Secondary Nature, Climate, and Landscape
The ubiquity of nature and the seasons in Japanese literature is apparent in too many ways to count. One has only to turn to The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, early eleventh century) to discover that most of the female characters—such as Kiritsubo (Paulownia Court), Fujitsubo (Wisteria Court), Lady Aoi (Heartvine), Lady Murasaki (Lavender), Suetsumuhana (Saf-flower), Oborozukiyo (Misty Moonlit Evening), and Hanachirusato (Village of Scattered Flowers)—are named after natural objects and phenomena, usually flowers and plants, each of which is associated with a specific season. Indeed, a fundamental grasp of The Tale of Genji requires an understanding of the literary implications of a wide variety of plants, flowers, atmospheric conditions, and celestial bodies that provide not only the names of the characters but also the settings in which they appear (figure 1). Furthermore, the associations of these natural objects are closely linked to those found in the thirty-one-syllable waka (classical poetry).
The Tale of Genji, in fact, is often given as a prime example of the intimate connection between Japanese culture and nature. However, it is also true that when The Tale of Genji was written, aristocratic women rarely ventured out from behind the multiple layers of standing screens, curtains, and sliding doors that separated them from the external world. On rare occasions, they went on pilgrimages to the surrounding hills or temples, but for the most part, the only nature that such women encountered was in the gardens of their palace-style (shinden-zukuri) residences; was represented extensively indoors, in picture scrolls (emaki-mono), screen paintings (byōbu-e), and door or partition paintings (fusuma-e); and permeated the waka that they wrote day and night. In other words, “nature” in The Tale of Genji and in the lives of eleventh-century aristocratic women was pervasive both spatially and psychologically, but much of it was carefully reconstructed in gardens or visually and textually depicted in paintings, furniture, dress, poetry, and illustrated tales (figure 2). This kind of re-created or represented nature, which I refer to as secondary nature (nijiteki shizen), was not regarded as being opposed to the human world so much as an extension of it. Indeed, this secondary nature became a substitute for a more primary nature that was often remote from or rarely seen by the aristocrats who lived in the center of Heian (Kyoto), the capital of Japan during the Heian period (794–1185). This book explores how this secondary nature was constructed over many centuries, particularly in an urban environment, and the implications that it has for understanding space and time in Japanese culture from the Nara period (710–784) through the Edo period (1600–1867).
INTERIOR AND GARDEN IN A HEIAN-PERIOD RESIDENCE
Set on an autumn evening, this scene from the “Rites” (Minori) chapter in The Tale of Genni Scrolls (Genji monogatari emaki, ca. twelfth century) shows Genji (center) and the Akashi empress, Lady Murasaki’s adopted daughter (lower right), visiting the dying Murasaki (upper right), who, in a poetry exchange transcribed on the same scroll, compares herself to the dew on the bush clover. Using the open-roof (fukinuki yatai) technique, the illustration shows both the interior and the garden, making nature (bush clover, miscanthus grass, and the fragile dew in the autumn wind) a metaphor for the emotional and physical state of the characters. (Courtesy of the Gotō Museum of Art, Tokyo)
INTERIORIZED NATURE IN A HEIAN-PERIOD RESIDENCE
In this scene from “The Eastern Cottage” (Azumaya) chapter in The Tale of Genji Scrolls (Genji monogatari emaki, ca. twelfth century), a female attendant (center) reads aloud a court tale while Ukifune (upper left) looks at the accompanying illustrations. Nakanokimi (lower left), Ukifune’s half sister and patron, is having her hair combed by another attendant. The illustration shows how nature was “interiorized” in the aristocratic residence of the Heian period. Landscape and the seasons appear in the partition paintings, on the interior walls, and on the “curtain of state” (kichō), which was used to divide the room, in the center. (Courtesy of the Tokugawa Reimeikai Foundation, Tokyo)
The Myth of Harmony with Nature
Even today, there is a widespread belief that the Japanese have an inherent affinity with nature and that this affinity is one of the major characteristics of Japanese culture. Typical of this view, which is held even in the age of extensive urbanization and technology, is a passage in “The Special Characteristics of Japanese Literature: Fusion with Nature,” from a widely used high-school textbook on Japanese literature and language:
Japan is an agricultural country; the Japanese are an agricultural people. Since agriculture is controlled by the seasons and the climate and since the climate in Japan is warm and mild, Japan is characterized by the leisurely change of the seasons. In contrast to the Westerners who fight with and conquer nature, the Japanese live in harmony with nature and desire to become one with it.
The literature that is born from such a climatic conditions [fūdo] naturally emphasizes unity with nature. First of all, in the ancient period Japanese poetry [waka] emerged from a careful observation of nature, which was used to express emotions. In the Heian period, this tendency extended to prose writing. The miscellany The Pillow Book is an excellent example. In The Tale of Genji, too, nature has an important symbolic function. The medieval period produced such poets as Saigyō, who questioned the meaning of nature. The idea that nature was the source of various human endeavors resulted in recluse literature in which the writer retreated to nature. Edo-period haikai is a literary form that cannot be conceived without nature, and its strong emphasis on seasonal topics continues into modern haiku.1
This particular view of Japanese literature, as embodying the close relationship of the writer or reader to nature, appears as early as Ki no Tsurayuki’s (872–945) kana preface to the Kokinshū (Collection of Japanese Poems Old and New, ca. 905) and has been repeated over the centuries into the twenty-first.
