Exploring Haiku and Japanese Culture
Jun 14 '02
The Bottom Line Poetry? Always thought haiku was some kind of fish. From Hawaii. Gee, I learn a lot here. It's good to be an Epinions member. It's so damned cultural!
Japan.
The land of the rising sun.
Mysterious…exotic...kind of far away.
Before you go too far, I've got to be honest with you.
I don't know too much about Japan. But I've been studying up on that country so I could write as informative an essay as possible for you. The problem is that Japan has an ancient and complex culture that is vastly different from what I'm familiar with as an American, and some things are really confusing.
I read in a book that their society is homogeneous. Not quite sure what that means, but I think that they either boil everything in the whole country to kill all the germs, or they're all gay. But if they're all gay, how do they make little Japanese babies? So the boiling thing is probably it. (I watched the movie "Shogun" twice, and they took a lot of baths. Very hygienic people.) Well, I guess it's just another one of the mysteries of the East.
The Japanese are our friends.
The people of the United States have had a special bond with the Japanese for decades. Granted, we don't invite them over much anymore; not since Pearl Harbor. Although they're nice folks…real polite and everything, they can get rowdy.
A while back, Japanese culture took America by storm. Everyone was into things Japanese like sushi, sashimi, pachinko games, origami, karaoke, Okefenokee, and the hokey pokey. It seems as though that's what it was all about at the time. In the corporate world, the great zaibatsu ruled, and American companies scrambled frantically to emulate the Japanese business model. This was about ten or fifteen years ago, when Japan still had an economy.
That's when I first became intrigued with haiku.
Haiku is a traditional form of Japanese poetry. Its structure is kind of odd by Western standards. Three lines of five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables, respectively. And nothing rhymes.
There are practical reasons for this. First off, there are only seventy-three words in the Japanese language, and not one of them rhymes with any other. It's also hard to say a lot of different stuff with only seventy-three words to choose from, so it was a matter of either brevity or redundancy.
Despite having only three lines and seventeen syllables, a haiku can be quite powerful. To illustrate, here's an early Rich haiku on the cruelty of nature:
Roses can be red
but violets can't be too
and that makes them blue.
Don't that just make you want to weep for the poor, freaking violets? Isn't it so profound on so many different levels?
But honestly, am I the only one who thinks that haiku is a funny word? Do you know what it reminds me of?
Ah! Ah! Ah! HAIKU!
Must be those damned allergies.
HAIKU! God bless you.
Despite my sophisticated palate, I have issues with Japanese food.
I'm a civilized man. I love beef, but I don't walk over to a pasture and take a bite out of a cow. So I sure as hell don't want to go bobbing for flounder. I want my food cooked. I'll eat stuff like sushi and sashimi as long as it's either deep-fried or barbecued. Here's a couple of haiku…(haikus? haikuses?) …whatever…on Japanese cuisine:
Sushi is raw fish,
seaweed and other gross stuff.
What is up with that?
And:
I will teach Japan
how to cook their food with flame.
They will make me king!
My next one is on the triumph of man over nature:
"Banzai!" shrieked bonsai
as its sharp twig poked my eye.
"You die, bonsai." Mulch.
(No damned, shrimpy, little foreign tree screws around with old Rich and gets away with it!)
You'll note that the beauty of haiku lies in its simplicity, and that even bad haiku is mercifully short. (I could be writing bad epic poetry.)
And last, just to cover my butt in case anyone got offended by any of this:
Mister samurai,
please don't chop my fool head off!
No one reads this stuff.
And:
Ninjas aren't real.
But neither is Santa Claus,
yet I get presents.
Hmmmm. Something to ponder.
You know, maybe I shouldn't write stuff like this anymore.
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Epinions.com ID:
rich2003dm
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Location: New York City
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About Me:
I broke my pencil so I'm probably done here.
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