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There is a growing interest in the Japanese appreciation of nature in environmental philosophy. However, numerous studies on the subject put forward several ambiguities and contradictions about the Japanese conception of nature. This article aims to investigate these ambiguities and contradictions by considering the Japanese word shizen as an "untranslatable". In philosophy, the investigation of the meaning of an untranslatable term includes determining its polysemy in the source language and clarifying the difficulties when the term is translated into another language. To this aim the article examines the semantic differences between shizen and nature, the conceptual difficulties in defining a particularly Japanese conception of nature, and the semantic history of the term shizen. Such an examination reveals not only the significance of the polysemy of shizen in the discussions on the Japanese perception of nature but also how different meanings of the term nature intermingle in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]