Haga Yaichi’s Kokuminsei jūron (Ten Essays on the Character of the Nation, 1907) reveals how this view of nature was articulated in the Meiji period (1867–1912). Haga (1867–1927)—who became a professor at the University of Tokyo, the president of Kokugakuin University, and one of the founders of the field of modern Japanese literary studies—wrote the following in 1907, in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), after his return from studying in Germany. This is from the beginning of the fourth essay, “Loving Trees and Plants, Enjoying Nature”:
The climate is mild. The rivers and mountains are superb. The landscape of the four seasons, from the flowers to the bright leaves, is truly beautiful. It is only natural that the inhabitants of this kind of land become attached to everyday life. Since the surrounding landscape that lies directly in front of us in all four directions is smiling, there is no one who does not smile. It is only to be expected that the people who love this world and who enjoy human life, love heaven and earth, the rivers and mountains, and are attracted to nature. In regard to this point, the people of the various countries of the east, when compared to the Europeans of the north, can be said to receive the treasures and virtues of heaven. In particular we Japanese are close to the flowers and the birds, the wind and the moon; this is apparent in our lives wherever one looks.2
Haga sees one of the unique features of the Japanese people (nation) as their love of and respect for nature, which, he believes, distinguishes them from Westerners, who lack this attitude and who fight with and attempt to conquer nature. Like Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) and Takahama Kyoshi (1874–1959), the two leading haiku poets of the Meiji period, Haga goes on to make an important link between this love of nature and the widespread practice of Japanese poetry (waka and haiku), which is regarded as the embodiment of the respect for and closeness to nature. This view of Japanese culture continued unabated in prewar and postwar Japan and has infiltrated Western studies of Japanese culture.3
Haga’s position, which reflects the rise in aesthetic nationalism that followed the Russo-Japanese War, was influenced by Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744–1803) notion that climate informs national character; it was also built on a long tradition, beginning with Tsurayuki’s kana preface to the Kokinskū, probably the most influential single statement on Japanese poetry:
The songs of Japan take the human heart as their seed and flourish as myriad leaves of words. As long as they are alive to this world, the cares and deeds of men and women are endless, so they speak of things they hear and see, giving words to the feelings in their hearts. Hearing the cries of the bush warbler among the blossoms or the calls of the frog that lives in the waters, how can we doubt that every living creature sings its song? Without using force, poetry moves heaven and earth, makes even the unseen spirits and gods feel pity, smoothes the bonds between man and woman, and consoles the hearts of fierce warriors.4
The kana preface stresses the central role of nature both as a stimulus to poetry and song and as an expression of human thought and emotion. It also emphasizes the close relationship between humans and nature, the universality of poetic composition or song, and the ability of poetry to bring about social harmony—all of which were to become fundamental elements in the mythology of waka-based nature. Significantly, the two representations of “nature” are the warbler and the frog, both considered to be elegant seasonal topics (of spring) by the Heian-period aristocracy and both associated with sound (singing or crying).
In the twelfth century, Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204), probably the most influential poet of his time, took the role of nature-based waka to another level in his poetic treatise Koraifūteiskō (Collection of Poetic Styles Old and New, 1197):
As stated in the preface to the Kokinshū, Japanese poetry takes the human heart as its seed and grows into myriad leaves of words. Thus without Japanese poetry, even if one were to seek out the cherry blossoms in the spring or look at the bright foliage of autumn, there would be no one who would recognize the color or the scent. … As the months pass and the seasons change, and as the cherry blossoms give way to bright autumn leaves, we are reminded of the words and images of poems and feel as if we can discern the quality of those poems.5
If Tsurayuki established what we might call the expressive-affective model, in which nature is the key means to articulate emotions and thoughts, then Shunzei established a highly influential cognitive, intertextual model, in which the knowledge of nature-based poetry is necessary for humans to see and respond to nature, to recognize its colors and scents. In this view, waka cultivates us, giving us the heart to respond to nature.
When writers from Ki no Tsurayuki to Haga Yaichi speak of the close relationship between humans and nature, they are speaking of a view of nature that, over the centuries, permeated almost all levels of literate society and that came to be regarded as a “national” trait. This association of harmony with nature and national character appears as early as the Heian period. The standard graphs for waka 
literally mean “the poetry / song (uta) of Ya-mato” 
, which first referred to the Nara basin but by the Heian period had come to mean “the country of Yamato” (Yamato no kuni), or Japan as it was conceived at that time. The wa in waka came to mean yawaraka or yasashi (soft, gentle) and implied harmony, a significance that was expanded by Fujiwara no Kiyosuke (1104–1177) in his poetry treatise Ōgishō (Collection of Inner Truths, ca. 1135–1144) and made explicit by Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241) in his poetry treatise Maigetsushō (Monthly Collection, ca. 1219):
First of all, since poetry [uta] is a style of wakoku, the country of harmony [wa], in the writings of earlier masters, it has been repeatedly noted that poetry should be composed in a gentle and emotionally moving fashion. Truly, since poetry is a unique product of our country, our predecessors have carefully noted in poetic treatises that poetry should be composed with elegance and with deep feeling [mono no aware]. No matter how frightening a thing may be, when one writes about it in Japanese poetry, it must sound graceful and elegant. What would be the point of taking something that was originally elegant such as the cherry blossoms or the moon and composing poetry on them in a frightening way?6
The implication is that the essence of waka, which is gentle and deeply moving, is in the style of a country that is harmonious in all things.7 In other words, high cultural value was placed on gentleness and harmony. The stress was not on what nature is but on what it should be; particularly in waka, it should be a graceful and elegant form.
