What does 心臓を捧げよ Shinzou Wo Sasageyo mean?

Shinzou wo sasageyo means offer up your heart. In Attack on Titan it is the soldiers' cry, given with the right hand raised to the heart, and it is also the title of Linked Horizon's opening theme for the anime's second season.

The phrase, taken apart

心臓 (shinzō) joins 心 (shin), which KANJIDIC glosses as heart, mind and spirit, with 臓 (zō), entrails or viscera. The second character is what makes the word anatomical: Daijisen defines 心臓 as the organ that drives the circulation of the blood, a fist-sized pump in the chest, a little to the left.

を (wo, pronounced o) marks the object. 捧げよ (sasageyo) is a command form of 捧げる (sasageru). Daijisen derives the verb from sashiagu, to lift up, and gives its first sense as holding something in both hands above eye level; from there it means to offer something respectfully to gods, buddhas or superiors, to devote love or sincerity, and to pour everything one has into something, as in devoting one's life to research.

The grammar of an order read aloud

Verbs like sasageru have two command endings. Daijisen's entry on the imperative gives both kinds among its examples, 見ろ (miro, look) and 起きよ (okiyo, get up). Wiktionary's Japanese verb appendix spells out the division: -ro is the spoken imperative, -yo the written one. Sasagero would be the spoken command; sasageyo is the written one, and one reading is that this difference in register is much of why the line sounds ceremonial rather than merely loud.

The words themselves are ordinary. Daijisen's example for the dedicating sense is the sort of line printed in the front of a book, この小著を亡き母に捧げます, I dedicate this small book to my late mother. Its entry for 心臓 even records a colloquial use: calling someone a heart means they have nerve, as in telling a friend they have some heart to ask a particular person for a loan.

What it means in Attack on Titan

When Mynavi News asked its members for the most memorable lines of the Attack on Titan manga, 心臓を捧げよ!! came second with 8.5 percent, credited to Erwin Smith. The article notes that the cry appears repeatedly in the story and that soldiers raise the right hand to the position of the heart as they shout it.

The official Season 2 site lists 心臓を捧げよ! by Linked Horizon as the Season 2 opening theme, on the album 進撃の軌跡 released May 17, 2017. Speaking about that album, in a quote BARKS reported on May 18, 2017, the group's leader Revo said that rather than rewriting the source so it looked like his own, he would proudly pull in the words of Attack on Titan, and reword only what he judged better in his own words. BARKS reported in December 2021 that the song was the first by Linked Horizon to pass 100 million plays on Spotify, and ranked fifth in Spotify's 2021 list of Japanese music most played overseas.

Heart, or heart

English uses one word for the organ and for the seat of feeling. Japanese can keep them apart: 心 read as kokoro is the mind and feelings (this site has a page on kokoro), while 心臓 is the organ Daijisen describes as a pump. The phrase chooses the organ.

One reading follows. Offering your shinzō is not offering your feelings or your loyalty in the abstract; it is offering the organ that keeps you alive, which is to say your life. An English heart can mean either, and the Japanese line, in the written grammar of an order, picks the one that beats.