History, Genre, and Social Community
This book approaches the idea of secondary nature, particularly in urban environments, from various angles—textual and visual arts, architecture, socio-religious rituals, and annual observances—and explores the evolution of some of the major components of secondary nature through a number of closely interlinked art forms: waka (classical poetry), renga (classical linked verse), haikai (popular linked verse), standing-flower (rikka) arrangement, gardens, the tea ceremony (chanoyu), screen painting (byōbu-e), and ukiyo-e. What emerges is not a unified “Japanese” view of nature and the seasons, but a highly diverse perspective, with functions and representations of nature differing greatly, depending on the historical period, genre, social community, and environment. As we have seen, depictions of nature over the thousand years from the Nara (710–784) to the Edo (1600–1867) period reflect the social hierarchies and values of producers and consumers, particularly those—such as the aristocracy in the Heian period (794–1185)—in positions of dominance and influence. Earlier constructions were not totally replaced so much as modified and woven into newer ones, in an increasingly variegated fabric of intersecting representations. Thus beliefs about the talismanic powers of animals, plants, and natural objects, which first appeared in the ancient and Nara periods, continued to coexist with the elegant depictions of nature—based on color, scent, and sound—that developed in aristocratic and court society in the Heian period, and these in turn coexisted with Chinese-influenced monochromatic landscapes painted in the medieval period (1185–1599). In the Edo period, the earlier views continued alongside new perspectives on nature that resulted from the emergence of medical botany (honzōgaku), which was closely tied to the highly scientific, realistic depictions of plants and animals, including insects and fish, that began to appear in paintings and prints.
Both the intensive focus on the seasons and the notion of harmony with nature in Japanese culture have been attributed by modern Japanese scholars and critics to the climate of Japan and the agricultural basis of Japanese society. But in the early chronicles—the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712) and Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720)—and the provincial gazetteers (fudoki), there is little evidence of the “love of nature” that is now thought to be such a major characteristic of Japanese culture.1 On the contrary, uncultivated nature is generally depicted as a threat to human existence. The chronicles and the gazetteers are filled with gods of nature, who were often feared. By the mid- to late Heian period, when farmers had gained more control over the land in the estates (shōen) in the provinces, many of the nature deities had evolved into guardian gods (chinju no kami) or agricultural gods. As Buddhism became more and more influential, indigenous nature gods were often displaced by or fused with Buddhist deities. Folk stories and myths of agricultural origin were likewise given Buddhist interpretations.
The sense of harmony with nature and the focus on the seasons that is associated with Japanese culture arose in the so-called middle and late poetry of the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, ca. 759), in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, particularly after the move of the capital to Heijō (Nara) in 710. Furthermore, this seasonal poetry emerged under the very heavy cultural influence of China, in which there had been a longstanding tradition of poetry that used landscape (kei) and nature to express human emotions (jō) and thought. There was also a venerable continental tradition of using figures of nature for symbolic purposes—for example, the carp climbing a river or waterfall as a sign of success or an auspicious future, the plum blossom in early spring as a sign of resilience, or the wild goose in the sky as a sign of loneliness or exile. Many of the seasonal and natural associations that are found in Japanese poetry, painting, and urban culture in fact derived from Chinese models and entered Japan through Chinese poetry and related genres, both in the Nara and early Heian periods (from Six Dynasties [220–589] and Tang [618–907] China) and in the Muromachi period (1392–1573) (from Song China [960–1279]). Many of the natural motifs that appear in eighth-century waka (such as the plum, peach, and mandarin orange) do not reference plants found in the wild, but trees that had been imported from China and were cultivated in the gardens of aristocrats.
Above all, it was the Heian court-based culture, in the capital of Heian (Kyoto), particularly in the tenth and eleventh centuries, that developed and established an extremely complex and highly codified view of the four seasons that would become the model of elegance and the primarily literary representation of nature for the next thousand years. The overwhelming influence of this “flower and bird, wind and moon” (kachō fūgetsu) model can be attributed to the literary and cultural impact of the imperial court. In particular, the imperial waka anthologies and such court narratives as The Tale of Genji formed a court tradition that was absorbed by subsequent classes and social communities (such as the provincial warlords [daimyo] in the Muromachi period) who desired to acquire the cultural pedigree of the Heian nobility.