This tradition of regarding nature as harmonious, close, and a means to view the world is largely a construction of aristocratic, capital-centered culture and of metropolitan genres, particularly waka. Equally important, waka was an urban genre, born of the city and meant for social communication among educated elites, and it coexisted with a number of related metropolitan, capital-centered genres, such as screen painting (byōbu-e), palace-style (shinden-zukuri) gardens, and twelve-layered robes (jūni hitoe) worn by aristocratic women. These kinds of genres and media—which in the medieval period (1185–1599) came to include ikebana (flower arrangement), bonsai, and the tea ceremony (ckanoyu)—reconstructed nature in elegant form, creating what I call secondary nature (nijiteki shizen), which became a surrogate for more primary nature for urban inhabitants. The so-called Japanese closeness to or harmony with nature as described by modern critics is, I will show, largely the result of the prevalence of this secondary nature, which influenced almost every major cultural form in the premodern period.
Climate and Cultural Inversion
The culture of the four seasons as it was developed in Heian classical poetry and related genres was both a reflection of the climate of Japan and an inversion of it. In the winter, the main island of Japan came under the influence of a cold-air mass that extended from the Baltic Sea to Mongolia. As the cold air moved south from Siberia and then crossed the Japan Sea, it ran into moist air moving north that, when it hit the Japan Alps, dropped heavy snow. As a result, Japan (as it is presently configured) had one of the heaviest snowfalls of all the countries in the world. In the summer, Japan was dominated by a tropical air mass now called the Ogasawara high-pressure system, which came from the southeast, from the Pacific Ocean, and brought high heat and humidity. The main island of Japan thus had very heavy precipitation in both the summer and the winter. The quantity of rain during the summer was, in fact, equal to that of many tropical countries. The forest of broad-leaved evergreen trees behind Kasuga Shrine in Nara, where the primary forest is still preserved, is identical with that of a tropical jungle, with thick evergreen oaks (kaski) and their roots wrapped in tree ferns (shida) and terrestrial orchids. One consequence is that Japan is home to plants and animals—broad-leaved evergreen trees, dense bamboo grass (sasa), windmill palm (shuro), and monkeys—normally associated with tropical areas. As we shall see, the high humidity in Kyoto and Nara fostered a poetic culture that focused heavily on atmospheric conditions: mist (kasumi) became a marker of spring; the long rains (monsoon) were a major feature of summer; autumn was known for its mists (kiri), dew, and typhoons; and the hallmark of winter was snow and frost.
Needless to say, the climate differed according to the geographical area and historical period.8 In the pre-Meiji period, during which a luni-solar calendar was used, spring consisted of the First, Second, and Third Months; summer of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Months; autumn of the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Months, and winter of the Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Months.9 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, according to the modern (solar) calendar, the traditional four seasons are as follows:
Spring | February 4—May 4 |
Summer | May 5—August 6 |
Autumn | August 7—November 6 |
Winter | November 7—February 3 |
Converting from the premodern calendar to the modern calendar is a complex calculation. The luni-solar calendar sometimes required a leap year that added one month, resulting in thirteen months in that year. As a general rule, however, roughly five to six weeks are subtracted from the solar calendar to get the approximate seasonal equivalent in the luni-solar calendar.
For those living in Kyoto in the premodern period, spring (First through Third Month in the luni-solar calendar) arrived around the middle of what is now February. In northern Europe and the northern United States, spring is relatively late, gradually appearing in March with the emergence of the new growth of various plants. By contrast, in Kyoto, the spring mist (kasumi) appears in the mountains from around February 10, together with the buds of new grass in the withered fields. The blossoming of the cherry trees, which has been the highlight of spring from the Heian period onward, occurs in what is now the middle of April. Historical records show that the average peak of the cherry blossoms in the Kyoto area was April 17 in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.10
Summer (Fourth through Sixth Month in the luni-solar calendar) now begins on May 5 and ends on August 6. Summer is extremely hot in the Kyoto and Nara region, with the temperature equal to or greater than that in many Southeast Asian countries. The heat reaches 90 degrees Fahrenheit in August, and the humidity climbs to over 65 percent during the rainy season.11 When the front of the southern warm-air mass from the Pacific Ocean moves north over the land, the fresh, balmy air of early summer suddenly turns moist, marking the beginning of the monsoon (tsuyu) season, which lasts from around June 10 to the middle of July in Kyoto. The hot, dry weather that immediately follows—now called the post-monsoon (tsuyu-ake) period—extends from mid-July to the first week of August, lasting more than twenty days. The extensive summer rain enables wet-field rice agriculture, but it also results in floods and landslides in a country dominated by mountains. So distinct is the monsoon season in Japan that the climatologist Kira Tatsuo has argued that Japan has five seasons: spring, monsoon season, post-monsoon season, autumn, and winter.12
In the modern calendar, autumn (Seventh through Ninth month in the luni-solar calendar) extends from August 7 to November 6. At the start of fall, the Ogasawara high-pressure system begins to retreat to the south and the cool winds from the continent start to arrive,13 but the atmosphere remains hot—a long, lingering summer—until the third week of August. Autumn in Kyoto also overlaps with the typhoon season, which extends from August through November and brings heavy precipitation.14 The first half of autumn is still very hot, and many of the early-autumn poems in the Kokinsku are about lingering summer heat. It was not until the middle of September (around the middle of the Eighth Month in the luni-solar calendar) when the typhoons, coolness, and sound of insects associated with autumn finally arrive. Heian-period waka focus on both the sad and the bright sides of autumn, particularly the colorful foliage, which begins in Kyoto in autumn and continues into winter.
