The ubiquity of nature in Japanese culture is difficult to overlook even in today’s highly urbanized, technological age. Nature appears not only in poetry, painting, and the traditional arts (such as ikebana [flower arrangement] and the tea ceremony [chanoyu]), but in many aspects of daily life: the decoration of kimono as well as the names of colors, such as peach color (momo-iro) and yellow kerria/Japanese rose color (yamabuki-iro); of traditional cakes (wagashi), such as warbler cake (uguisu-mochi) and bush-clover cake (ohagi); and even of rooms in hotels and inns, such as Heartvine Room (Aoi no ma). Equally important, traditional Japanese architecture relies heavily on natural materials, such as tatami (straw matting), paper partitions (fusuma), and, most of all, bare wood.1
Almost every letter written in Japan begins with a reference to the current season, whether it is the approaching winter cold or the first signs of spring. This custom of seasonal greetings (aisatsu) can be traced back to the early eighth century and the seasonal poems in the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, ca. 759), many of which are elegant greetings to guests and hosts at banquets and other social occasions. In modern letters, as in ancient poems, the seasonal reference not only establishes the time and setting, but makes the greetings more elegant and polite. This is but one of the innumerable examples of the ways in which the seasons have been incorporated into social communication and cultural expression over thousands of years in Japan. When, where, and why did this phenomenon occur? In what ways was it manifested? How did it evolve with time, place, and social community?
I became interested in these questions as a result of my extended encounter with haikai (popular linked verse) and saijiki (poetic seasonal almanacs), which are essential to the study and composition of Edo-period haikai and modern haiku. I was struck profoundly by the comprehensiveness of and detail in the saijiki, which systematically categorize almost all aspects of nature and much of human activity by the cycle of the four seasons. The seasonal almanacs, which often include exemplary poems for each seasonal word (kigo), reflect a shared, comprehensive, and highly encoded representation of nature as it related to Japanese everyday life; this representation, in turn, could be said to provide the foundation for much of Japanese literary and visual culture.
The seasonal almanacs, which first appeared in the Edo period, were preceded by large and thematically organized poetry anthologies (beginning as early as the eighth century with the Man’yōshū), a major characteristic of East Asian literature, as well as by waka (classical poetry) and renga (classical linked verse) treatises that, like the saijiki, organized poetic topics and poems by the cycle of the seasons. Over the years, the encoding of the seasonal topics (kidai) and words became even more detailed. By the time of the publication of Haikai saijiki (Haikai Seasonal Almanac, 1803), a monumental compendium of more than 2600 seasonal topics edited by Kyokutei Bakin (1767–1848), the seasonal almanac had become a cultural encyclopedia that, drawing on Chinese and Japanese encyclopedias, integrated the latest information from such diverse fields as botany, astronomy, and geography into a worldview organized by the seasons. In other words, the seasons had become a fundamental means of categorizing the world and everyday life.
My initial inquiry emerged from the question of how the saijiki originated and what historical circumstances and sociocultural forces had converged to produce them. Why had the seasons come to play such a major role not only in poetry, but in a wide range of cultural phenomena, from painting to food? This led to an impossibly large question, which can be addressed only in part here: How were the seasons represented or constructed in literary and visual culture, particularly by poetry? How did depictions of and references to the seasons in various genres and media—ranging from ikebana and noh to folding screens and confectionary—relate to those in Japanese poetry? What kinds of changes occurred from one historical period to the next and from one subculture or social community to another? What were the social, religious, aesthetic, and ideological functions of the culture of the four seasons?
The most immediate answer provided by modern books and articles on this subject is that the Japanese have a long-standing and close affinity with nature, rooted in a deep and influential agricultural heritage centered on wet-field rice farming, and that the climate and geography of Japan brought about a profound sensitivity to the cycle of the four seasons. The most prominent arguments for this view are found in modern Japanese climate-culture (fūdo) studies, beginning with Watsuji Tetsurō’s (1889–1960) Fūdo (Climate, 1935), which became popular in Japan in the postwar period, particularly in the 1980s when there was, concomitant with the economic “bubble,” a boom in Nihonjinron (studies of the Japanese character). This explanation, while sometimes helpful, draws heavily on modern notions of national identity and hides the more complex historical differences among artistic genres, social communities, and cultural environments.
While writing Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, I was energized by the recent emergence of ecocriticism, which examines how concepts or images of nature are constructed in different subcultures and institutions and are expressed through a variety of literary, cultural, and social practices. To quote Ursula Heise, “Ecocriticism analyzes the ways in which literature represents the human relation to nature at particular points in history, what values are assigned to nature and why, and how perceptions of the natural shape literary tropes and genres. In turn, it examines how such literary figures contribute to shaping social and cultural attitudes toward the environment.”2 As we shall see, each major medium—reflecting the values of its producers, consumers, and distributors, as well as the conventions of the genre—provided its own perspective on nature, which took on different functions in various social contexts. However, one genre in particular, the thirty-one-syllable waka, stood in a dominant position from at least the tenth century and had such a far-reaching influence that by the Muromachi and Edo periods, its representations of nature and the seasons had come to be identified with those of Japan as a whole.
Modern Japanese climate-culture studies posit a direct cause–effect relationship between climate and culture, attempting to explain Japanese culture through the climate and topography of Japan. Ecocriticism, by contrast, focuses on the gap between the environment and culture, a gap that is often deliberately obscured by cultural and literary representations of nature. Modern Japanese climate-culture studies generally assume a mimetic function in culture, as directly reflecting material reality or physical environment, when in fact reconstructions and depictions of nature were often the opposite of reality: what aristocratic society or culture wanted nature to be rather than what it actually was. As we shall see, the first extensive cultural recreation and codification of nature in Japan occurred during the transition from rural to metropolitan culture in the early eighth century.
In her book What Is Nature?, Kate Soper defines three notions of nature as they appear in Western philosophy: metaphysical, realist, and lay. In the metaphysical concept, nature is the non-human, which is opposed to the human or cultural. In the realist concept, nature is the “structures, processes, and causal powers that are constantly operative within the physical world, that provide the objects of study of the natural sciences.” This view, on which the natural sciences are based, does not divide the human from the non-human. In the lay concept, which is how the word “nature” is used in this book, nature is “used in reference to ordinarily observable features of the world: the natural as opposed to the urban or industrial environment (landscape, wilderness, countryside, rurality), animals, domestic and wild, the physical body in space and raw materials.”3 This perspective establishes a topographical contrast between urban and rural. As we shall see, the lay view of nature, at least as it has been conceived in Japanese traditional arts, is not regarded as being opposed to the human, as is the metaphysical concept, as much as being an extension of the human, with nature becoming embedded in the urban landscape.
Why, then, are nature and the seasons so prevalent in Japanese literature and culture, particularly in classical poetry, the most canonical of literary genres? How and in what types of visual and textual forms is this seasonality expressed? How do the use and presentation of seasonality differ according to media, genre, and social community? In what ways was seasonality related to power and social hierarchy? In addressing these very wide-ranging questions, I do not attempt to cover every major social group and genre. Instead, I take up representative and sometimes episodic examples as a means to examine larger, broader phenomena. This book takes a historical approach to the study of nature and the seasons in Japanese culture, but the Index of Seasonal and Trans-Seasonal Words and Topics can serve as a valuable reference for readers who want to know the basic cultural associations. Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons is based almost entirely on Japanese primary and secondary sources, but English-speaking readers who want to pursue the subject further can consult the Bibliography of Recommended Readings in English.