A dawn moon, a chanting monk, and a blossoming plum — what could they possibly have in common? You’d be right to guess “nothing”, but Issa thought otherwise. Read on!
有明や梅にも一つ鉢たたき ariake ya ume ni mo hitotsu hachi tataki[1]
dawn moon —
by the plum tree, another
monk beating his bowl
—Issa[2]
Morning at Beppu, by Kawase Hasui
In winter, monks of the Pure Land sect would beat their bowls and chant for 48 days. The ritual honors Kūya (903–972), who first performed it in commemoration of a deer killed by a samurai. That may seem like a silly reason to make a racket for 48 days, but the deer isn’t really important: compassion for others is the point. Hearing these sounds would have been a familiar feature of life back then.
The haiku itself layers several kigo. We have “dawn moon”, a traditional kigo for late autumn when the moon lingers in the morning sky. It suggests the waning of autumn. Then “plum tree”, a kigo for spring, hinting at new life. Finally, “bowl beating”[3], a kigo for winter.
Maybe Issa wrote this in late autumn, when the morning moon suggested the season’s end and he could imagine the bowl beating soon to begin. Or perhaps it had already started. I’m not sure how precisely these events would have lined up in 1813 when he wrote this.
That year was momentous for Issa: his first daughter was born, only a year after his first son had died in infancy. His household would have been filled with both grief and hope. Maybe thoughts of that were in his mind when he wrote this.
Chinese characters have long fascinated me. That fascination isn’t unique to me, I know — Westerners have been drawn to them for centuries, sometimes with questionable results. Think of the tattoos inked across arms and backs that, to anyone who can actually read them, range from nonsensical to downright embarrassing. Strength often turns out to say “noodle soup”. Love might really be saying “cheap”. Winner might actually be rendered as “Stupid foreigner”. Still, their visual pull is undeniable. Even when they’re wrong, they look right enough to impress someone at a bar.
What interests me most, though, isn’t the aesthetic but the history. For centuries, Chinese characters functioned as a kind of universal written language across East Asia. Japan, Korea, and Vietnam each pronounced words differently, but the characters themselves carried shared meaning. A merchant traveling across the region might be unable to follow the chatter in a marketplace, but if he saw the character for “rice” written down, he knew exactly what was being sold. It was a remarkable bridge: one symbol, many voices. If you’ve ever struggled to order food in a foreign country, you can appreciate how miraculous that must have felt.
It’s easy to forget how unusual this was. Europe never had anything like it. Latin spread widely, yes, but you still had to learn Latin. No shortcuts. Chinese characters worked differently. They were like a plug adapter: whatever your language’s shape, they fit. Japanese layered kanji onto their own syllabaries; Vietnamese combined them with chữ Nôm; Koreans used hanja. The spoken languages diverged, but the written ones held steady. For the literate, crossing borders didn’t mean starting from scratch.
Of course, all good things eventually end. Japan simplified characters one way, China simplified others another way, and Korea and Vietnam eventually abandoned them in favour of alphabets. The result? A traveller who once could decode menus and poems across the region would now be reduced to staring at squiggles wondering if that dish was beef or blowfish. Progress is rarely as tidy as historians pretend.
Fast forward to the modern world. In 1964, preparing for the Tokyo Olympics, Japanese designers faced a problem: millions of visitors, hundreds of languages, not nearly enough translators. Their solution was pictograms: simple images that spoke for themselves. A swimmer meant “pool”. A stick figure pedalling meant “cycling”. A person on skis meant “broken ankle waiting to happen”.
The idea worked so well that a decade later the American Institute of Graphic Arts adapted it for U.S. airports, and soon the icons went global. Wherever you land, a knife and fork means food, a plane silhouette means departures, and a bed means hotel. For the jet-lagged traveller who can’t remember how to say “toilet” in French, it’s a lifesaver.[1]
Which brings us to today. Emoji. Born in Japan in the late 1990s as a cute pager gimmick, they’ve become the closest thing we have to a universal script. A red heart works in Paris, Bangkok, or Nairobi. A crying face is instantly understood. Admittedly, nuances creep in (some cultures use 🙏 as “please” or even “thank you”, others as “pray”, and still others as “high-five”, which must make for some very confusing text exchanges) but the core idea holds. Tiny images cut through linguistic noise.
And unlike kanji or Olympic pictograms, emoji have personality. They’re playful, ironic, sometimes absurd. They let us say “I’m fine” while attaching a face that clearly says “I’m not fine at all”. They carry tone in ways words often fail. It’s not inconceivable that they’ll someday slip into formal writing the way punctuation did — how soon before you come across an academic paper ending with 😂?