Spring and autumn in Japan are relatively mild, very similar to these seasons in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, but climatically they are sandwiched between two long and severe seasons. Although summer ends around August 6 under the modern calendar, in terms of climatic conditions, summer in Kyoto continues at least until the end of August. When the monsoon and post-monsoon periods are combined with the hot weather of August, summer lasts for roughly one-third of the year. Viewed in this larger perspective, spring and autumn are transitional seasons between the cold continental weather and the hot Pacific Ocean weather.15 These severe climatic conditions contrast starkly with the widely held view of Japan’s climate as mild, elegant, and harmonious. In an inversion of the actual climatic conditions, Nara- and Heian-period aristocratic culture made spring and autumn the supreme seasons, which were celebrated in literature and the visual arts, as they were in early China, and around which a wide range of religious, social, and cultural associations developed. This disjunction between the actual climate and the poetic culture of the four seasons can be traced to several factors.
First, the location of ancient (before 784) and Heian Japanese culture was in the Nara and Kyoto basins, where the winter was relatively mild compared with that in other parts of the country. The view of “nature” found in waka and in Japanese classics such as the Kokinshū, The Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari, ca. 947), and The Tale of Genji reflects almost entirely the conditions in these two inland basins. As a result, the winter depicted in classical Japanese literature is mild, with gently falling snow, which, as a harbinger of a rich harvest, was regarded as auspicious. In the rest of Honshu, particularly on the Japan Sea side and in the northeast, snow was considered a serious hardship and a hazard. The severe snows of the area facing the Japan Sea, the so-called Snow Country, do not figure in classical literature and poetry. It was not until the emergence of haikai (popular linked verse) by poets like Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827), a peasant from the Shinshū (Nagano Prefecture) area, in the early nineteenth century, that heavy snow appears in poetry.
Second, summer in early and medieval Kyoto was in reality a time of extreme heat, pestilence, and death. The result was a large number of local and major festivals in the capital (such as the Gion Festival and the Hollyhock [Aoi] Festival) and in the provinces intended to appease the gods and to exorcise sin and dangerous elements. For example, the famous Gion Festival in Kyoto, which was held in the first half of the Sixth Month in the premodern period, at the beginning of the post-monsoon season and at the height of summer heat, originated in the mid-Heian period as a prayer to the god of the Gion Shrine for protection from pestilence and natural disasters. These negative aspects of summer were not considered the proper subject matter for classical poetry and generally do not appear in waka, particularly those of the imperial waka anthologies, which were intended to manifest the harmony of the state and the cosmos. Court poetry of the Heian period thus did not reflect the actual climate so much as create a highly aestheticized and, as we shall see, ideological representation of the four seasons. Imperial waka anthologies, such as the Kokinshū, selected the most appealing aspects of the seasons as they conformed to aristocratic standards and for which there was often a Chinese literary precedent. The heavy weight placed on spring and autumn (two books each) and the brief representation of summer and winter (one short book each) in the Kokinshū thus reflect a utopian view of nature.
Finally, when it came to the unpleasant or difficult seasons, summer and winter, aristocratic poetry and culture sought to depict not what nature was actually like but what it ought to be. For example, one of the most important summer topics in Japanese poetry (waka, renga [classical linked verse], and haikai) was summer night (natsu no yo), which was thought to bring coolness and relief from the heat and was deemed to be all too short. In the Edo period, a hokku (opening verse of a renga sequence) that suggested a cool residence was considered to be complimentary to the host. Japanese traditional confectionary and cakes (wagashi), ikebana, the tea ceremony, rock-and-sand gardens, and the architecture of palace-style (shinden-zukuri) and parlor-style (skoin-zukuri) residences are all designed to give a feeling of coolness, precisely because the summer is so hot and humid in central Japan. As Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591) notes in Nanbōroku (Records of the Words of Rikyū, 1593) in regard to the tea ceremony, “In summer impart a sense of coolness, in winter a feeling of warmth.”16 In other words, one of the functions of secondary nature in the capital was to create an ideal environment through linguistic, visual, tactile, and alimentary means.
Provincial Farm Villages
Two fundamental forms of secondary nature are evident in Japanese culture: one that was developed in the capital (first Heijō [Nara] and then He-ian [Kyoto]) by the nobility, and one that I refer to as the satoyama (literally, “village mountain”) paradigm, which emerged in the mid- to late Heian period in farm villages in the provincial landed estates (shōen). These estates initially were owned by aristocrats, temples, and the imperial family but were cultivated by commoners and lower-level samurai.17 These two representations of secondary nature intersect at key points in the Heian and the Kamakura (1185–1333) periods, and by the Muromachi period (1392–1573) overlap in a number of cultural genres.
