Every Gust Has a Face – Wind in Japanese Poetry Has a Name, Intentions, and Feelings

Kochi carries an exile's longing. Matsukaze sighs loneliness through the pines. Kogarashi strips trees to the bone. Japan created dozens of names for wind – each with its own season, psychology, and poetry. An essay on wind as a literary character: from Sugawara no Michizane through Zeami's nō theater to the hokku of Bashō and Buson.

In Japanese poetry, the wind does not blow – it arrives, remembers, and grieves

A bamboo blind stirred gently – and a heart quickened, because the person you had been waiting for all through that dark evening was approaching. But no, no one comes. It is akikaze – the September wind of parting. Seventh century, the imperial court, night. Princess Nukada recorded that moment in five verses that would survive thirteen centuries: the wind moved the blind exactly as a lover would have. Hope and disappointment in a single touch. In a single gust – an entire drama. Two centuries later, Sugawara no Michizane, exiled from Kyoto, said goodbye not to his wife or his students – he said goodbye to his plum tree and asked kochi, the eastern wind of longing, to carry its fragrance across all of Japan to reach him. Three hundred more years and Murasaki Shikibu let the autumn typhoon nowaki (野分) into the palace of her novel "Genji Monogatari," allowing it to overturn the screens behind which a husband had hidden his wife’s face from his own son. And Bashō, walking on foot through the winter of 1684, wrote three verses about how the wind kogarashi (木枯らし) lashed his face with its icy blows.

Each of these stories has a different tempo, a different temperature, a different taste. And each involves a different kind of wind – not a generic gust, but a specific, named one, recognizable by touch and feeling. Kochi (東風), warm and vernal, carrying longing. Matsukaze (松風), low and monotonous, sighing in the pines like the voice of someone who left long ago and will never return. Japan created dozens of such names – not to catalogue the weather, but because each of these winds brings different emotions. And none can be confused with another, just as grief cannot be confused with fear, though both cause pain.

This essay will not be a dictionary of winds. It will be an attempt to understand why the Japanese poetic tradition treats wind not as an atmospheric phenomenon but as a literary character with its own psychology, season, and intention. John Ruskin called the attribution of human feelings to nature the "pathetic fallacy" – the error of a weak poet. The Japanese tradition looks at it from the other side. It does not ask whether it is permissible to assign human emotions to the wind. It listens to them.

東風

Kochi – the wind that carries longing

The year 901, early spring. Sugawara no Michizane, the most brilliant scholar and poet of his era, Minister of the Right at the imperial court in Heian-kyō, stands before his own home for the last time. Political intrigue by the Fujiwara clan has stripped him of his position, his titles, and his future. Emperor Daigo, whom Michizane faithfully served, did not lift a finger in his defense. The sentence is simple and final: exile to Dazaifu on Kyūshū, at the very edge of the known world.

Legend has it that Michizane said goodbye to everything in silence – everything except one tree. Before his beloved plum tree, the same one under which he had written poems since childhood, he stopped and spoke five verses that would survive a thousand years:

東風吹かば

匂ひおこせよ

梅の花

主なしとて

春な忘るな

(kochi fukaba / nioi okoseyo / ume no hana / aruji nashi tote / haru na wasuru na)

When the eastern wind (kochi) blows,

send me your fragrance,

oh plum blossom –

though your master is gone,

do not forget the spring.

- Sugawara no Michizane, waka, 901;

"Shūi wakashū," 10th c.

This is not a poem about a tree. It is a poem about wind as a feeling of longing. Kochi (東風, lit. "eastern wind") – the warm spring breeze that in Japanese tradition heralds the thaw and the first blossoming – is here appointed as a messenger. Michizane does not ask his wife, does not ask his students, does not ask the emperor. He asks the wind. Because he knows that the only force capable of carrying the fragrance of a blossoming plum from Kyoto to Kyūshū is kochi. And he knows that kochi comes every year, faithfully, reliably – unlike people.

The kanji 東 means "east." Michizane was traveling west, into exile. By asking the eastern wind to carry the scent toward him, he was asking for a bridge between two ends of the world – the one where he had left his life and the one where he was to die. This request is at once an act of faith and an act of despair. Michizane never returned to the capital. He died in Dazaifu in 903, broken and alone.

