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From Seasons to Saijiki
All traditional Japanese poetry has historically been deeply involved with nature. Natural cycles, such as the seasons and the course of love relationships, have long been major subject matter for composition, the primary source of figurative language, and a large part of the basis for organizing poetry collections. According to principles of Japanese poetry well-recognized by the fifteenth century, certain words and phrases embody ideas that go beyond their literal meanings. For example, using the word "blossom" (hana), without the name of a specific blossom, means the blossoms of ornamental cherry trees. For any other blossom one must specify: "peach blossoms" (momo no hana), and so on. Further, the word "cherry" (sakura) always means "cherry blossoms"--unless one specifies "fruit of the cherry" (sakura no mi). This last is the reverse of the usual English practice, where the word "cherry" normally means the fruit and to specify the blossoms one says "cherry blossoms." But in Japanese poetry the principle goes deeper.
For the Japanese many natural phenomena and human activities and the words and phrases traditionally used to name them immediately bring to mind the seasons in which they typically occur--or become most noticed--along with a whole range of temporally-related images. The effect on the Japanese reader is somewhat like that for a New Englander who reads the phrase "the frost is on the pumpkin": One not only sees the whiteness covering the orange surface of the pumpkin, but also smells the scent of cut-over fields and woodsmoke, feels the nip of frost in the air, and perhaps thinks of a drink of hot apple cider. A friend, when asked what the phrase meant to her, came up with similar images, and without being prompted associated the phrase with Thanksgiving, in late November.
Every culture has phrases, often used in literature, which bring to mind whole complexes of associated images and feelings. Ezra Pound called the use of such phrases "logopoeia," which stimulates "the associations (intellectual or emotional) that have remained in the receiver's consciousness in relation to the actual words or word groups employed" (ABC of Reading). In Japanese traditional literature those "words or word groups" associated with the seasons have been particularly appreciated, and even catalogued.
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