From the ancient period, the Japanese were engaged in the “reclamation” of wilderness for rice farming. The opening of new rice fields was of utmost importance for the provincial shōen system, which began in the ancient period and grew in the Heian and later medieval periods. In converting wilderness to rice fields, there was no hesitation about chopping down giant trees, clearing forests, or killing animals to create more cultivatable land. As the provincial gazetteers (fudoki) reveal, untamed nature was regarded as the sphere of violent gods (araburu kami). The Saka District (Saka no kōri) section of the Hizen no kuni fudoki (Hizen Province Gazetteer) describes the gods who prevented the cultivation of land on the Saka River:
To the west of the county, there was a river. The name of it was Saka River. The river had sweetfish [ayu]. The river originated in the mountains in the north of the country and flowed to the south, where it emptied into the sea. At the upper reaches of this river were violent gods [araburu kami] who let live half of the people who came and killed the other half.18
A similar example is the river serpent in the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712) and the Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720) who destroys the crops and requires that a young woman of the village be sacrificed each year. The river serpent, whom the god Susano-o vanquishes, represents the danger of flooding and the overflowing river for wet-field rice agriculture. Susano-o symbolizes the ability to control the unruly waters of the river. As the early chronicles and provincial gazetteers suggest, a divide existed between the violent gods of nature and the world of human beings, who built shrines at the base of the surrounding mountains to honor and pacify these dangerous gods.
From the mid- to late Heian period, a significant shift occurred in the attitude toward nature. As Iinuma Kenji has shown through archaeological excavation, many of the hitherto violent gods, who had thwarted or resisted the opening of the land to agriculture, were transformed into gods of rice agriculture.19 They became gods of water, dams, and irrigation; they became guardian gods (chinju) who protected the local village and who were worshipped through such rituals as ta-asobi (literally, “play in rice field”) or prayers for a rich rice harvest. The shrines to these gods, which had been located on the periphery, were now constructed within the grounds of the shōen, symbolizing a more cooperative relationship with nature (from the human perspective). This change also reflected greater technological control over nature, particularly management of water and irrigation.
This type of environment marked the beginning of what is now referred to by ecologists as the satoyama, an ecosystem that continued into the twentieth century (figure 3; see also figure 17). Farm villagers lived next to a river, which was used to irrigate the rice fields, and harvested not only the rice fields but the surrounding grasslands and woodland, which provided fertilizer for the rice fields, fodder for oxen and horses, construction materials, and firewood and pine needles for fuel. In medieval anecdotal literature (setsuwa) and folktales, the characters (such as the woodcutter [kikori]) typically “go to the mountain to cut brushwood” (yama ni skibakari), a standard phrase that indicates going into the bush or forest to cut firewood or to gather undergrowth or fallen tree leaves for fertilizer. The satoyama became a type of secondary nature, in that both the rice fields and the surrounding hills were constantly harvested and recycled, but it was fundamentally different from the secondary nature found in the capital, which tended to be elegant, physically compact, centered on birds and insects, and oriented around color and scent.20
A SATOYAMA
This representation of a satoyama, painted by Nagai Kazuo in 2007, shows the basic topography of the farm village: in the background is the mountain (yama), which provides fuel (brushwood and trees); at its foot is the village and the wet rice fields; and in the foreground is the river, which provides water and irrigates the rice paddies, and the wild fields (no), which also provide valuable fuel. (Oil; 20.9 x 25.6 inches. Courtesy of the artist)
The setsuwa “How a Young Lad from the Country Wept on Seeing the Cherry-Blossom Falling” (1:13), which appears in the Uji shūi monogatari (A Collection of Tales from Uji, early thirteenth century), foregrounds the difference between the attitudes toward nature in the farm village and in aristocratic society:
Again, long ago a young lad from the country had entered the monastery on Mount Hiei and noticed one day when the cherry blossoms were at their most beautiful that there was a strong wind blowing, and he began to cry bitterly. A priest happened to see him and went gently up to him to ask, “What are you crying for, my boy? Are you sad because the cherry blossoms are falling? They don’t last more than a short time, and soon fall, as you see. But there’s more to it than that. There’s nothing anyone can do to prevent the cherry blossoms falling.” “That’s not what grieves me,” said the lad. “The reason I am sad is that I am thinking how the flowers will be knocked off my father’s barley and the grain will not set.” And he set up a great sobbing and wailing. Really, this was taking things a little far.21
The story humorously contrasts the priest’s aristocratic, waka-based view of nature, which prizes cherry trees for their blossoms and regrets their scattering, with that of the son of a farmer whose only concern is the fate of barley (mugi), a crop that was vital to the subsistence of village farmers but that almost never appears in waka or court tales.
These two fundamental attitudes toward nature emerge in the difference between the waka-based genres, such as the Heian-period court tales (monogatari) and literary diaries (nikki), and such genres as the early chronicles, provincial gazetteers, anecdotal literature, and war tales (gunki-mono). The historical chronicles and setsuwa collections, such as the Nihon ryōiki (Record of Miraculous Events in Japan, ca. 822) and the Konjaku monogatari shū (Tales of Times Now Past, ca. 1120), describe a wide variety of animals: dogs, wolves, badgers, foxes, cats, tigers, bears, horses, cows, deer, boars, sheep, flying squirrels, mice, rabbits, monkeys, and even elephants. Many of these animals were hunted for food, used in agriculture, or lived in the satoyama. By sharp contrast, in the imperial waka anthologies and monogatari, the world of animals is largely confined to certain pets (such as cats) and to deer, singing birds, and crying insects. In court poetry, nature is an elegant world in which neither wildlife nor farm animals play a significant part. The result is a close harmony between the natural and human spheres, with the two becoming metaphors for each other. The birds, insects, and deer that appear in waka are generally prized for their lexical associations (such as matsumuski [pine cricket; literally, “waiting insect”]) or their sounds. As the frequently used verb naku, which means both “to cry” and “to weep,” implies, these animals are the exterior embodiment of interior, affective states. Since setsuwa and war tales usually were written or compiled by aristocrats or educated priests, to some extent the satoyama image was also filtered through court culture, but the differences in attitudes and perspectives toward nature remain stark.