A close connection also developed between waka and women’s culture. Waka-esque associations permeated the design of clothing displayed on the female body, first in the twelve-layered robes (juni hitoe) of the Heian period and later in the haute couture of the kosode (kimono) in the Edo period. They also informed the names used to designate the imperial consorts and their female attendants in the Heian period; the occupants of the ōoku (sho-gunal harem quarters) of large castles in the Muromachi and Edo periods; and the high-ranking professional women in the pleasure quarters of the major cities in the Edo period, where well-educated courtesans took on elegant classical names such as Fuji (Wisteria) and Yūgiri (Evening Mist). As a result, certain poetic associations, particularly those established in both waka and The Tale of Genji (written by a woman largely for women), became culturally gendered.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even as the aristocracy lost political power, Heian court culture took on renewed authority, leading to a classical renaissance. The neoclassical impulse is encapsulated in allusive variation (honka-dori), a major feature of the waka in the Shinkokinshū (New Anthology of Poetry Old and New, 1205), in which poetry is created out of noted mid-Heian waka or passages from the Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise, ca. 947) and The Tale of Genji. Saigyō’s (1118–1190) famous poem in the Shinkpkinshū—“Was the beautiful spring at Naniwa in the province of Tsu just a dream? The wind blows through the withered reeds” (Tsu no kuni no Naniwa no haru wa yume nare ya ashi no kareha ni kaze wataru nari [Winter, no. 625])—is an allusive variation on a noted mid-Heian poem, collected in the Goshūishū (Later Collection of Gleanings, 1086), by Nōin (b. 988): “How I would like to show it to someone of sensibility! The spring scene at the Naniwa Crossing in the province of Tsu” (Kokoro aru hito ni misebaya Tsu no kuni no Naniwa watari no haru no keshiki wo [Spring 1, no. 43]). Saigyō praises winter (wind blowing through the reeds) by noting the absence of spring as it was conceived in this Heian-period waka.
The far-ranging impact of waka stemmed from its creation of a cultural vocabulary, a communal language, that became associated with education, pedigree, and elegance. From at least the tenth century, education for both men and women implied the ability to compose waka. A major turning point was the Ōnin War (1467–1477), which destroyed Kyoto and its cultural monuments. After the war, the culture of the capital survived in waka, painting, and other genres that attempted to preserve or re-create the customs of the lost imperial court. The traditions of Heian court culture also spread to the provinces, transmitted and taught by scholars and clerics who had fled the capital. Renga masters such as Sōgi (1421–1502) and aristocratic scholars such as Ichijō Kanera (1421–1520) became the new purveyors of classical culture to provincial daimyo who were eager to acquire a culture to which they were not entitled by birth. Knowledge of the Heian court classics, particularly with regard to waka, became a form of cultural capital for the surviving aristocrats, who transmitted or created secret teachings (hiden). Meanwhile, the broader cultural meanings of the Heian classics and their seasonal associations were loosely disseminated through such popular genres as Muromachi tales (otogi-zōshi) as well as through more elite genres such as noh, flower arrangement (ikebana), and other arts of the Muromachi period.
One result of the medieval neoclassical impulse is that much of the literature of the period—from war tales to linked verse to noh plays—uses waka and its seasonal associations as set pieces. The descriptions of nature in the Kakuichi variant of the Heike monogatari (The Tales of the Heike, mid-thirteenth century)—such as the “Viewing the Moon” episode in book 5, in which Shikkei of the Daitoku-ji Temple returns to the abandoned capital; the moonlit evening at Saga in the “Kogō” section in book 6; and GoShirakawa’s visit to Kenreimon’in’s retreat (Jakkō-in) in the section “The Retired Emperor Visits Ohara” at the end—weave together citations of famous Heian-period waka, evoking the cultural past. In creating a cosmology of Heaven and Earth, renga similarly codifies the associations of classical poetry, and noh plays by Kan’ami (1333–1384) and Zeami (1363–1443) string together lines from classical waka to create stage settings.2
From the twelfth century, at least two major literary representations of nature emerged and coexisted in writings by aristocrats and Buddhist priests: the satoyama view, focused on farm villages in the provinces, usually at the feet of small mountains; and the elegant view, derived from waka and capital culture. In the ancient period, untamed nature was often regarded as a bitter adversary, as a land filled with wild and dangerous gods. But at least from the mid- to late Heian period, the satoyama emerged in literary texts as a place in which humans appear to have been in an intimate (though not necessarily mutually beneficial) relationship with nature. There was a close interaction between the villagers and the animals and plants in the surrounding forests and wild fields, which were harvested for food, brushwood, and other necessities. The animals in the satoyama—such as rabbits, wolves, and raccoons—almost never appear in waka or court tales (mono-gatari) of the Heian and Kamakura (1185–1333) periods, but they are important protagonists of folk stories, anecdotal narratives (setsuwa), war tales (gunkj-mono), and other popular genres, particularly those that came to the fore in the medieval period. By the Muromachi period, the plants and animals of the satoyama appeared regularly not only in renga but even in waka.
As early as the eleventh century, an idealized view of the satoyama appeared in urban, aristocratic representations of nature, particularly in the literary and poetic “pastoralization” of the mountain village (yamazato), which was regarded by Heian-period waka poets as a retreat from the danger and bustle of society. In the Muromachi period, with the influx from China of Zen-inspired ink paintings that depicted recluses in the mountains, the yamazato became even more idealized. The most obvious manifestation of this idea of nature occurred in the Muromachi and early Edo periods with the emergence of the “rustic” tea ceremony (wabicha), conducted in small teahouses in the middle of the city, representing a kind of “pastoral” retreat.