The urge to find a universal language never seems to die. From brush strokes on bamboo to glowing screens in our palms, we keep inventing new sets of symbols that everyone can share. We just change the medium. And, inevitably, someone gets them tattooed.
So yes, I wonder: how long until we see the first emoji sleeve tattoo? Probably it’s already out there. A row of 🍕🍔🍟 down one arm. A tasteful 💩 on the ankle. Some future archaeologist will dig up these remains and conclude our civilisation worshipped hamburgers and poop.
Hmm… and that wouldn’t be too far off.
During WWII, my grandpa was in a French village and needed to use the toilet. He asked as best he could, but the result was ending up in a room with only a sink and no toilet. Luckily, men have a solution to this problem. ↩
As the guest in a linked-verse gathering in Iga, a young Bashō gave the following opening haiku:
詠むるや江戸には稀な山の月 nagamuru ya Edo niha marena yama no tsuki[1]
gazing up—
the mountain moon is rare
in worldly Edo
—Bashō[2]
“Autumn Full Moon at Ishiyama” by Hiroshige
Bashō was just 33 when he wrote this.[3] He had been struggling for four years to survive in Edo and was now back in Iga, his hometown. While there, he was invited to a renga session[4] and, as the honored guest, gave the opening verse: this haiku.
On the surface, he’s offering a very simple image. The phrase yama no tsuki, “mountain moon”, was a classical image in Chinese and Japanese poetry, evoking purity, solitude, and nature. A fitting, elegant beginning.
But dig deeper, and Bashō’s cleverness shines.
The word Edo (江戸) refers to what is now Tokyo — already the de facto capital by 1676. It puns on Edo (穢土), a Buddhist term meaning the impure land of earthly desire. It’s the place of attachment and suffering, where enlightenment is obstructed.
So when Bashō says the mountain moon is “rare in Edo,” he’s saying more than the city lacks natural beauty. He’s also suggesting that enlightenment, and the serene clarity it symbolizes, is hard to come by in a world of ambition, noise, and appetite.
After living as a struggling artist in the city, he may have had some bitterness, but moreover he’s following the etiquette of the renga world and of Japanese culture in general: praising the host’s rural setting while humbling himself as a traveler from the big city. Everyone in the room would have caught the gesture and the double meaning, and appreciated both.
This was the Danrin period of Bashō’s development, when his style was witty and full of wordplay. Later, he would grow dissatisfied with mere cleverness and find such displays distasteful. But here, in this early verse, you can already see him balancing elegance, depth, and social finesse.
And perhaps there’s one final twist. On the surface, he is being modest and praising his host and the rural beauty, yet implicitly elevating his own sensibility for being able to appreciate it. A bold move, but one that perfectly fits with the Danrin school and with young Bashō.
This isn’t usually considered one of his best haiku, but I like it. It shows off the cleverness that served him well when he was climbing to the top of the haiku world. And it’s a telling glimpse of what he would later reject. On top of everything, it’s a nice image. A good poem for marking his haiku journey.
When you look at old portraits of Japanese noblewomen—or ukiyo-e prints, you may sometimes notice something strange: pitch-black teeth. It’s quite shocking the first time you see it and your first impression might be that the picture was damaged because… black teeth?! Yep — black teeth. It isn’t poor dental hygiene. It’s ohaguro (お歯黒), the once-common practice of dyeing the teeth black.
To modern eyes, the effect can be unsettling. But for centuries in Japan, blackened teeth were not just accepted, but they were admired. They were symbols of maturity, beauty, and even loyalty.
“Geisha blackening her teeth” by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi
The Look of Refinement
The practice of ohaguro dates back at least to the Heian period (794–1185), though it became widespread among aristocrats during the later Muromachi and Edo periods. It was especially associated with court ladies and samurai wives, and eventually spread to townspeople and geisha as well.
Teeth were stained with a mixture made from iron filings dissolved in vinegar or sake, then combined with tannins from powdered gallnut or tea. The solution was reapplied regularly (sometimes daily) to maintain the glossy black appearance.
Far from being viewed as grotesque, ohaguro was considered elegant and refined. It served multiple cultural purposes:
Maturity and marital status: For many women, blackening the teeth marked their transition into adulthood, particularly after marriage or childbirth.
Beauty ideal: Just as white teeth are prized today, black teeth were seen as more harmonious with the powdered white faces of the time.
Loyalty: In some cases, the black teeth were seen as a way of suppressing sexual allure; something of a signal of devotion to one’s husband or household, similar to wearing a wedding ring today.
There is no contradiction between those last two, by the way. Blackened teeth were considered an elegant, refined beauty. It wasn’t about sexual allure in a provocative sense, but rather harmony, restraint, and cultural taste. It also functioned as a visual marker of being “off the market,” much like shaving one’s eyebrows (a custom called hikimayu) or wearing certain kimono styles. It muted or redirected sexual attention rather than inviting it.
