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It is wrong blithely to assume. Yet I didn’t feel, as I set out again for Matsuyama, that I had made any blithe assumptions. Far from it.

     The inauguration of a new set of international haiku awards in memory of the poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), took place two years ago, though they had been announced another year before. The city of Matsuyama, the poet’s hometown on the island of Shikoku, is in many ways the capital of haiku in Japan, and it was appropriate that the awards should be established there. Not only was it Shiki who brought haiku into the modern age, but it was also he who coined the word now so well known around the world. The centenary of his death occurs this year, by Western reckoning, but by the Japanese reckoning it took place in 2001, and various celebrations were arranged. I had been asked to participate in one of the events myself.

     Though I have been involved with haiku for a number of years, and though I have some knowledge of Japanese, I have never felt confident about speaking it in public. So I did not assume that the symposium I had been asked to take part in, together with professional scholars, would by any means be easy. To prepare myself, I assiduously reread whatever I could find about the poet on my shelves, and made a list of necessary vocabulary. The book on Shiki by Janine Beichman, which I had read several years before on another trip to Matsuyama, was among those I perused. She would be sitting next to me and might give help if I got stuck, since the other panellists were native speakers. But at the same time, I obviously couldn’t cover the scholarly stuff that she was going to. Rather, I would have to speak from an international perspective.

     I remembered, and confirmed from Hiroaki Sato’s book One Hundred Frogs, that Shiki had been the first to translate Bashō into English. This seemed worth pointing to as the moment - -if there was to be one - when the internationalisation of haiku actually began. It was part of Shiki’s great interest in and enthusiasm for things new, which was also characteristic of the age he lived in, that led him to experiment with English. Without that enthusiasm, and the reforms that he single-handedly directed to revive the dying art form, haiku would perhaps not have made it into the modern age. So the whole international spread of haiku today, including the presence of someone like myself at an event like this, could be credited to his energy and open-mindedness as well. Or at least that is what I tried to say.

     The discussion beside me developed around Shiki’s poetics, an evaluation of the ideas that he promoted, like the presentation in haiku of straightforward observation, or things as they are (ari no mama). Janine suggested that ‘sketch from life’ was the best way to translate the poet’s concept of shasei, and the prose sketches  that  he  evolved  from this. Her book gives several examples, and the ‘haibun’ that so frequently appear in haiku journals overseas (though little known or practised inside Japan), surely derive from this concept and example. Yet direct observation, while important to stress at the time of the reforms, and widely taken up as the key to haiku overseas, is surely not the whole of the haiku story.

     For haiku, it has always seemed to me, is a form of poetry, with a variety of characteristics, some of which come to the fore and are emphasised at certain times to refresh the art form. I attempted to explain something to this effect as the symposium was a drawing to a close.

     One of the difficulties of taking part in a discussion in a foreign language, and the effort of concentration this involves, is that by the time you have mustered a comment to interject, the moment for adding it may have gone. As part of my preparation I had reviewed what work on Shiki I could find in English, and now I threw in one of the verses I had memorised. If, I endeavoured to expound, direct observation could be conceived as a frog sitting squatly on the ground staring directly at what was just in front of it, then here was an important difference, between haiku of one kind and the blithely soaring spirit of Romantic poetry exemplified by Shelley’s skylark. I quoted a verse by Shiki to sum up what I meant, rather wittily I thought:

Hibari-ha to kaeru-ha to uta-no giron kana

which can be translated as The skylark school and the frog school debate the poem! There was no reaction of any kind to this, and the comment fell completely flat.

     I was baffled more than disappointed by the lack of any perceptible response,  even the tiniest glimmer of recognition, and it wasn’t until later that I realised what had happened. A more important symposium had been recorded for national television the week before, but a souvenir booklet was to be printed as a record of our event. This would eventually include the hundred haiku selected from a competition held for residents of Ehime, the prefecture where Matsuyama is located. The winners had been announced before the symposium began, and the final booklet was to include a redaction of our discussion. In due course I received the proofs of this, and it was then I understood what had gone wrong. It was quite clear from the redaction that one or two of my remarks had been incomprehensible to the person listening to the tape, and presumably the audience as well. A Japanese audience will sit patiently listening to a foreigner talk utter nonsense, so long as it is not insulting, and not grow restive. I always find this rather touching, but my mistake about the haiku was a bit more complicated.

     Before leaving Tokyo I had memorised the verse, and I was in no doubt that I had spoken it correctly, but what became immediately apparent from the proofs was that no one had realised it was a haiku. It took me a day or two to relocate the source, which turned out to be Harold G Henderson’s best-selling book, An Introduction to Haiku, still one of the best introductions to the form in my opinion. Henderson translates the verse in the following way:

On how to sing / the frog school and the skylark school / are arguing.

Helpfully he includes the Japanese, which I had quoted when I spoke but which now appeared without quotation marks in the proofs. Because the verse was included in the book, I had assumed it was a famous verse, and it evidently wasn’t. Since Shiki left about eighteen thousand haiku, it is hardly surprising that this one was not well-known.

     Happily I managed to get the text corrected before it went into print so that at least a later reader would understand it. At the time my general point was picked up sympathetically by the chairman, and didn’t go too far astray. And now the amended text appears at the back of the very handsome commemorative booklet  [to be reviewed in BS 12/4  Ed] produced in Matsuyama. Ehime: One Hundred Haiku  runs to over a hundred pages,  and includes English versions of the haiku, though not of the symposium discussion printed at the end. Twenty of the haiku have been paired with special flower arrangements, of which the appropriate photograph appears opposite each verse. Some of the pictures - experimental arrangements matched intuitively with the poem - are stunningly beautiful.

     Last year no awards were made, but this year another set of the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Awards (which are supported by the British Haiku Society) will be given.

Mist from the offing
moves slowly up the inlet -
the cry of a kite