The capital-based landscape and the village-based landscape (as represented in writings by cultural elites) began to intersect in a wide range of popular genres—anecdotal literature, war tales, Muromachi popular tales, noh, comic drama (kyōgen), and haikai—particularly from the Muromachi period. For the most part, Nara- and Heian-period setsuwa collections rarely contain waka. The Konjaku monogatari shū (Tales of Times Now Past, ca. 1120) devotes only one of its thirty-one volumes to waka. But the waka tradition became increasingly prominent in popular genres to the degree that Muromachi popular tales (otogi-zōshi) include a whole subgenre of aristocratic tales (kuge-mono). Even the Kakuichi version of the Heike monogatari—which was edited around 1371 and drew heavily on anecdotal literature—interweaves waka-esque and court tale-type sections, some of which feature female characters, into its narrative of war. Takarai Kikaku’s (1661–1707) famous hokku (opening verse of a renga sequence)—“Unlike The Tales of the Heike, not even a moon appears in the Taiheiki” (Heike nari Taiheiki ni wa tsuki mo mizu)—astutely points to the portrayals of natural beauty and courtly elegance (symbolized by the moon) in the Heike monogatari but not in the Taiheiki (Record of Great Peace, 1368?–1379?), a narrative about the bloody battles of the Northern and Southern Courts period (1336–1392).3 Noh, which came to the fore in the Muromachi period, also represents a major intersection of court-based culture and provincial views of nature. Of particular interest is the appearance of waka-esque figures (such as the willow, cherry tree, and chrysanthemum) as the protagonists of both medieval tales and noh plays. The animal and plant protagonists express a new kind of interiority, revealing the “suffering” of nature as a result of the actions of humans or the destruction of the environment. The Edo period was marked by the growth of urban popular literature, but the satoyama landscape—with its cosmology of plants, animals, and supernatural beings—continues to appear in folk tales and in such genres as kusa-zōshi, illustrated red-, black-, and yellow-covered books originally written mainly for children and then later for adults.
The variety of representations and reconstructions of nature is as great as the number of social and religious communities, but two features stand out amid the diversity of views: the deep and pervasive impact of waka and its seasonal and natural associations on a range of media, particularly among the socially and politically dominant classes; and the extensive and tightly controlled re-creation of nature in the city and in what became the “traditional arts” of Japan. As we have seen, the thirty-one-syllable waka had an overwhelming influence on Japanese views of nature from the Nara period through the Edo period and permeated all the other major vernacular genres in aristocratic culture—court tales (monogatari), poem tales (uta-monogatari), literary diaries (nikki), and travel diaries (kikobun)—as well as such visual media as screen paintings (byōbu-e), door or partition paintings (fusuma-e), and picture scrolls (emaki). Thus the waka-based view of the world—with its stress on seasonal associations, harmony, and elegance—came to be regarded in the modern period as the Japanese view of nature, overshadowing a multiplicity of other reconstructions of the natural environment.
Waka had two potential functions: as a one-time social, political, or religious act, in which the poem and its media (calligraphy and paper) functioned as a form of elevated dialogue that inevitably lost much of its significance after the occasion; and as a text, in handwritten or printed form, that continued to survive outside its initial context. The desire to re-create the original social, political, or religious context of a poem gave rise to a number of literary genres, such as the poem tale, literary diary, travel diary, and headnotes or interlinear commentary supplied in poetry collections. When later generations had difficulty reconstructing the original social context of a poem, they read it in relation to earlier poems and established topics, particularly seasonal topics. So while its force as performance would eventually be lost, the poem as text continued to exist in larger, trans-historical contexts, with its seasonal topics anchoring it in a communal memory that was accessible through anthologies, treatises and handbooks, and seasonal almanacs.
Waka also played a major role in what I have called the ideology of the four seasons—that is, the use of the culture of the four seasons to reinforce hierarchical power relations. The imperial waka anthologies, beginning with the Kokinshū (Collection of Japanese Poems Old and New, ca. 905), created an idealized world that centered on the emperor and the upper echelons of the imperial court. The anthologies, which had immense prestige throughout the Heian and medieval periods, long after the aristocracy lost its economic and political power, attempted to create the illusion that both time and space—that is, “all under Heaven,” nature and humans, the Heavens and the Earth—were brought to order around the sovereign and the imperial court and were held in harmony through poetry. This stance derived, at least in part, from a long-standing Chinese tradition that regarded the orderly cycle of the seasons to be a direct reflection of the state of imperial rule. In this cosmology, natural disruptions or disasters (earthquakes, floods, plagues) became a sign of misrule or governmental mismanagement. This belief is reflected in such narratives as The Tale of Genji—for example, when the protagonist is exiled to Suma and Akashi. As we have seen, the coexistence of the four seasons in four directions also was a symbol from as early as the Heian period of a utopian state or an eternally harmonious world.
