Balloon from Japan
(Dying to convey to the Hailstone Launchers that, not only had their balloon message sailed all the way to Britain, but that it had been retrieved by none other than yourself, a so-called ‘haiku poet’, you spent a while in the Yellow Pages and finally invested in a small tank of helium, “a single party job”, as Joe at Mad Hatter’s had said. It had been a cloudless autumn day when you had launched your windmail reply, and you had made sure, as you inflated the first of your twenty-five balloons, that there was no one looking on too closely. You had already photocopied and encapsulated your enthusiastic letter - greetings, verse and news - and when each tiny furled-up copy soared up into the blue, strung to its own balloon, your heart had felt it was going along for the ride. Almost a year passed. And then, once again ... ... as you are out for a walk, no more than a mile from the site of the previous retrieval, a shred of Heian purple rubber, three inches of slightly-frayed but quite elegant string, and one of the same tiny capsules you had received before. The untidy wreck is lodged near the top of a hawthorn. You find a fallen branch with which to flick it off. It is a new letter, this time in rudimentary English!)
Dear Finder, Welcome to Japanese haiku world! Congraturations for finding our balloon! You are very nice to learn. Key prayers in Japanese haiku, yes today we tell you about haiku on our terebision. O.K.?
(To spare us, you interpret as best you can ...)
On its educational channel, the national broadcasting corporation (Nippon Hoso Kyokai) has a weekly kukai-format 30-minute show, ‘NHK Haidan’ (NHK Haiku World), in which a prominent professional haijin parades his/her selection of fifteen haiku from the thousands of haiku postcards sent in each week. Alternate weeks are kendai (set, usually seasonal, topic) or jiyudai (free topic). On air, three poet ‘guests’ are asked to choose and argue for their three favourite verses from the fifteen displayed as shikishi (squarish poem-cards) on the screen. The presiding haijin then adds his/her own three votes. An overall ‘winner’ (or joint winner) usually emerges having collected two or three of a possible perfect four ‘rosettes’. Haiku techniques and resonances are discussed in a charitable, educational, and sometimes gently humorous way. The last part of the show sees the leading poet pick up a red brush and alter viewers’ haiku sent in during the previous month - ‘haiku correction’ or tensaku. The programme gets two repeats each week. The fifteen haiku are subsequently published in an eponymous monthly magazine that can be bought in virtually any bookshop.
Pointo wa, kokoro no yutori, imo o niru
The main thing
About boiling potatoes:
The heart should be
At ease.Eriko Sugihara
In a recent programme, the above was praised for its freshness of phrasing (‘The main thing’ sounds like a phrase from a cookery book). If you ask us: that is where it should have stayed!
Unlike ‘Haiku World’, which is produced in Tokyo, the other popular haiku TV programme, ‘Haiku Okoku’ (Haiku Kingdom), is from NHK Matsuyama, Shiki’s native town on the island of Shikoku, and is broadcast weekly on one of NHK’s two satellite channels. ‘Haiku Kingdom’ lasts almost an hour, but there are no repeats. This programme is altogether more fun, for the haiku are by the participants themselves. This ensures an element of personal ribbing. Once again, the proceedings are kukai-style, with a prominent poet leading a panel of ‘lesser’ haiku poets in selecting from and commenting on eight kendai (and later another eight jiyudai) haiku, which are brushed onto the paper shikishi without the poets’ names. The presiding haijin, one guest celebrity (who is not a poet), five other haiku poets and the presenter himself are each given two votes. A winning poem might therefore get as many as six or seven votes, but this is very unusual. In this programme, there are usually a couple of genuinely rank poems, but it is not always the presenter or the guest who have to own up to having composed them! The biggest laugh is on the leading poet if his/her own one pulls in only criticism. The moment when, after due discussion of its merits and demerits, the compere asks whose verse it was never fails to bring sighs of recognition or gasps of surprise. In some ways, though, it is a bit like fishing: the participants submit verses they hope will hook in votes. Whereas ‘Haiku World’ is essentially analytical, ‘Haiku Kingdom’ is much more of a game. It is amazing how different participants expound and then argue for quite different scenarios gleaned from the very same open-ended verse. But the composer is always there to put them right! The set topic and free topic sections are separated by an interlude, in which the presiding haijin introduces a dozen or so of the one or two thousand haiku sent in by viewers for the programme that week.
Funsui no, tama hajike-au, koharu kana
Beads of the fountain
Ricochet about -
Indian summer.Osamu Furutani
In both programmes, women participants usually outnumber men, but in terms of winning poems, by a short head the men still have the upper hand. This may well change in the next decade or two as increasing numbers of women take to haiku as a means of meaningfully recording their daily lives. Recent popularization of haiku in Japan has meant that what used to be largely a men’s hobby is fast becoming a woman’s one. We hope you don’t mind us calling it a ‘hobby’, for apart from the few true professionals, in Japan it is viewed as such: more ‘hobby’ than ‘art’.
Both programmes are sometimes broadcast in special format. A national holiday might mean a special extended edition with an all-star cast recorded live in front of several large audiences gathered in various halls about Japan and linked in relay. An extravaganza like this might involve selection from a submitted pool numbering tens of thousands, and last-minute submissions are often accepted right there on air by fax. For two or three hours, we can watch all the famous poets as they thumb through wads of haiku as if they were checking boxes of sparklers for duds! Snow may still be on the ground outside the hall in Sapporo, but in Kagoshima the participants are all sitting outside amongst spring flowers. Special events (Shiki’s 100th, for example) also propel NHK into special productions, and there is a steady stream of documentaries (some as series) on all the haiku ‘greats’. These range from dreary, professorial lectures with occasional illustrations ... through to marvellously-shot, resonance-rich, slow-paced elegies. A magnificent one on Seishi Yamaguchi, a case in point. Have you heard of Yamaguchi Seishi, by the way? One day, perhaps, he will become popular abroad. In the meantime, we will continue to hope to hear about haiku, and the haiku poets who write them, in other lands than ours.
We always look out for incoming windmail.
Sincerely yours,
The Hailstone Launchers
Page(s) 58-60
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