Kotodama: The Spiritual Power of Words in Japanese Culture
Published in
4 min readMar 13, 2024
In Japanese, the word “kotodama” is written with the following two kanji characters: 言霊. The first one, koto, means “speech” or “word,” and the second, tama, means “spirit” or “soul.” Kotodama can be roughly translated as “word spirit” and refers to the belief that words contain spiritual power.
Basically, positive words hold positive power, while negative words hold negative power. These powers can influence one person’s environment, occurring events, and mind. Therefore, we should be careful of the words we use because their…