Needless to say, the village farmers in the Heian and medieval periods did not have the luxury of enjoying poetry, painting, and gardens, nor did they engage in such cultural practices as the tea ceremony and flower arrangement. In short, there was a significant difference between the romanticized mountain village (yamazato) that appears in waka and court literature, which we might call a pastoral mode, and the actual life of farm villages. In contrast to the waka-esque portrayal of the yamazato, which generally represents a space of peace and solitude, the rural farmers who appear in the set-suwa and other non-aristocratic genres constantly face potential natural disasters: earthquakes, floods, drought, disease, and famine. Unlike the insects and birds found in the elegant world of waka, most insects and birds (both of which ate the rice crop) are regarded as pests. Farmers had to kill insects and other animals that harmed their rice fields. This led to the widespread practice of praying for the spirits of slaughtered animals, including insects. By contrast, insects that protected the crops—such as the dragonfly, which gave its name to Japan, “the land of the dragonflies” (akizuskima), and which ate other insects—were worshipped.
As Japanese folklore (minzoku-gaku) scholars have shown, there is a long tradition of muski-okuri (ritual sending off of insects). Farm villagers, in order to get rid of harmful insects that damaged the harvest, lit pine torches (taimatsu) and rang bells. This was followed by mushi-kuyō (offerings to the spirits of deceased insects). Similar kuyō were carried out for whales, fish, boars, deer, and other hunted animals. Numerous medieval setsuwa, popular tales (otogi-zōshi), and noh plays reveal this fundamental conflict between the need to control nature—particularly the pressure to hunt, kill harmful animals and insects, and clear forests—and the desire to appease and worship nature, which was believed to be a realm filled with gods. This tension was made even more complex after the adoption of Buddhism, with its injunction against killing certain animals, in Japan.
The Trajectory of the Chapters
This book argues that the oft-mentioned Japanese “harmony” with nature is not an inherent closeness to primary nature due to topography and climate, but a result of close ties to secondary nature, which was constructed from as early the seventh century and based in the major cities. This secondary nature took many forms and appeared in such diverse genres as poetry, screen paintings, gardens, flower arrangement, and the tea ceremony. Of seminal importance was waka, the thirty-one-syllable Japanese classical poem, which became a fundamental form of social communication among the urban aristocracy and whose seasonal associations influenced almost all major literary, artistic, and design-based forms and genres in Japan. As a result of the ubiquity of waka, flora and fauna as well as the atmospheric conditions of the four seasons became heavily encoded; for example, summer rain (samidare), or monsoon, became associated with melancholy or tedium, and the autumn dew became linked to tears. A number of these associations were indigenous, but many, such as autumn dew and tears, derived from Chinese poetry (kanshi), which was also composed extensively in the Nara and Heian periods.
Chapter 1 examines how the seasonal topics of waka were established, in the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, ca. 759); how they evolved into the core of poetic topics in the imperial waka anthologies in the Heian period, particularly the Kokinshū; and how they broadened from a spring–autumn axis in the Nara and Heian periods to embrace winter, which became a medieval favorite. Each seasonal topic developed a specific set of cultural associations, thus heavily encoding nature not only in poetry but in a wide variety of related media, beginning with screen paintings (byōbu-e) and picture scrolls (emaki) in the Heian period. In the Kokinshū, a close correspondence also arose between the topic of love (koi) and those of the sea sons, the two main pillars of classical poetry, with nature being the primary vehicle for expressing private emotions.
The Kokinshū) the first imperial waka anthology, contains about forty-five seasonal topics. The number of canonical topics gradually increased over time to about sixty in the Skinkokinshū (New Anthology of Poetry Old and New, 1205), the eighth imperial waka anthology, and these topics and their established associations, in turn, became the foundation for medieval waka and renga, which flourished in the Muromachi period. From the mid- to late Heian period, poets placed increasing emphasis on annual observances, celestial bodies (particularly the moon), atmospheric conditions, and the time of day (such as dawn and dusk). Seasonal topics, poetic diction, and natural motifs formed a complex system of representations, with the topics, the images, and their associations functioning as a rich cultural “vocabulary” to be used for a wide range of purposes—from love to political protest to personal lament.
Chapter 2 looks at the impact of waka on visual culture, examining the manner in which its seasonal topics and their associations were manifested in various media, beginning with the twelve-layered robe (jūni hitoe) and screen paintings of the Heian period and extending to medieval tea utensils and the illustrated card games of the Edo period. The twelve-layered robe literally wrapped nature and the season around a woman’s body through its colors. Heian nobles were also surrounded by four-season and famous-place paintings that combined poetry with painting. With the development of the twelve-month painting (one painting or independent panel for each month), the associations between nature and the seasons became even more refined, matching specific birds and flowers with specific months. Famous places were also linked with particular seasons and natural motifs. For example, the Tatsuta River, which became famous as a result of a series of autumn poems in the Kokinshū, was linked with bright foliage to the extent that the combination of water and colorful leaves in paintings and on ceramics, lac-querware, and clothing immediately suggested the Tatsuta River. The power of waka was such that tea masters began to use phrases from waka to “name” tea utensils, thus bestowing poetic and seasonal associations on unadorned objects.
