the theme song of a cartoon from age six will use it at once.

Nostalgia. English nostalgia usually carries loss: the old house is sold, the friend has moved away, the feeling is wistful and private. Natsukashii is warmer and has no loss built in. It is said aloud, often with a laugh, at the moment of recognition. Writing for SoraNews24, Scott Wilson recalls two girls at a Dance Dance Revolution machine shouting the word on spotting an old song, and found no English phrase that fit.

In the wild

• Akino Arai, Natsukashii Mirai (懐かしい未来, “a nostalgic future”), her first studio album, Victor Entertainment, 1986.
• Scott Wilson, “Is there an equivalent of the Japanese word ‘natsukashii’ in other languages?”, SoraNews24, republished by Japan Today, 2018.