What does 木漏れ日 Komorebi mean?

Komorebi is sunlight that has come through leaves. It appears in every list of beautiful words English supposedly lacks, and the lists are wrong about it in a specific and correctable way.

The word is transparent

木 is tree. 漏れ is leaking, from a verb used for water through a roof and information through an organisation. 日 is the sun and its light. Tree-leak-light.

Anyone who knows those three elements can decode the word on sight. It is not opaque, it is not ancient, and it does not contain a concept that has to be explained; it is a compound describing exactly what it depicts.

What the listicle genre claims

That the existence of the word proves an unusual sensitivity to nature, and that English has no way to express the idea. Both parts fail.

English has dappled, which does the same job, and has been describing light through leaves in verse for centuries without needing a noun for it. What English lacks is not the perception but the habit of packing a description into a single compound, and that is a fact about word formation rather than about attention to trees.

Japanese compounds like this constantly

The language builds nouns by stacking elements, so a phenomenon that English would render as a phrase becomes a word. Once that is understood, the famous supply of Japanese words English supposedly cannot render turns out to be a supply of ordinary compounds, each of which English expresses in three or four words and always has.

The interesting question is not why Japanese has the word. It is why English chose phrases where Japanese chose compounds, which is a question about grammar.

The other error, in the opposite direction

Having established that the word is unremarkable in construction, it is worth not overcorrecting. This is not a term people exclaim on a walk; it leans literary, and it is more likely to appear in writing and in the titles of things than in daily speech.

So the listicles get it wrong twice: they treat a transparent compound as mystical, and a somewhat literary word as an everyday one.

What is actually worth noticing

That animation has been rendering this effect obsessively for decades, and that the visual convention is far more culturally specific than the vocabulary is. The word is a compound. The habit of pointing a camera at light through leaves for four seconds is a style.