The ideology of the four seasons was also represented in poetic places (utamakura), locales made famous by waka, which represented a cultural mapping of Japan as viewed from the capital. These sites were initially concentrated in the Nara and Kyoto areas, but they gradually extended to the east (Kanto area), to Kyushu, and to the north (Tōhoku area). They included famous places (meisho) around the capital, such as Arashiyama and Yoshino, frequently visited by the nobility and famous for their cherry blossoms, autumn foliage, snow, or other classical seasonal landscapes. In the Heian and Kamakura periods, the more remote utamakura functioned as cultural nodes in the imagination of poets and educated courtiers, as a means for urban nobles to travel without traveling; to compose on distant utamakura was to bring a provincial landscape into one’s own textual and poetic garden. In the Heian period, poetic places were reproduced in quantity in screen paintings, in the gardens of palace-style (shinden-zukuri) residences, and even on miniature landscape stands (suhama-dai) that represented the Japanese archipelago and on which pins were placed to identify specific utamakura. Gradually, beginning in the late Heian period and extending through the Edo period, waka, renga, and haikai poets such as Nōin, Saigyō, Sōgi, and Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) visited and wrote poems on these distant poetic places, making them increasingly popular not only as locales to reference poetically, but also as sites to visit. From the Edo period, poets who lived in provinces without established utamakura (essentially, spaces without authoritative cultural recognition), particularly in the Ōshū region (northwestern Honshu), began to construct their own poetic places, using waka-esque names and thereby connecting themselves with capital culture. At the same time, haikai poets, seeking to go beyond such classical associations and to break out of the yoke of capital-centric discourse, used non-classical diction and rural landscapes to create new poetic places called haimakura (haikai poetic places).
The Edo period brought about radical change in the poetic topography with the emergence of a commercial, capital-based society centered on three major cities—Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo (Tokyo)—in which the main focus of interest was human relations as determined by money and social status, a situation reflected in the fiction and drama of Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) and Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725), respectively. However, the commercial economy centered not so much on manufactured goods as on agricultural products, which were distributed around the country and encouraged a high level of awareness of the seasons, climate, and food. Furthermore, the mercantile economy resulted in a vastly expanded transportation network, leading in turn to dramatic growth in the number of travelers and pilgrims, such as the haikai poet Bashō, who could now seek out and experience nature firsthand, outside the cities. The commerce-based society also created the leisure and education that allowed for engagement in poetry—haikai, senryū (satiric haiku), kyōka (comic poetry), kanshi (Chinese-style poetry), and kyōshi (comic Chinese-style poetry)—and the traditional arts, which flourished on an unprecedented scale among samurai, urban commoners, and wealthy farmers. One result was the extensive production of books on farming, travel, and poetry of all varieties.
The rise of print culture and the publication of haikai books in the seventeenth century also had a major impact on the spread of poetic knowledge. Mid-seventeenth-century Teimon school haikai poets and scholars such as Kitamura Kigin (1624–1705) encouraged the dissemination of classical literary knowledge (which had hitherto been restricted to aristocrats, priests, and powerful warriors) among urban commoners. The haikai genre proved to be a highly effective carrier of classical culture, since it relies heavily on traditional verbal associations, particularly seasonal associations, for its foundation. Leading haikai poets and teachers such as Kigin compiled and published modern editions of and commentaries on the Heian classics—a notable example being Kigin’s Genji monogatari kogetsushō (The Tale of Genji Moon on the Lake Commentary, 1673)—and created poetic seasonal almanacs such as Yama-no-i (The Mountain Well, 1648), also by Kigin, that gave commoner poets and readers easy access to traditional seasonal associations. Thus by the early Edo period, Heian court culture, particularly waka culture, managed to thoroughly infiltrate commoner culture and spread to the far corners of Japan.
At the everyday, amateur level, Japanese poetry might better be regarded as a craft than as an art. Significantly, renga masters (rengashi) were identified as craftsmen (shokunin) in the Muromachi period. Poems (waka, renga, haikai) were intended to be composed by anyone, not only those with superior talent. Japanese traditional arts are generally based on the acquisition of fixed patterns (kata), which enable the form to be practiced by a wide populace, including amateurs, under the supervision of a teacher or school. The average seasonal word (kigo), such as hototogisu (small cuckoo), consists of five sound units (onji). Thus the seventeen-syllable hokku or haiku is almost one-third finished when the kigo is chosen. More complex operations are involved in the composition of waka and renga, but the practice of using fixed patterns and imitating standard models remains unchanged. As a kind of craft that can be widely practiced, shared, and imitated, poetry became a key vehicle for the transmission of cultural memory.
