Haiku, Japan, and the misunderstood
The Dodgers are back in the World Series.
The Yankees are also back in the World Series. It will be the 22nd time for the Dodgers, the 41st for the Yankees, and the 12th time both teams have met in the final series. Yankees have won 8 of those meetings. I think Ohtani gives the Dodgers an edge this year, but the Yanks will have the advantage in pitching. It’ll be a good series.
Needless to say, you know which team Japan will be cheering for. Me too.
The best part of autumn is hearing the night insects.
friend cricket, sing louder
i can’t hear you
from my bath
Finally the evenings are starting to get cooler here. Maybe the true autumn is finally coming! And with the cooler evening weather, we are getting some night insects, especially the crickets. As I’ve written before, listening to the night insects in Japan is a very traditional sign of autumn, and one that people have long looked forward to.
Over 1000 years ago in her famous Pillow Book (枕草子, Makura no Sōshi) Sei Shonagon wrote:
日入り果てて、風の音、虫の音など、はたいふべきにあらず。
Which might be translated something like:
When the sun has completely set, the sound of the wind and the chirping of insects—it is beauty beyond words.
Japan has loved the sound ever since.
Bathing in Japan is another long tradition. Growing up in the States, taking a bath was always considered a thing for children only. Some adults might enjoy it, but bathtubs in general are too small for adult sized people to really enjoy soaking, which may aid the image that they are only for kids. In Japan, however, bathing is considered much more important for everyone. Bathtubs are much deeper so that the water level can be at shoulder height and we can really soak and relax.
Both of these traditions I have embraced—especially the last. Soaking in a hot bath at the end of the day is one of those small pleasures that really make the end of the day so much more enjoyable.
The other day I was listening to the crickets after the sun went down. It was getting late so I wanted to go take my bath, but then I was disappointed that I couldn’t hear them anymore from the small window in my bathroom. Mentally I started urging them to sing louder. Then I realized I had a haiku.
You may not know the name Ward Christensen, but he was a key figure in what led to the modern internet. He co-created BBSes in 1978.
Their new system allowed personal computer owners with modems to dial up a dedicated machine and leave messages that others would see later. The BBS concept represented a digital version of a push-pin bulletin board that might flank a grocery store entrance, town hall, or college dorm hallway.
In many ways BBSes led to the modern internet. This is a nice overview of his accomplishments by Ares Technica.
LINK: Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age, dies at age 78
Autumn is usually lauded for its beauty, but it has its downsides.
battling the flu
with moans and shivers
my son
I’ve written many posts about the joys of autumn. The colored leaves (yet to come here this year, but the idea anyway), the night insects, the cooler weather in the evening, and so on. There are a great many good points to autumn.
But there is one big bad point: Autumn is typically the start of flu and cold season. Autumn allergies too, but those usually aren’t as bad as in the spring. It’s the ease of catching a cold or flu due to the drastic temperature changes and our tendency to not wear enough that haunt this season. Even as adults we sometimes fall prey to this season, but it is kids who tend to get sick and suffer the most.
And that’s exactly what happened to my oldest. The other day he came home from school with a fever, then slept for 12 hours straight. In the morning his fever was gone but he still didn’t feel well. Then at night it came surging back, passing 39°C (102°F). We took him to the doctor and, you guessed it, flu.
Oh well, that’s how it goes. He’ll bounce back in a few days, as kids tend to do. But at least for the time being, he’s having a rough time, with body aches, pains, and all the works.
At the risk of catching the bug myself, I was sitting with him last night. Mostly reading silently, but telling him motivational things when he started complaining about how much it hurt. Sometime in the process, I pulled out a notecard and wrote down the above haiku.
I originally wrote the last line as my poor son but I think it does better without the adjective, allowing the reader to fill in their own image.
There are several kigo (season words) related to sickness. I was surprised to see that flu is in my saijiki (kigo encyclopedia). Surprised because flu in Japanese is “influenza”, but rendered in the Japanese accent as i-n-fu-ru-e-n-za, which is seven syllables! If one wants to use this kigo and follow the traditional 5/7/5 form, this could only fit in the middle line and it would take all of it. More common would be kigo like seki, “cough”, or kusame, “sneeze”, or other symptoms. Most are kigo for winter.
What do you feel when you think of Autumn?
秋立といふばかりでも寒かな
aki tatsu to iu bakari demo samusa kana[1]
autumn’s here—
just those words
make me cold
—Issa[2]
There is something about the idea of Autumn that makes us cold, isn’t there? Even just that hint of winter coming in the morning and night hours can make us shiver, perhaps more at the anticipation of what is to come than what is here already.
It is usually a welcome chill. After the hot summer, the idea of cooler weather, of having to wear an extra sweater, of needing something to warm our hands, the thought of these things give us some pleasure.
But even in that somewhat welcome chill, in the premodern world, it wasn’t all fun and games. Winter was not exactly a fun experience and the Autumn chill was a reminder to start preparing for it. No central heating meant that even well-off people were cold almost all the time. This was especially true of Issa who was hardly well-off. He was poor and lived in little more than a shack. Even on autumn nights, he was probably freezing.[3]
Issa wrote this in 1822 when he would have been 59. As we get older, cold bothers us more and more, and no doubt this was the case for Issa as well, contributing to the feeling of this haiku.
Most Japanese houses these days still don’t use central heating, nor do they have the best insulation, making winter still quite a cold experience at times. ↩