But the poem survived – and so did the legend. According to tradition, the plum tree in Michizane’s garden tore itself from its roots and flew across all of Japan to stand beside its master in Dazaifu. The flying plum – tobiume (飛梅) – grows before the main hall of Dazaifu Tenmangu shrine to this day and blooms first among all the trees in the area each spring. Historians, like Robert Borgen in his monograph on Michizane, note that the legend of the flying plum did not appear until the Edo period, centuries after the poet’s death. But that does not matter. The legend does not speak of fact – it speaks of the power of longing and its wind: kochi. The wind to which the dying exile turned proved to be the only one that kept its word.

After Michizane’s death, plagues descended upon the court in Heian-kyō (present-day Kyoto), lightning struck the imperial palace, and the descendants of his persecutors died one after another. The court, terrified by the wrath of his spirit, hastily restored Michizane’s titles and founded the Kitano Tenmangu shrine, deifying him as Tenjin – the deity of learning and calligraphy. Today, Japan has over twelve thousand tenmangu shrines, and plum trees grow before each one. Every year in January, crowds of students hang wooden tablets on them with prayers for passing their exams. And every year in February, kochi blows – warm, vernal, eastern. As if the wind had never broken the connection between the poet’s former life and the place of his exile.

松風

Matsukaze – the wind that waits

The word matsukaze (松風) means "wind in the pines." Except that Japanese is a language of homophones, and matsu (松) – "pine" – sounds identical to matsu (待つ) – "to wait." Matsukaze is therefore simultaneously "wind in the pines" and "the wind that waits." This wordplay is not merely a literary amusement. It is the foundation of one of the most important works in Japanese theater.

The nō play "Matsukaze," written by Kan’ami and reworked by his son Zeami in the fourteenth century, tells the story of two sisters – salt gatherers on the Bay of Suma. Matsukaze (Wind in the Pines) and Murasame (Autumn Rain) fell in love with the exiled courtier Ariwara no Yukihira, who spent three years at Suma before returning to the capital and dying. The sisters, driven mad by grief, died shortly after. Yet their spirits did not depart. Attachment – shūshin (執心) – holds them to the only memento of their beloved: a solitary pine on the beach where Yukihira left his court hat and hunting cloak.

A wandering monk, stopping for the night in a fisherman’s hut, discovers that the two women who host him are the sisters’ ghosts. Matsukaze dresses herself in her beloved’s cloak and surrenders to an ecstatic ha no mai dance – in the finale, she mistakes the pine tree for Yukihira, embracing its trunk as though it were her lover’s body. Murasame seizes her sleeve:

"You are drowning in the sin of passion. This is a pine tree. Yukihira is not here."

But Matsukaze answers: "This pine is Yukihira!"

The play’s leitmotif is a waka by Yukihira from the anthology Hyakunin isshu (百人一首):

立ち別れ

いなばの山の

峰に生ふる

まつとし聞かば

今帰り来む

(tachi wakare / inaba no yama no / mine ni ouru / matsu to shi kikaba / ima kaeri kon)

Parting from you,

I leave for the mountains of Inaba –

but if I hear

that you are waiting like the pine on the peak,

I will return at once.

- Ariwara no Yukihira, "Hyakunin isshu," poem 16, 9th c.

The same wordplay returns: matsu on the peak of Mount Inaba is simultaneously a pine tree and the act of waiting, while Inaba (因幡) is both the name of a province and inaba (いなば) – "if I were to leave." The entire poem is built on a double meaning. Yukihira promises to return. He does not. The pine waits. The wind in the pines waits. The sisters wait. Everyone waits forever, because the promise will never be fulfilled.

Zeami mentioned "Matsukaze" more often than any other work in his writings on the art of nō. The play’s ending is among the most moving in the history of theater: the monk wakes from his dream, the ghosts vanish, and the chorus restores the sisters’ names to their original meanings. Matsukaze and Murasame are gone. Only the wind in the pines and the autumn rain remain. There are no ghosts. Only sound.

Bashō, traveling to Suma in the autumn of 1684, wrote a hokku in homage to the same place:

松風の

落葉か水の

音涼し

(matsukaze no / ochiba ka mizu no / oto suzushi)

Wind in the pines –

is it fallen needles or water?

A cool sound.