All the major poetic genres—from the banquet poetry of the Nara period in the Man’yōshū to the poetry contest (uta-awase) in the Heian period to haikai in the Edo period—were composed in group settings, usually under the supervision of a professional or teacher, such as a judge (hanji) in the uta-awase or a renga or haikai master. These poetry masters were also heads or subheads of poetry houses (ie) or schools (mon). Noted poets existed within the context of house lineages or schools, which continued over many generations, sometimes over many centuries, and served as the repositories of specialized knowledge and texts. The house system was characteristic of traditional Japanese arts in general, not just poetry. Familiar examples are the Reizei family in waka,4 the five schools of noh (Kanze, Hōshō, Konparu, Kongō, and Kita), the Ikenobō school in ikebana, and the Urasenke family in the tea ceremony. Family schools first appeared in the mid-Heian period, but a new type of school, based on the household (iemoto) system, emerged in the Edo period and sometimes recruited a large body of followers for financial gain.
The tradition of such houses or schools led, on the one hand, to the increasing specialization of knowledge. This is evident in the composition of renga, whose rules became so complex that a master had to preside over the za (gathering of poets for group composition) to ensure that they were being followed. On the other hand, particularly from the Edo period, when the household system emerged, the practitioners of poetry included many amateurs, including wealthy samurai and urban commoners. These literary and performance genres are simple enough to be accessible to non-specialists, but at the highest level they can be mastered only by specialists. The system of open schools has continued to the present day. One result has been continual growth in the population of practicing poets and followers of the arts, all of whom depend to some degree on a knowledge of the culture of the four seasons.
Kanshi, which held a position equal to, if not higher than, that of waka through the Edo period, encompasses a much wider range of topics and subject matter than does waka, ranging from poverty to education to war. Kanshi (by both Chinese and Japanese poets) served as a continual source of inspiration for a range of seasonal topics, as the topos of the “Eight Views” suggests, but it did not give rise, as did waka, to a well-cataloged, systematic set of seasonal associations, a communal language, that supplied a rich vocabulary for social and aesthetic usages. Various forms of song lyrics—from the imayō (popular songs) of the Heian and medieval periods to the dodoitsu (ditties sung to the samisen [banjo-like instrument]) and hauta (music and songs performed in the popular theater and the pleasure quarters) of the Edo period—dealt frankly with such “inelegant” topics as sexuality and the body. But even these popular lyric forms drew heavily on classical traditions of waka diction and imagery, appropriating elements of classical poetry for the purposes of popular culture.
Haikai also played a key role in combining classical associations with new topics from popular culture and in developing the technique of mitate (visual transposition). As we saw with Suzuki Harunobu’s multiple takes on the “Eight Views of Omi,” motifs and topoi derived from the waka culture of the four seasons often became the object of parodic and ironic treatment in the Edo period, particularly in such genres as haikai, senryū, and kyōka, which parodied classical poetry and frequently turned elegant topics into crude or pornographic images. This vulgarization of waka-based topics and associations began as early as the Muromachi period with early haikai, which playfully inverted canonical images into their opposites. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, highly educated samurai and wealthy townspeople who were well versed in the Heian and Chinese classics were composing kyōka, which took the parodic inversion of classical motifs to an even higher level. Much of the humor of late Edo popular literature and ukiyo-e depends on mitate that ironically transposes classical images into topics of contemporary commoner life. Both kyōka and haikai have the potential to lower their textual targets by debasing them or undercutting their authority, but they can also elevate their subjects by drawing attention to their traditional cultural associations.
The system of seasonal words (kigo), the seasonal encoding of almost all aspects of nature and society, was first extensively developed in waka and renga, then widened in haikai, and finally inherited and further disseminated by haiku, the most popular poetic form in the twentieth century. One constant throughout these changes was an emphasis on representations of nature and the seasons as a way of giving value not only to the months and years, but to everyday life and the physical world. One can argue that the seasons are important in all cultures, but what makes the Japanese culture of the four seasons particularly striking is the various and prominent ways in which cultural seasonalization—particularly the breaking down of nature into seasonal categories and phases with specific associations—occurs across a wide variety of media and genres over a millennium. The evolution of this poetic and artistic tradition paralleled the development of secondary nature in the metropolis, where nature took on multiple social, cultural, religious, and recreational functions.
