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January 2002: A Word Puzzle

I was asked to translate a technical paper on the design of semiconductor materials, which was destined for publication in a physics journal. It ended with the following closing paragraph:

This just didn't seem to make any sense. To illustrate the problem, the following table shows the meaning and pronunciation of each character. [Note: Most Japanese characters can be pronounced using either a traditional Japanese pronunciation (kun-yomi) or a pronunciation derived from Chinese (on-yomi). Also, I've added accents to differentiate the long vowels from the short ones.]

The units SHÔ and GÔ are often used when measuring volumes of sake. So had the author taken three seasons to write the paper and consumed 2.5 SHÔ (about a gallon) of sake in the process?

I eventually discovered that this is a form of Japanese rebus that plays on the large number of homophones in the Japanese language. First we have all the seasons of the year apart from autumn. The Japanese for "autumn" is aki, so this can be read as "no autumn", or aki nai. This represents the word akinai, which means "trade" or "business". The next two characters simply mean "two times masu", or masumasu (which means "more and more"). Finally, the last two characters mean "five times gô", which in terms of capacity is the same as half a masu. By combining the on-yomi for masu with the prefix han (meaning "half"), we end up with hanjô, which means "prosperity".

The whole thing actually means "May business become increasingly prosperous", or perhaps "Onward and upward". It is pronounced akinai masumasu hanjô, and normally it would be written as follows:

But why did the author of a complex technical paper on physics decide to end with a rather obscure word puzzle?