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Before boarding a flight to Europe this summer, I passed through the security gate and sat down to put my shoes on again. When I looked up, a multilingual sign caught my attention. In English, it said, “Don’t touch the table,” which struck me as strange. Could someone undermine security merely by touching a table? If so, it seemed there wasn’t much security to be had. I worried about that for a moment until I noticed the Japanese version of this sentence. I’m going from a vague memory here, but the sentence was something like this:
テーブルを触らないでください。
Tēburu o sawaranai de kudasai.
Or was it longer than that? I know I recognized everything except 触.
Leafing through my dictionary just now, I came upon the expression 手を触れるな (Te o fureru na), “Hands off!” Maybe that’s what I saw! Perhaps the airport speaks much more roughly to Japanese people than to others!
At any rate, I deduced that 触 meant “to touch,” but I didn’t know why horn (角) + insect (虫) would combine to have that meaning. Of course, 角 can also mean angle, as in 三角 (sankaku: triangle, three + angles). Did 触 somehow mean “touched by an angle”?
Frustrated at having no way to research this kanji, I kicked myself for not having thought to bring a Japanese dictionary to England and Norway.
I had, however, brought an annotated Japanese book of stories to read on the plane. In a Kawabata sentence, I soon encountered 触 again:
今のことには一言も触れなかった。
Ima no koto ni wa hitokoto mo furenakatta.
She did not say a word about what had just happened.
Here’s what the annotation said:
今のこと (ima no koto: events of the moment)
一言も。。。ない (hitokoto mo … nai: not a single word)
触 (fu(reru): to mention)
Huh? Had the security sign said, “Please don’t mention the table”?
Multiple Meanings
I wasn’t able to resolve these mysteries until I got home and reunited with Jim Breen (in a cyber way). I found that, as is so often the case, 触 has loads of meanings and multiple yomi:
触 (SHOKU, fu(reru), sawa(ru): to contact, touch, feel; to hit; to proclaim; conflict)
Breen makes no mention of “mention” as a possible meaning. Ugh! Nor do Halpern or Henshall. But after consulting Spahn and a native speaker, I came to understand the following:
• Sawa(ru) only means “to touch, feel” in the physical sense.
• Fu(reru) can similarly mean “to touch” in the literal sense but can also have a broader, more abstract meaning, as in “to touch (upon), announce, mention.”
Here’s another way to think of it. If a butterfly alights on a leaf, that’s either sawa(ru) or fu(reru). If I alight on a topic, that can only be fu(reru).
In English, as well, “to get in touch” usually has a nonphysical meaning (although I now realize that nonnative speakers might mistake “I’ll get in touch with you” or “I’ll contact you” for come-ons!).
Henshall offers more insight into 触 and how its components have evolved.
Let’s look at one of these meanings today, leaving others for next time.
Sensory Experiences
You probably know 感 (KAN: emotion, feeling, sensation), an extremely common character that shows up in loads of words about feelings. When it teams up with 触, they produce this useful word:
感触 (kanshoku: sense of touch; feeling; sensation; texture (of food while chewing))
This compound plays a part in one interesting phrase:
外観と感触 (gaikan to kanshoku: look and feel)
outside + appearance + feeling + to perceive by touch
I like the repetition of KAN in this phrase. And I like the way the perspective changes from outside (sizing up the appearance of something) to something more internal (as when one closes one’s eyes and runs one’s fingers over a surface).
The next word also helps you talk about your impressions of things:
触り (sawari: touch; feel; impression (of a person); most impressive passage; punch line)
There’s a lot going on here—just look at all the possible meanings! Failing to make sense of this strange assortment, I asked a native speaker for his input. Given that 触り can mean “to feel,” he wasn’t surprised to see “impression (of a person)” in the list, because those meanings seem somewhat close. But he has never seen 触り used as “impression (of a person),” and his dictionaries don’t include that meaning. To help me understand 触り as “most impressive passage,” he wrote a sample sentence, which you’ll find at the link.
He also said that Japanese people tend to use 触り in compound forms such as 手触り (tezawari) or 舌触り (shitazawari), where 触り means “touch, feel.” You’ll encounter these compounds in the Verbal Logic Quiz, so I won’t define them here. And guess what? It’s already time for your quiz, so you don’t have to be in suspense any longer!