As we have seen, secondary nature in Japanese poetry and visual arts tends to fall into the two broad categories of seasonal and trans-seasonal motifs. Seasonal motifs (such as the bush warbler, cherry blossom, and butterfly) mark a specific season or phase of a season. Trans-seasonal motifs (such as the pine, bamboo, crane, turtle, and carp), by contrast, appear all year round and usually have auspicious or talismanic significance. Sometimes a particular motif, such as the plum or chrysanthemum, straddles both categories. Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), who was firmly rooted in the waka tradition, identified the cherry blossom as the ultimate symbol of Japan in a noted waka: “If one asks people about the heart of Yamato, it is the mountain cherry blossoms that glow in the morning sun” (Shikishima no yamatogokoro wo hito towaba asahi ni niou yamazakurabana).5 By contrast, in Nihon fūkei-ron (Discussion of Japan’s Landscape, 1894), perhaps the most famous description of nature in Japan in the Meiji period (1868–1912), Shiga Shigetaka (1863–1927) considers the pine, with its rugged strength, as the ultimate embodiment of Japanese “character.” Both the cherry blossom, the most noted seasonal motif, and the pine, the most prominent trans-seasonal and talismanic motif, have coexisted over the centuries, playing different but complementary roles.
The cultural functions of nature appear on at least three fundamental semi-ritualistic levels in urban society. First, it emerged in the form of annual observances that frequently had talismanic objectives (to protect against evil, prolong life, bring good fortune, and so forth). These ceremonies generally connected participants with cosmic sources of life energy or with the gods (kami), who often were believed to be embodied in natural objects (plants, animals, rocks). This role can be seen in almost all the major court observances—from the setting up of the gate pine (kadomatsu) on New Year’s Day to the gathering of new herbs (wakana) in the spring—derived from Chinese precedents, as well as in the provincial culture of the sa-toyama, where many such rituals were of indigenous origin, local in character, and related to agriculture.
Second, the cultural use of nature functioned on an interpersonal level as a form of greeting (aisatsu) to a guest, friend, or social superior. One of the historical origins of ikebana (flower arrangement) was the Heian-period aristocratic custom of attaching seasonal flowers or plants to a letter—with the requisite poem, the paper, and the flower all matching the seasonal occasion. In this context, nature served as an elegant means of communication in an elite society that prized politeness and refinement. These two cultural uses of nature, one ritualistic (talismanic) and the other interpersonal (social), are combined in the Muromachi- and Edo-period arts of standing-flower (rikka) arrangement and the tea ceremony (chanoyu).
Third, nature functioned as an object of communal, socially sanctioned entertainment, exemplified in the practices of viewing cherry blossoms, the harvest moon, autumn foliage, and fallen snow. These forms of seasonal entertainment had religious roots, but they evolved into opportunites for communal release. Cherry-blossom viewing began as early as the Nara period in aristocratic circles, gradually spread to commoner society in the Muromachi period, and became an integral part of urban commoner life in the Edo period. Significantly, such communal entertainment—which focused on eating, drinking, and dancing—concentrated on the aforementioned “big four,” the most popular topics in waka. They were staged in the pleasure quarters as major seasonal events and were closely associated with travel to famous places (meisho), an activity that became popular among commoners in the Edo period.
The role of nature as the object of communal entertainment was fueled especially by the rapid and widespread construction in the Edo period of new centers for seasonal observances within and around the major cities—on temple and shrine grounds and in parks such as Ueno in Edo. In ancient times, the cherry tree was regarded as part of the coppice (mixed-tree) woodland (zōkibayashi); grew on the tops of hills and mountains; and was used for firewood. But as the Yasurai Festival at the Imamiya Shrine in Kyoto—which can be traced to the Heian period and is now held on the second Sunday in April—indicates, the cherry blossom (whose scattering was thought to cause illness) began to be worshipped and its spirit placated as a means to prevent the spread of disease in the spring. From the second half of the ninth century, cherry trees, like willows, were planted in the capital and the gardens of nobility for aesthetic purposes, eventually leading to the construction of famous places for cherry blossoms.
When the capital moved to the present-day city of Kyoto, at the beginning of the Heian period, the practice of seeking out bright foliage (momiji) probably began sporadically in mountain valleys around the capital, but eventually it shifted to sites in the city itself, thanks to horticultural efforts to create gardens and groves notable for colorful autumn leaves. Today, such sites in Kyoto—among them Takao, Toganoo, Makinoo, Ōhara sanzen-in, Jakkō-in, Shūgaku Detached Palace, Kiyomizu Temple, Arashiyama, Ka-tsura Detached Palace, and Tōfuku-ji temple—feature special trees such as the Japanese maples Acer palmatum (iroha-momiji), with its bright crimson leaves, and Acer amoenum (oomomiji), whose leaves change from bright yellow to red. These trees are planted to be seen; they are carefully pruned to look attractive and are cleared of underbrush, and their grounds are regularly swept.6 In other words, this aspect of the seasonal “nature” for which Kyoto is known is a carefully manicured production intended to attract sightseers and tourists.