This waka tradition was carried on by renga (classical linked verse), which became the dominant poetic genre in the Muromachi period. Renga not only transmitted the seasonal associations developed in waka but further refined them, linking seasonal topics with specific months or phases of the seasons. Each combination of prior verse and added verse (read together as a single poem) had to be identified by season or non-season, and renga became a means by which the participants journeyed through the four seasons. Renga, like the waka anthologies before it, also followed a cosmological system referred to as the Three Realms (Ten-chi-jin)—Heaven, Earth, and Humanity—which created a topographic and cosmological order that directly linked the natural and human worlds. Renga manuals, which list seasonal words and their associations, became one of the primary conduits by which the seasonal associations of waka were absorbed into noh, which came to the fore in the Muromachi period and reconstructed the Heian classics for a newly powerful warrior class. Renga also appropriated the mountains-and-rivers (sansui) landscape of ink painting, which had been imported from Song China (960–1279) and became very popular in the Muromachi period. Distant views of high mountains and open waters became an integral part of landscape in Japanese poetry, as they did in rock-and-sand gardens (kare-sansui), miniature tray (bonseki) gardens, and Zen ink paintings.
This secondary nature was also “interiorized” within the medieval residence, particularly in the form of ikebana (flower arrangement) and other arts of the alcove (tokonoma). Chapter 3 examines the architectural forms that linked the exterior to the interior and then, in the Muromachi period, moved the garden and flowers inside the residence in the form of ikebana and bonsai. The Heian-period palace-style (shinden-zukuri) residence, with its open pillar construction, opened the interior directly to the garden, a trend that continued in the Muromachi period with the parlor-style (shoin-zukuri) residence. Its main feature was the alcove, a vertical open space that became the stage for a wide range of arts: tea ceremony, painting, renga, waka, kanshi, calligraphy, incense, and flower arrangement. The Muroma-chi- and early Edo—period art of standing-flower (rikka) arrangement carried out many of the socioreligious functions that waka had earlier: social communication, elegant salutation, celebration of the season, and prayer. In the Muromachi period, with the development of the kare-sansui, which minimized or eliminated the use of flowers, the flowers literally moved indoors. But in the Edo period, live flowers returned to the gardens of both urban commoners and upper-rank samurai, who favored “grass flowers” (such as chrysanthemum and morning glory) over the “tree flowers” (cherry, plum, wisteria, and mandarin orange) that had been the main features of the Heian-period palace-style garden. Spring cherry blossoms, autumn foliage, and winter moon continued to be the main attractions at the so-called famous places (meisho) that sprang up in and around Edo (present-day Tokyo) and Kyoto in response to the desire for seasonal viewing, which became a major form of recreation for urban commoners.
Chapter 4 considers the contrast between the waka-based secondary nature of the capital and the farm-based secondary nature of the satoyama, as depicted in such genres as the early chronicles, anecdotal literature (setsuwa), war tales (gunki-mono), and Muromachi popular tales (otogi-zōshi). A major characteristic of the satoyama landscape, with its farm village near a river at the base of a mountain, was the belief that gods resided in different aspects of nature and that birds and animals served as intermediaries between this world and the other world of gods and the dead, which existed in and beyond the mountain. In the medieval period, these two types of landscapes intersected with increasing frequency. One of the most notable examples is noh, which emerged in the Muromachi period and whose repertoire came to include a large number of plays about trees and other plants. Significantly, most of these plays derive from seasonal topics and images originally found in waka—such as cherry blossoms and wisteria—but instead of being elegant metaphors for the human condition, the dramatic focus in noh is on the spirit of the plant or flower, which, like human beings, is often caught in a Buddhistic conflict between attachment to this world and the need for salvation. These plays, like many of the otogi-zōshi of the time, view the world from the perspective of the plants or animals that are sacrificed and that suffer, usually at the hands of human beings.
Nature in classical poetry is generally linked with seasonality and impermanence, but as chapter 5 reveals, talismanic (magical protective) functions and trans-seasonality—the association of a natural image (such as pine, crane, bamboo, and turtle) with the ability to transcend time and season—are of equal cultural significance. In the Nara period, as is evident in the poetry of the Man’yōshū, nature (in the form of flowers and green plants) had a talismanic function, either to expel evil elements (such as plague, pollution, and death) or to pray for good fortune (bountiful harvest, good health, and longevity). As such, nature played a major role as an intermediary between humans and the gods, who could be either benevolent or malevolent. Aristocratic spring rituals (such as gathering young herbs or pulling up the roots of small pines) sought annual renewal of life through nature as it was found in wild fields (no) in and around the cities. Classical poetry and screen paintings also featured continentally inflected images such as pines and cranes, both of which symbolized longevity. In the imperial waka anthologies, the talismanic and trans-seasonal topics tend to be concentrated in the “celebration” (ga) volume. The present Japanese national anthem is based on a Kokinshū celebratory poem about such everlasting aspects of nature. In the satoyama, the talismanic function took the form of village shrines, festivals, and prayers (such as ta-asobi), which paid respects to the gods of agriculture and nature, who could either protect or destroy. Trans-seasonal and talismanic themes also play a prominent role in a wide variety of genres—from the god plays (waki-nō) in noh to the so-called celebratory tales (shūgi-mono) in Muromachi popular tales. Talismanic function and trans-seasonality were also expressed topographically, in the “islands in the sea” constructions found in temple, shrine, and shinden-zukuri gardens from the Nara period and in the four-seasons–four-directions gardens, which became a utopian image from the Heian through the Edo period. All these natural images, which were urban reconstructions of nature, implicitly point to the constant threat posed by the wild, uncontrolled aspects of nature and the need to defend against them.
