WHAT DOES YAHADA MEAN?

Now why was the tribal deity of the Hadas called "Yahada" and then later changed to "Hachiman"? Here we must pause for a moment to consider the influence of the Chinese culture, which these immigrants brought with them when they first entered Japan Like the countries of Northern Europe sucked at the breast of their Mediterranean mother, so also did Japan in her early years feed at the teats of China. No doubt the importation of numerous Chinese books was not an unmixed blessing because since then, Japan has been burdened with the Chinese system of reading and writing. Japanese itself is a language of simple phonetic structure, but with polysyllabic, highly inflected words. It can be written so easily with phonetic symbols. What a pity then, that children since time immemorial in these islands, have had to learn a foreign system of writing that is not adaptable to a phonetic transcription or representation of inflections. In itself, the Chinese language lacks inflections, and in ancient times words were mostly monosyllabic. As a consequence thereof, the Chinese found it possible to develop and hold to a writing system in which all the individual words were represented by separate symbols, which were originally pictographs.

In later years, the Japanese developed a syllabus of their own for spelling out words either by themselves, like the Roman alphabet, or in conjunction with the Chinese ideographs or characters; before this, it was necessary when writing to use vocal renderings of these Chinese ideographs, irrespective of their meanings, in order to transliterate the Japanese polysyllabic words and phrases, and to provide the inflections, that are so common in the Japanese, but so utterly lacking in the Chinese language .

The result of this can best be made clear if we consider the written numeral and alphabet used in most Western countries today. The symbols 1, 2, 3, for instance, convey the same meaning to everyone, but they differ in their vocal renderings in different languages. Similarly, the symbols U2, or E-10, in their normal visual form, would be understood by all; but they would lose their original sense and be utterly incomprehensible to anyone knowing, for example, nothing but French or German if they had to be used as a transliteration of the English words, "You, too" and "Eaten."

Had Japan been a neighbor of some Western country using a Phonetic script such as the Roman alphabet, the Japanese would have quickly learned to write and read their own native tongue efficiently and with ease, but unfortunately the Japanese islands were cast into the Pacific Ocean, close to the East Asian mainland instead of being set down somewhere in the middle of Texas or California; thus resulted the cumbersome writing system. It was because of this adoption of the Chinese characters that the title of the tribal deity of the Hadas was changed from YAHADA-no-Kami (Japanese reading) to Hachiman-Shin (Chinese reading).

There are several theories as to the etymology of the word "Yahata" or "Yahada." The ancient Nestorian Christians in China and Persia had adopted several Greek terms into their religious life. Some of these Greek terms had been in turn opted into the Greek from the Hebrew. One of these terms as "Yahada." The famous scholar and anthropologist, Dr. Yoshiro Saeki, believed that the term Yahada originally came from the Hebrew "Yehuda," meaning one who is descended from the Hebrew Patriarchs. These Nestorian Christians called themselves "the tribe of Patriarch" and preserved their patriarchal community, and the Greek word became corrupted with time to be pronounced "Hada." In the Nihonshoki, there is an account that describes a serious clash that took place between the Yamato Court and the Hada tribe, because the court refused to recognize the patriarchal nature of the Hada clan.

President Shazar, however, said to me, "The God of Yahada may suggest ' Jehovah ' or 'Yehudah' (meaning Judah), but to me 'Yachad' (meaning community) seems more appropriate. For instance, the Qumran Sect, who lived a communal way of life in caves near the Dead Sea, was called 'Yachad'. They upheld a strong Messianic belief and their religious practices might ha influenced the religion of the Yahada tribe."

Another interesting theory holds that "Yahata" meant the "sea" in the ancient language of Silla (Korea). The tribe may have been called so, because they had come from the other side of the sea. This reminds us of the word "Hebrew," which means "ones from across the river." This theory is quite probable because many of the descendants of the Hada tribe used the symbol of sail-boats as the family crest in the latter part of the feudal era. It is more than probable that these symbols were originally those of the tribe of Zebulun, the seafaring people of the Silk Road, because the sailboats depicted or the family crest of the Hada people are exactly the same in every detail as that found in archeological discoveries in Israel. If one were to take one of these sailboats emblems to any rabbi, orthodox, conservative, or even reformed, and ask him what they remind him from the Silk Road. His reply 10 times out of 10, will be the Tribe of Zebulun.

Hada also means weaving in Japanese. This is not surprising, in light of the fact, that before the arrivals of the Hadas, weaving was unknown to Japan, and the Japanese gave the name of these people to the craft which they introduced into Japan.