All three types of cultural seasonalization continued into the modern period. With the shift to the solar calendar in the early Meiji period, the government officially abandoned the Five Sacred Festivals (Gosekku), which had been the core annual observances of the luni-solar calendar through the Edo period. Today, in Tokyo, the Star Festival (Tanabata), which is an autumn topic in waka and was celebrated on the seventh day of the Seventh Month, is observed on July 7, thus maintaining the double number (7 / 7) but moving from autumn to summer. In most modern seasonal almanacs (saijiki), however, Tanabata remains an autumn topic and seasonal word, thus creating a significant disjunction between the actual observance and its traditional cultural associations. With the shift to the solar calendar, the New Year, which had marked the advent of spring, was split off from that season, now considered to begin in early February. Despite these severe disruptions, the system of seasonal words remains so vital to haiku that traditional seasonal words and their associations continue to be used.
The main difference between Edo-period haikai (and its opening verse [hokku]) and its modern descendant haiku is that linked verse disappeared totally in the twentieth century, leaving only the seventeen-syllable haiku, which requires a seasonal word. One consequence was that haiku, at least in its early stages, was seasonal poetry first and social poetry second. Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), the pioneer of modern haiku, wrote almost no love poems. It was not until the Taishō period (1912–1926), with the appearance of haiku poets such as Sugita Hisajo (1890–1946), one of the first women haiku poets, that we find notable love poetry in haiku: “Taking off the cherry blossom robe—left tangled in strings of all sorts” (Hanagoromo nugu ya ma-tsuwaru himo iroiro). The seasonal word in this haiku is hanagoromo (cherry-patterned robe), which is a spring word. Hanagoromo were worn by court women in the Heian period and by modern women when they went cherry-blossom viewing. The haiku suggests that the speaker has just come back from viewing cherry blossoms and, perhaps intoxicated by the flowers and by wine, attempts to fling off the bright kimono that remains attached to her body by multicolored strings.
Although modern haiku depended on the classical seasonal associations for its survival, they are not necessary for the composition of the thirty-one-syllable tanka (short poem), the contemporary form that replaced the traditional waka. A good example is a tanka by Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), one of the pioneers of love poetry in the Meiji period: “Won’t you be lonely, not touching the hot blood under my soft skin? You who philosophize” (Yawa-hada no atsuki chishio ni fure mo mide sabishikarazu ya michi wo toku kimi). This poem, in Midaregami (Tangled Hair, 1901), shows a very iconoclastic approach to love, with the woman taking on the position of the aggressor. A more recent example is by Tawara Machi (b. 1962), whose tanka collection Sarada kinenbi (Salad Anniversary, 1987) became a pop phenomenon and sold over a million copies: “Looking up at the rain that falls down, suddenly, in this position, I want your lips” (Ochite kita ame wo miagete sono mama no katachi de fui ni kuchibiru ga hoshi). In tanka, the topic of love does not have to be mediated by a season, as in haiku. Thus tanka may draw on seasonal associations, but does not depend on them for its survival. This is a far cry from the symbiotic relationship between love and the four seasons in the Kokinshū.
The tendency to move toward non-seasonal poetry is evident in the emergence in the mid-eighteenth century of senryū, a seventeen-syllable, satiric, and socially centered verse that split off from haikai, that does not require a seasonal word, and that remains popular. In contrast to Heian waka, which had been highly restrictive in limiting its vocabulary to refined topics, Muromachi- and Edo-period haikai allowed for any kind of language and any kind of topic, including the vulgar and the erotic. In the Meiji period, tanka became the successor to waka, and haiku became the successor to haikai. But there was a dramatic reversal of roles. It is tanka that has no restrictions on diction and content, while haiku requires a seasonal word, anchoring the form in the poetic tradition. In other words, the new form of waka, which had been the classical genre for more than a thousand years, became the vehicle for the avant-garde, while the descendant of haikai, which had begun as an anti-establishment genre, became the guardian of the culture of the four seasons.
In a series of important essays published in the newspaper Nihon (Japan), beginning on July 24, 1894,7 Masaoka Shiki analyzed the relationships among nature, human affairs, and genre. One of the major characteristics of Japanese literature, Shiki argues, is the primacy of poetry and of nature, with poetry (specifically haiku and tanka) providing the main vehicle for representations of nature. By contrast, in Shiki’s view, modern European literature—centered on drama, epic, and the novel—tends to focus on prose and human affairs. In the Meiji period, Shiki points out, under the impact of European culture and literature, Japanese writers shifted their attention from poetry—the central literary genre, along with chronicles—to the novel and drama, to the extent that some now considered them to be the only literary forms. Shiki’s stance on poetry and nature can be interpreted as defensive with regard to the short or lyric poem, which had descended in the modern genre hierarchy, which places the novel and drama at the top, but it also throws light on the complex relationship between genre and nature in Japanese literary history. Takahama Kyoshi (1874–1959), Shiki’s chief disciple, stressed in a famous lecture in 1928 that “haiku is literature that should describe flowers, birds, wind, and the moon [kachō fūgetsu].”8 This view, referred to as kachō fūei (composing on flowers and birds), spurred an opposition movement in 1931 called the Shinkō haiku undō (New Haiku Movement), led by Kyoshi’s disciple Mizuhara Shūōshi (1892–1981) and others, who believed that human affairs and social engagement, including antiwar activism, should be the central subjects of haiku. The two directions—one toward nature and the other toward society—represent different sides of haiku. But whichever direction they take, the vast majority of haiku (as opposed to senryū) continue to use seasonal words, which provide a base of shared associations between the poet and the reader and which remain the cultural foundation of Japanese poetry. Those associations and poetic examples are gathered in seasonal almanacs, which have served as handbooks and references for modern haiku poets and have come to represent a shared cultural memory.