Chapter 6 examines the important role that annual observances, particularly those that originated at the imperial court, played in the representation of the seasons in waka and related genres. Most annual observances, whether of court or of provincial origin, had talismanic functions: usually to dispel evil and to pray for good health, long life, and a rich harvest. For example, early spring became associated with new herbs (wakana), which were gathered in wild fields and then cooked and eaten as a prayer for rejuvenation and new life. The Five Sacred Festivals (Gosekku) were an integral part of the seasonal topics of waka. These kinds of annual court observances, which derived in large part from Chinese customs, differed radically from those held in peasant villages, which were usually indigenous in origin and related to wet-field rice agriculture. A good example of the latter is ta-asobi (prayers for a rich rice harvest), usually held at the beginning of the year, in which farmers, treating the temple-shrine grounds as a rice field, imitated hoeing paddies, planting rice seedlings, driving away harmful birds, and so forth, thereby praying for a rich harvest. By the Edo period, each artistic or performance community—for example, kabuki—held its own set of annual observances, which integrated its cultural activity into the larger cycle of the four seasons.
The ancient rituals that sought to renew life through contact with nature also evolved into a form of communal entertainment and release, as exemplified by the widespread custom of cherry-blossom viewing (hana-mi), which first appeared among aristocrats and spread to urban commoners in the Muromachi and Edo periods. This aspect of secondary nature in the cities is manifested in the rapid growth in the eighteenth century of so-called famous places (meisko)–centered on traditional motifs, such as the cherry blossoms of spring and the colorful leaves of autumn—which became favorite spots for short excursions for urban commoners.
The way in which different representations and functions of nature and the seasons intersected and evolved in the Edo period is the subject of chapter 7. Haikai (popular linked verse), the foremost poetic genre of the Edo period, both inherited the seasonal associations developed by waka and broke away from that classical tradition, poking fun at its long-held conventions. Haikai played a major role in making classical poetry and prose literature accessible to urban commoners and educated farmers, thereby popularizing the culture of the four seasons. Haikai masters edited and printed annotated editions of Heian-period classics (such as the Kokinshū, The Tales of Ise, and The Tale of Genji) so that their students could absorb the diction and poetic associations so critical to the process of linking verse. At the same time, haikai enlarged the natural landscape to include everything from flies to food and added such humorous seasonal topics as cat’s love (neko no koi), the squealing sound of cats mating in the spring. In contrast to waka and renga—which had created a highly codified, elegant, and harmonious view of nature—haikai, which used both vernacular and classical Japanese as well as Chinese loanwords, played off the disjunction between the elegant world of classical poetry and the everyday lives of commoners. Haikai moved in two fundamental directions:
1. It sought out the low in the high, parodying or vulgarizing classical Japanese or Chinese topics, as did sophisticated shunga (erotic ukiyo-e) prints.
2. It sought out the high (spiritual overtones, poetic depth) in the low (contemporary, commonplace), as did the haikai of Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694).
A similar process is evident in ukiyo-e, as in Suzuki Harunobu’s series “Eight Parlor Views” (Zashiki hakkei, 1766), which parodies the classical “Eight Views of Omi” (Ōmi hakkei). In short, the culture of the four seasons spread widely, in expanded form, throughout popular culture, where it manifested itself in a wide variety of media and genres.
In the Edo period, fish and food (particularly vegetables), two topics that almost never appear in the world of waka, became seasonal words (kigo). The tea ceremony, in the form of vegetarian cuisine (kaiseki) and Japanese sweets (wagashi), helped to elevate food to the level of art, where it became part of the culture of the four seasons. With the geographical shift from an inland (Nara and Kyoto) to a port culture (Osaka and Edo), fish and shellfish became an important part of Japanese poetry and visual culture, appearing in bird-and-flower (kachōga) ukiyo-e from the mid-Edo period. Significantly, the visual representation of fish, like that of plants and terrestrial animals, came under the influence of medical botany (honzōgaku). This is most dramatically demonstrated in the depictions of nature found in books of haikai and kyōka (comic poetry; literally “wild poetry”). The haikai seasonal almanacs, which became encyclopedic handbooks of the Edo period, drew heavily on honzōgaku, which created new zoological categories for insects, reptiles, birds, and mammals and placed flora and fauna under a microscope. In kyōka ehon (illustrated books of kyōka), which became popular in the late eighteenth century, fish, plants, and birds were drawn in a highly naturalistic, scientific manner even as the accompanying kyōka parodied classical seasonal topics.
In summary, this book moves more or less in chronological order, beginning in the eighth century and ending roughly in the nineteenth century. It begins with an examination of the development and spread of the poetry-based, capital-centered view of nature in various literary genres and media, and then analyzes how that view intersected with the farm-village perspectives, particularly in the Muromachi period. It then turns to the fate of the poetry-based culture of the four seasons in the Edo period: its popularization through popular linked verse, its adaptation into the culture of the pleasure quarters, its manifestation in urban commoner entertainment and newly constructed famous places, and its complex function as the object of parody and humor in ukiyo-e prints and popular culture. The conclusion summarizes the implications of this evolution, drawing together the diverse threads in a larger historical context, and ends with a note on the ways in which this multilayered culture of the four seasons is expressed in twenty-first-century Japan.