The Japanese word that causes problems for vs debating

 There's a word in Japanese that I have found causes signifigant problems in vs debating, not that it should mind you, just that people are exploiting the world's ambiguity to massively wank certain verses. This is a word that if you are going to be debating Japanese verses you may wish to know. This word is 世界 or "Sekai". Literally translated this means "world" and that translation is generally perfect.

You may notice the word "world" is somewhat imprecise and in the same way so too is "sekai." When you say "world" what comes to mind? Most likely what comes to mind is the planet Earth. However "world" can mean smaller things. If a 10 kilometer meteor was going to hit the Earth you would say it's "the end of the world" but in reality it would not end the planet, just most life on the planet. You can make reference to various types of world: the world of sports, the prehistoric world, the Islamic world etc. or use it in sayings such as "a world of difference between". You can also, less commonly, use world to mean something bigger then the planet. such as the universe or indeed the multiverse if you say "change is a constant in this world." The general theme here is that when you say world you mean the totality of something, in other words it's everything comprising a subset. "Sekai" functions virtually identically. When you say "sekai" the primary meaning is the planet Earth but you can use it to mean society or various subsets of the Earth (you could say a fish for instances lives in the world of a lake) or use it to mean something bigger like macrocosmic structures. 

Here's the problem: it's a usually intentionally amibigous word. It is not specific enough to use in the way people are trying to use it. There's a clear double standard here some are using. Let me tell you what this would be like if you were to use world in the same way sekai is used. There's a point during Infinite Crisis where Post-Crisis Superman and Golden Age Superman fight and their fight creates a blow that shatters the "world". They're fighting over the universe so this definitely means it should be at least a universal feat. But DC's world is way larger then a universe so it's an archetypally infinite feat.

Except no, that's completely ignoring the ambiguity of the word "world". Some people recognize this double standard but go the other way and say yep, that's a universal feat right there. I'm saying the inverse. There's a lot of times I can see where people are taking Japanese works where the word "sekai" is used and scaling that to the maximum extent of the verse regardless of the ambiguity of the word "sekai". Most times you see the word "world" by itself in a Japanese work it is translated from "sekai" and to keep that ambiguity means it should be at most planetary. There's a very common type of this where people take two seperate statements that contain the word "sekai" and then put them together to mean something that if it was in English would never be taken as evidence. Here's an example.

"The Demon World has different seas, continents, skies and stars to your reality."

"Quick! Stop him! He is threatening the Demon World!"

This is a random example that I use just to seperate from pre-conceptions. The person analyzing will take the first statement to say the Demon World is multi-stellar in size and the second to say the character is multi-stellar. But that's ignoring that "world of demons" is as ambigious as saying the world of humans and that world can be used in two different ways in two different statements. The second statement I would read as at most planetary and possibly just meaning a threat to all life there.

Try and interpret foreign works as close as possible to how you would interpret your own and don't try and read additional meaning into words. Japanese has it's own ways of saying universe ("Uchu") and multiverse ("Tagen uchu") and most times if the writer wants to say universe or multiverse, they will use those specific words for it. 

The reason this is a sore spot for me is I like to debate Sailor Moon and have history with this tactic because of it. A long time ago, people constantly downplayed SM by saying words didn't mean what they literally meant. There's a statement in SM that the Lambda Power "restores everything to the static cosmos". People would then throw at me "Sailor Moon takes places in the galaxy so cosmos here means galaxy" even though cosmos literally means universe. Now people are doing the same tactic but in reverse, including for Sailor Moon. They'll say "Sailor Moon's cosmology includes alternate universes so cosmos means multiverse" even though again Cosmos literally means universe. I try and stick as close as possible to the words in the text.