How to Read “A bad wife is a hundred years of crop failure”
Akusai wa hyakunen no fusaku
Meaning of “A bad wife is a hundred years of crop failure”
This proverb means that if you marry someone with a bad personality or behavior, the negative effects will last your whole life. Your entire life becomes unhappy.
Marriage isn’t a short-term relationship. It’s a long journey you walk together with someone. You see each other every day and share both happy and hard times.
Because of this, your partner’s influence on your life is huge. A “bad wife” doesn’t just mean someone you don’t get along with.
It means someone who doesn’t respect their husband, creates chaos at home, and ruins relationships with others around them.
People use this proverb to teach how important it is to choose the right marriage partner. It’s used when warning young people not to pick someone based only on looks or temporary feelings.
It’s also used to describe someone’s unhappy marriage situation. Today, we need to be careful using this proverb because of gender equality. But the main lesson about choosing a life partner carefully is still important.
Origin and Etymology
There are different theories about where this proverb came from. No one knows the exact source for sure. But we can learn interesting things by looking at the words used.
Let’s focus on the phrase “hundred years of crop failure.” In old Japan, farming was the basis of society. A bad harvest wasn’t just about losing money.
It could mean life or death. If crops failed for one year, the whole village could starve. If it lasted a hundred years, it would be a complete disaster with no recovery.
The “hundred years” here doesn’t mean exactly 100 years. It’s a way of saying “your whole life” or “almost forever.” Japanese has many expressions using “hundred years.”
For example, “even a hundred years of love can grow cold” or “waiting a hundred years for the river to clear.”
What’s interesting is comparing a bad marriage to “crop failure,” a farming term. For common people in the Edo period, the home was also the center of economic activity.
Husband and wife worked together on the family business. They raised children and prepared for old age. When this didn’t work well, it was like having fields that produced no harvest.
In other words, having a bad wife was like owning farmland that gives you no crops year after year. This expression probably came from farmers’ real-life experiences.
Usage Examples
- He says “A bad wife is a hundred years of crop failure” is true, and he really regrets not being more careful when choosing his marriage partner
- I advised my friend before his wedding that “A bad wife is a hundred years of crop failure,” so he should carefully judge her personality
Universal Wisdom
This proverb has been passed down through generations because it contains a universal truth. It’s about “the weight of our choices” in human life.
Our lives are built from countless choices we make. But among all these choices, marriage is special. Why? Because it’s not a one-time decision.
It’s a “continuing choice” that happens every single day. From when you wake up until you go to sleep, you share everything with this person. Joy, sadness, success, failure—all of it.
Whether your partner lifts you up or pulls you down changes the quality of your whole life. This difference is fundamental.
Our ancestors understood something important. Human happiness doesn’t come only from external success. It comes largely from daily relationships, especially our closest ones.
You might succeed at work and make lots of money. But if you can’t relax when you come home, you can’t feel truly happy.
This proverb shows that humans are social creatures. We live especially through close relationships. We can’t live alone.
That’s why choosing who to live with determines whether our life is happy or unhappy. This has been true from ancient times to today, and it will never change.
When AI Hears This
In complex systems science, we know that small differences in starting conditions grow exponentially over time. Choosing a marriage partner is a perfect example of this principle at work.
For example, imagine small negative words every day create 10 minutes of time and mental cost. This seems tiny at first. But in complex systems, interactions matter.
That 10-minute loss reduces your work efficiency by 5 percent that day. This leads to lost income opportunities and declining health. This chain reaction is what makes a nonlinear system.
In a linear system, 10 minutes × 365 days × 50 years equals about 3,000 hours of loss. But in a nonlinear system, negative feedback builds up like compound interest.
Stress dulls your judgment. Bad judgment causes more losses. That creates more stress. If this cycle continues, the initial small negative impact multiplies by tens or hundreds of times.
The expression “hundred years of crop failure” captures this exponential growth perfectly. You can recover from one year of bad harvest. But a hundred years means losses across generations.
This proverb understood the essence of complex systems science hundreds of years ago. It shows how crucial initial choices are.
Lessons for Today
This proverb teaches modern people about the importance of “daily quality of life.”
We often get distracted by big successes or dramatic events. But most of life is actually built from ordinary daily moments.
The home you return to every day. The person you see every day. The words you exchange every day. Whether these things are comfortable or painful completely changes the color of your life.
In modern society, we have many “environment choices” beyond marriage. We choose workplaces, places to live, and friends to spend time with.
This proverb’s lesson applies to all these choices. Don’t look only at temporary appeal or surface conditions. Imagine yourself spending every day in that environment. This is what matters.
And if you’re in a difficult environment now, it’s important to have courage to change it. You don’t have to accept “a hundred years of crop failure.”
You only live once. You have the right to choose an environment where you can feel peaceful. When your daily life is happy, your whole life becomes happy.
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