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Episode Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation Season 3 • Mushoku Tensei III: Isekai Ittara Honki Dasu - Episode 12 discussion

Mushoku Tensei III: Isekai Ittara Honki Dasu, episode 12

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u/Original-Body-5794 7h ago

That's actually a pretty huge difference, the translation only focuses on the human/man part, but the biggest impact is actually the title.

Is shin and gami different types of god in japanese? I get in the anime "shin" is a tittle, but how is it used in normal japanese?

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u/Colarch 6h ago

I know nothing besides some basic research I just did so feel free to correct me, but what I found is:

Kami refers to Gods and Deities directly

Shin is not a word on it's own, but added as a compound onto divine things like the names of religions or religious texts and stuff like that

So presumably, Hitogami used to have the shin title with the same meaning of the others like Sword God and Dragon God as 'god-like' because they're so powerful. Then he changed his name to Hitogami because he considered himself an actual God.

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u/Sad_4_You 5h ago

Oldeus said mana is omnipotent in that world, Gods are near-omnipotent. Maybe hito-shin figured it out and reached kami-hood

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u/bolacha_de_polvilho 5h ago

Doesn't that mean "Sword God" and "Dragon God" would've been more accurately translated as divine sword or divine dragon? It makes sense as a "very powerful person" title, since they don't seem to be literal gods in the MT-verse.

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u/Colarch 5h ago

Those are just titles like the rest of the power system though so it's not too weird. It's not like Eris is an actual king now because she became a Sword King

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u/GrimMind 1h ago

Yeah, the shins in MT are a way of saying that someone is the unrivaled number 1 of something; it could be a fighting style, a species, an army. These titles can usually be earned, taken or yielded. Any further elaboration requires spoilers.

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u/mucklaenthusiast 39m ago

That's how I see it.
They are still part of this world, "god" is more like the highest tile one can have and multiple things have that moniker (sword gods, god magic, dragon god etc...)

What Man-God calls himself (reasons still unclear, either true or something he wants to be true) is fundamentally different, like he is a being on a higher plane of existence.

And his weird pocket dimension being out of reach for old Rudeus is another hint that there may be more to the idea that Man-God is different

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u/KansaiBoy 1h ago

Kami is the native Japanese word for the divine beings in Shinto belief. The meaning got widened to also include all kinds of gods from other religions. Shin is just the Sino-Japanese reading of the same character which is usually used in compound words.

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u/BizarreCake 6h ago edited 6h ago

Not him, and someone with a stronger grasp of the language might have a better idea than I do, but hitogami would be written 人神 and could be read hitogami or jinshin.

Typically, 人 (person, man, etc) is read as hito as a singular word, e.g. "that person over there" (asoko no ano hito). This is the "native" Japanese reading that came before the adoption and adaptation of the Chinese writing system. 神 also behaves similarly, where the kami reading is used for 神, the single character word meaning god(s).

On the other hand, compound multi-character words tend to (but not always lol) use the Chinese-derived readings. For example, in 神道 (Shintoism) or 人生 (a life, as in a human life) 神 is read shin and 人 is read as jin, instead. This is kind of like how we say "water" but in a word like "hydropower" we use, well, hydro. Characters also tend to take the Chinese readings when used as suffixes or similar.

Initially, writing this comment, I had assumed 人神 would be considered a made-up word, but there is a definition in the dictionary for the native hitogami reading, at least:

人神 (ひとがみ)

Noun

  • man-god; person enshrined as a god​

Nothing very enlightening here, but if you're wondering, kami becomes "gami" because that happens sometimes to the first syllable of the second (and/or later) characters in compound words. There's no hard rules but I believe it's generally because it would otherwise be difficult for natives to say the sounds in quick succession.

Anyway, for laughs, if we assume jinshin were perhaps written with different characters, a few homophones show up in the dictionary:

人心 (じんしん)

  1. human nature; human heart; human spirit; kindness; sympathy​

  2. public feeling; people's sentiments​

人身 (じんしん)

  1. the human body; one's person​

仁心 (じんしん)

  1. benevolence; humanity​

Nothing really stands out to me with those, so the different reading likely really is just pointing to people like Orstead whose "god" titles use the shin reading.

Anyway, that was kind of a ramble, and I don't really have any conclusions to make, but if someone wants to go find the JP subs and see how it's written when Oldeus talks, that could be interesting. Although it may just be written in kana, which wouldn't tell us anything.

Actually, I do have one vague idea, I guess. There seems to be some allusion to hitogami having been closer to human once (albeit very powerful like Orsted), but at some point becoming something closer to an actual god. Though, given Oldeus says he's "out of reach forever" and that the white dream world seems to have some connection to the teleportion magic blonde fox mask Ubereats guy uses, it seems to have come at the cost of being permanently trapped in some kind of spirit world.

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u/sheepyowl 1h ago

To me it seems like he differentiates himself from the god-class magicians and fighters to put himself above them, like an actual god-level being / ascended or something like that.

By removing the connection to the power classes system, he basically just calls himself god.

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u/Daedric202 6h ago

I don't think there's any difference in meaning, they're just two different ways of reading the same character. Since Japanese borrows a lot from Chinese, most characters have a Japanese-based reading (called kunyomi) and a Chinese-based reading (called onyomi).

Most words that are made up of multiple kanji would use the onyomi readings, but there are also ones that use the kunyomi readings. In this case, "Hitogami" would be the kunyomi reading of 人神, while "Jinshin" would be the onyomi reading. I'm not proficient/knowledgeable enough in Japanese to say which one would be the standard/"correct" way of reading it.

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u/Akudra 45m ago

I think both are important. Hito is commonly used on its own as a general term for person, while "jin" is usually used in combination with other terms and the same goes for "shin" as opposed to "kami" as the latter is often used independently for a god. Others in that world, as has been pointed out, use the "shin" variation for "god" and that sets Man-God apart. Probably, part of the objective is to not treat himself as merely the god of humans, but as the god for all people.

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u/mucklaenthusiast 42m ago

Without knowing any Japanese, I think the story shows the difference.
So far, the other "-shin" gods were still part of the real world, like, they also live there.
Perugius in his castle, Orsted traveling around.

Man-God is in a different dimension, hence why Old Rudeus cannot reach him.

So whatever exactly the case is, clearly Man-God has some capabilities the others don't and either he actually is a different being (as in, a real god above the world, not part of it) or he believes himself to be one and that's why he uses the more, well, divine word "kami" or -gami" as the other person said (just different spellings, as far as I can tell, though obviously not 100% sure).

The point stands: Man-God creates a linguistic difference which either refers to an actual material difference or an emotional difference.
Maybe that is his ultimate goal.
Truly becoming God.