A typical modern haiku seasonal almanac (for example, the Nihon daisaijiki [Great Japanese Seasonal Almanac, 1983], edited by Mizuhara Shūōshi, Katō Shūson, and Yamamoto Kenkichi) contains as many as five thousand seasonal words divided into five categories: New Year, spring, summer, autumn, and winter. The pyramid of seasonal topics that emerged in the Edo period remains, with the narrow top derived from the classical tradition and the broad base occupied by seasonal words from contemporary life. Due to urbanization and environmental change, some of the icons at the top, such as the small cuckoo, have faded, while the cherry blossom and autumn foliage remain cultural heavyweights. Examples of new seasonal words for summer are beer, swimming (oyogi), camping (kyampu), baseball night game (naitaa), yachting (yotto), sunburn (hiyake), sunglasses (sangu-rasu), and short-sleeved shirt (natsu shattsu). Beer may be drunk throughout the year, but in Japan, cold beer and beer halls have a close association with hot summer nights, linking summer to the poetic or cultural essence of beer. As these examples show, the topics subsumed under the four seasonal categories are not restricted to plants, animals, hills, and rivers. It would be hard to call beer or a short-sleeved shirt a form of secondary nature. Instead, modern seasonal words extend to a wide range of social activities, from food to baseball, covering the human and social landscape in the broadest possible sense. In other words, the system of kigo not only reflects an awareness of nature, but also serves as a means to organize individual and social life throughout the year, providing seasonally coded markers. In that sense, seasonal vocabulary goes hand in hand with seasonal clothing, for example, and the ways in which fashion still equates certain seasons and their phases with specific colors, words, and images.
In a country in which little original wilderness survives, reconstructed nature—in the form of replanted forests, cultivated gardens, famous places (meisho), and shrine and temple grounds—has contributed to the greening of both the countryside and the urban environment. For city dwellers, who make up the vast majority of the population, representations of nature in poetry, paintings, ikebana, kimono patterns, foods, and annual observances raise awareness of the seasons. In an urban environment in which the average company employee probably encounters little nature or even natural sunlight in the course of the day, the tea ceremony, like many of the traditional artistic and literary forms, brings the worker back in touch with nature and the seasons, if only through secondary forms: the flower in the alcove, the calligraphic text on the hanging scroll, and the poetic name (uta-mei) of the tea jar or tea scoop.9 Although nature may be far away, it is relived or recaptured in the cultural imagination.
The population of practitioners of ikebana or of the tea ceremony has dramatically diminished in the post—World War II era, though, with few young people joining the ranks; and the alcove (tokpnoma), which was once the cultural center of the traditional residence, has almost entirely disappeared from modern apartments and homes, together with the tatami room. It is also increasingly difficult to find examples of the farm village (satoyama) landscape even in the remote countryside. The sense of nature and the seasons instead derives from such activities as hiking in the mountains, domestic tourism, visiting food markets, eating high-end traditional Japanese cuisine, and watching television, on which the weather reports show the arrival and departure of the seasons, particularly the cherry blossoms and the autumn foliage.
The diminished representation of nature and the seasons in contemporary Japan, however, does not lessen their enormous impact across more than a thousand years of Japanese cultural history, not only in poetry, painting, and the traditional arts but also in a wide range of media, from architecture to fashion. As we have seen, natural imagery in poetry provided a key means of social communication from as early as the seventh century, and representations of nature and the seasons became an important channel of aesthetic, religious, and political expression in the subsequent centuries. The highly encoded system of seasonal representation created by poetry provided an enduring foundation for an increasingly complex and multilayered view of the four seasons.
At the same time, the extensive cultural seasonalization and the pervasive presence of secondary nature may have dulled the sense of urgency with regard to conservation and the need to save the environment, where Japan’s record has not been good in the postwar period. The destruction of poetic places (utamakura), for example, has aroused environmental awareness of particular traditionally famous places, as has the destruction of shrines that protect large trees, but modern haiku and traditional-arts groups have not been in the forefront in raising concerns about broader environmental issues. In this sense, the pervasiveness of secondary nature in Japanese culture has often been mistaken for a closeness to or a belief in Japanese harmony with primary nature.