Haiku

Matsuo Bashō was the master of haiku.  He wrote, 

     古る池や

     蛙飛び込む

     水の音

     The old pond

     The frog jumps in

     Plop!

The Japanese poet's attentive selection of kanji raised the value of the haiku.  Bashō did this better than any other poet.  Kanji are visual metaphors,  sketching something that cannot be explained in words.  They build sound and pictures.  Like a movie.

It is no wonder that photographers in Japan often combine their photos with personal essays.  Images and words.

Seasons, emotions, mountains, temples, the red leaf maple, are all depicted in kanji in brush strokes painted in black on a stark white canvas.

Bashō also wrote, 

     かね 消えて

     花の香は撞く

     夕 かな

    As the gong of the temple bell fades,

    It bursts back in a waft of sakura.

     Night.

This is an elegant haiku.  

Warning: Explaining a haiku is a horrible thing to do.  I apologize.  To me the haiku is a small piece of life, of nature.  To tear a haiku apart and then to further violate it and bore you with excessive words of explanation, is ironic at best and a sin at worse.

Line 1.  Kane kiete.  Kane かね (a large bronze temple bell), Kiete消 (fades out).

See that kanji, 消!  The fire 火 radical (the 3-fingered symbol) on top, is the intensity of the fire of the loud gong of the bell.  The water 水 radical on the left feels like a cold bucket of water dousing the booming bell.  And the moon 月radical on the right-bottom is cold and calming down the loud gong.  Note that the moon image is echoed in the last line - night 夕.

Line 2.  hana no ka 花の香 the smell of the flower, tsuku  撞 く(strikes).

Though I expected that the fading sound of the bell would be a sign that my day had come to an end, I am surprised.  My day is not ended.  There is more! As the sound wanes, I am struck by the delicate incense of cherry blossoms.  A smell I had not noticed before.  Perhaps I was too overcome by the intensity of the bell.  I look up and I also notice...

Line 3. yū 夕 - night has come. 

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Kanji in black & white

I have two passions - black and white photography and kanji.  The allure of these two systems comes from my attraction to Japanese aesthetics: simplicity, suggestion, irregularity, quiet refinement.

Both photography and kanji can be minimalistic, complex, esoteric, mysterious, and enigmatic.

Kanji (漢字), the Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, are adopted from Chinese characters. Kanji are logograms.  That is a new word to me, too.  Logogram.  A logogram is a written character that represents a whole word or even a phrase.  Not a sound.  A whole idea.  A visual.

The Japanese write in pictures.  Imagine that!  Every time you write anything, you write your thoughts in little pieces of art.  Not only ideas, but images, too.  Tree actually looks a bit like a tree – 木。 See the skirt of the tree, and the branches at the side?  I know, a bit abstract.  But, then, abstract is cool.

A river looks like this 川．It is the flowing water down the stream.  And 水 – water –  is squeezing the river, and out comes water!  Swish.  I love it!  

Every word, every sentence is made up of a gallery of paintings.

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JAPAN. コーヒ Coffee in Japan

American journalists liked to prove how shockingly expensive Tokyo was by quoting the cost of a steak dinner or a cup of coffee.  In Tokyo in 1968, a cup of coffee cost a whopping $6.00 (U.S.$)!

Living there as a college student, I didn’t care about steak dinners, but I loved coffee at a Tokyo coffee house.

In 1968, there was a healthy coffee culture in Tokyo.  You'd expect to see a plethora of tea shops.  You know – tea, temples, and geishas.  On the contrary, I found it challenging to find a tearoom on the city streets.  Instead, I was so lucky to find that Tokyo sported the finest coffee shops and best coffee outside of Europe, perhaps the world.  In the kissaten (tea/coffe shop).

After greeting me with an enthusiastic, "irasshaimase," the proprietor of the café handed me a menu of kōhi, a heavy tome listing coffees from Brazil, Kenya, Ethiopia, Costa Rica, Java, Guatemala, and lots of other exotic sounding places.

Holding my hot cup of Java blend, I sat at my table, and read Kawabata's Snow Country.  "They emerged from the long border tunnel into the snow country. The night was carpeted with white."　　国境の長いトンネルを抜けると雪国であった。夜の底が白くなった.

Living in a tiny apartment in Meguro-ku, the coffee shop was a place not only for solitude, but also a landing place between my university classes (上智大学), my intensive language classes (Naganuma School), and the many English conversation classes I taught.  I didn't go home between classes, spending the day jumping from subway stop to subway stop, and class to class.

There were many coffee shops in the city and I could choose a coffee shop for its theme or its kind of music.  In the Ginza I found a French style shop, dressed up in pink and white frills.  I listened to French chanson, imagining I was in a romantic cafe on the Champs-Élysées.  Jazz coffee shops were common.  Some cafes had books or fine art hanging on the wall.  Some were sophisticated, others were bohemian shacks.

Coffee is a very Japanese thing.  It was brought to Japan by the Dutch in the 16th century – before American colonists protested tea and coffee taxes at the Boston Tea Party.

Those coffee houses were similar in many ways to today's local American gourmet coffee shops .  Not cookie cutter, not like the pervasive Starbucks of the 21st century.  They were more like our local coffee shops - General Porpoise in Seattle, Devoción in Brooklyn, or Spella Café in Portland.  Still, Tokyo cafes were different.  Better coffee. (Or, is that a memory of a youthful day?)  Better service and, of course, no computers.  Little noise other than the sound of jazz.  Sometimes a café was just quiet.  Quiet.  A welcome and rare commodity in busy Tokyo.

Before 1971, the offering of gourmet coffee in an American cafe was pretty rare in the United States.  In the States, coffee was made with old stove top coffee makers that served over-brewed Folgers.

If you are a fan of Haruki Murikami, you will be familiar with the coffee shops of the 60s and 70s.  “I belonged to Tokyo and its coffee shops. But I had never felt this loneliness there. I could drink my coffee, read my book, pass the time of day without any special thought, all because I was part of the regular scenery. ” (Haruki Murakami – Dance Dance Dance)

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China. My daddy sailed away on a chinese junk

My dad bought a Rolleicord camera just before he left for China.  His new camera cost him $800 (today's rate).  That was a lot of money for a 26-year-old first lieutenant in the U.S. Navy.

The  Rolleicord, a twin lens, medium format camera was used by amateur photographers in the years between World War I and II.  The camera captured images in black and white on 120 film format,  producing a 2 ¼  x  2 ¼ inch negative.  The Rolleicord took sharp photos with good bokeh.

Stationed in China from 1935 to 1937, my father took photos of Shanghai and Hong Kong.  His black and white photo of Chinese junks with their triangular sails hung on a wall of our 1950’s home.  Those junks sailing in the moonlight refashioned our prosaic one-story home into an adventure in China.  I didn’t know where the boats were going, but I pretended that my daddy sailed off on one of those little boats and would someday sail back to me.  My father never came back, but he did leave me his camera. 

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