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Practical Benefits, Too
The irony is that ohaguro may have actually protected teeth. The iron-tannin compound formed a kind of sealant that prevented tooth decay, making this beauty ritual something of an accidental dental treatment.
People in the past generally had much better teeth than we do today. Less sugar, for one. And the harder food meant their jaws got more of a workout and became more developed, leading to fewer cases of crowding and crooked teeth. Add black teeth as yet another reason their teeth were better than ours.
The End of Ohaguro
The decline of ohaguro was swift once Japan opened to the West in the late 19th century. During the Meiji era, the government aggressively modernized national customs, partly to change Western perceptions that Japan was “backward.”
In 1870, an imperial decree forbade civil servants and nobility from blackening their teeth. This didn’t stop everyone immediately, but the cultural tide had clearly turned. Soon, black teeth were no longer a sign of elegance: they were seen as old-fashioned, even embarrassing. By the early 20th century, the practice had mostly disappeared.[1]
A maiko with blackened teeth
A Vanished Aesthetic
Today, ohaguro survives mostly in historical dramas or festivals, and even then it’s often misunderstood. To modern audiences, it can look alien or grotesque. Because of that, it is often skipped even by people who know about it. But this was once a mark of status, adulthood, and cultural belonging. It was no stranger, perhaps, than high heels or cosmetic surgery today; a Japanese person 200 years ago might have been just as horrified by Botox lips or giant fake breasts as we are by black teeth.
Understanding ohaguro reminds us that beauty standards are never fixed. They grow from the values and technologies of their time — and when those values shift, the standards disappear, often without explanation.
If you think the speed of this attitude shift is crazy, consider two examples from the West: smoking — once cool, now disgusting — and corsets, which went from fashion essential to ridiculous in just a couple generations. ↩
We are approaching the anniversary of Shiki’s death. Let’s look at a poem about that day from his most famous student.
子規逝くや十七日の月明に shiki iku ya jushichi-nichi no getsumei ni
Shiki left us
on a moonlit night
in september
—Kyoshi
“Cuckoo in the Rain” by Yoshimoto Gesso
Shiki died on 19 Sept 1902 at the young age of only 35. His promising life was cut short by tuberculosis. Kyoshi, who would go on to control the haiku world in Japan for many years, was one of his students and was with him when he died.
Kyoshi uses the kigo (season word) “The 17th day moon”. This is a little confusing because he died on the 19th, not the 17th. It’s likely Kyoshi was referring to the traditional Japanese calendar, which lagged behind the modern Gregorian one by about a month. In that older systenm, the 17th night would have referred to a waning gibbous phase of the moon. We can know that because in the old calendar, which was a lunisolar calendar, the 1st of every month was the new moon and the 15th was the full moon. Japan had already adopted the Gregorian calendar by this point, having made the switch in 1873. However, many aspects of Japanese life, including the the kigo used in haiku, continued to follow the traditional lunisolar calendar. This tradition persists even today, with haiku kigo generally aligning with the older system.
Traditionally the moon of the eighth month was the most beautiful and most significant, being the harvest moon. For the entire month the moon took on a special importance. The full moon was the most important for moon viewing, but any moon of the month was considered special. Because of this, whenever we refer to the moon alone in haiku or whenever we count the days of the moon, we are referring to the month of the harvest moon. Therefore the 17th moon is referring to the 17th night (or 17th moon) of the eighth month. As I said above, there is about a month’s difference between the old and new calendars. So the moon of the 8th month becomes the September moon on the modern calendar. For that reason, I’ve translated Kyoshi’s kigo as simply “September.” It preserves the meaning while avoiding a long explanation.[1]
I’m not sure if the 19th of September in 1902 on the Gregorian calendar would have been the 17th day of the eighth month on the old Japanese calendar. It would have been close, but I don’t know exactly. I couldn’t find any online tools for precise conversion. If you can help, please let me know.
Regardless, the waning gibbous moon serves as a fitting metaphor for Shiki’s adult life: substantial and impactful, but drawing to a close. The specter of his TB haunted Shiki’s life from the moment he started to show symptoms of the disease in his mid–20s. In 1888 he started coughing up blood, much like a lesser cuckoo (a hototogisu) is said to do when it sings. This gave rise to his pen name: the kanji for hototogisu, 子規, can also be read as shiki. In those days TB was a death sentence. Knowing he had limited time may have been a driving force behind his remarkable productivity.
I realize I’m giving that very long explanation that I wanted to avoid. Go figure. ↩
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