- Matsuo Bashō, hokku, autumn 1684,

Suma; "Nozarashi kikō"

In this hokku there are no people, no ghosts, no love story. There is only a sound that the poet cannot distinguish – wind in the pines or the murmur of water? Bashō knows that on this beach two women died of longing. He does not need to write about it. It is enough that he listens.

野分

Nowaki – the wind that reveals

The twenty-eighth chapter of Murasaki Shikibu’s "Genji monogatari" (源氏物語) bears the title "Nowaki" (野分) – literally "dividing the grass," the name for an autumn typhoon. The action takes place when Hikaru Genji is thirty-six years old and at the peak of his power. His Rokujō-in palace (六条院) – a lavish estate with four wings, one for each season – stands open to the autumn storms.

Nowaki tear out fences, scatter flowers, overturn bamboo screens. And it is in this chaos that Genji’s son, Yūgiri (夕霧), passing through the garden, sees for the first time in his life the face of Murasaki no Ue (紫の上) – his father’s beloved wife. A face Genji had hidden from him for years. A face that strikes him like the sight of cherry blossoms in full bloom.

Murasaki Shikibu is not describing a disaster here. She is describing a revelation. In this chapter, nowaki serves as narrator – and simultaneously as a force that shatters conventions and facades. The wind does what no one at the Heian court would dare to do: it tears a secret from the hands of etiquette. Without the typhoon, Yūgiri would never have seen Murasaki. The typhoon here is a dramatist – not the backdrop of the scene, but its director.

Akashi no kimi, one of Genji’s ladies, is left alone after her husband’s visit – and whispers to herself:

おほかたに

菻の葉すぐる

風の音も

うき身ひとつに

しむ心ちして

(ōkata ni / ogi no ha suguru / kaze no oto mo / uki mi hitotsu ni / shimu kokochi shite)

Even the passing sound of wind

in the tall grasses

pierces this one

wretched body

– it seeps in and will not let go.

- Murasaki Shikibu, "Genji monogatari,"

ch. 28 "Nowaki," ca. 1005

The wind that for some is the discovery of beauty, for others is despair. In a single chapter, Murasaki Shikibu uses nowaki as a mirror in which each character sees something different – Yūgiri sees forbidden beauty, Genji sees a threat, Akashi no kimi sees her loneliness. The wind is the same. The people are different.

In saijiki (歳時記), the Japanese poetic calendars, nowaki is a kigo (季語, seasonal word) for late autumn. Traditionally it refers to gales that arrive between the two-hundred-tenth and the two-hundred-twentieth day of the year counting from the start of spring in the old calendar – the time when rice ripens in the fields and is most vulnerable to destruction. Nowaki is not a meteorological abstraction. It is a specific season of fear – a moment when an entire year’s labor can be blown away in a single night.

木枯らし

Kogarashi – the wind that strips bare

Some Japanese words are so good that the Japanese created a separate character for them. Kogarashi (木枯らし, lit. "that which dries the trees") is the winter wind that strips the last leaves from the branches. The standard notation uses two kanji: 木 (tree) and 枯 (to wither, to die). But there also exists a kokuji – a character created exclusively in Japan, nonexistent in classical Chinese: 凩. Inside the character 風 (wind), the element 木 (tree) has been placed. A wind that contains a tree within it. Or a tree that exists inside the wind.

Kogarashi is officially announced in Tokyo and Osaka – the Japan Meteorological Agency reports the date of the first kogarashi of the year, just as it reports the date of the first cherry blossoming. The first kogarashi means that winter has arrived. In poetry, it means something more: that the process of laying bare has begun. Kogarashi does not destroy – it strips. It peels away layers. It leaves what is underneath – the bare skeleton of a tree, the bones of a landscape, the truth.

Matsuo Bashō, on his way west in the autumn of 1684, experienced kogarashi on his own body:

木枯や

頬腫痛む

人の顔

(kogarashi ya / hoobare itamu / hito no kao)

Winter wind (kogarashi) –

cheeks swell and ache,

a human face.

- Matsuo Bashō, hokku, winter 1684; "Nozarashi kikō"

There is no contemplation here, no metaphor. There is only a body exposed to the wind. Bashō’s cheeks swell and ache – kogarashi is not a poetic figure but a physical force that attacks the skin, muscles, and bones of the face. Bashō traveled on foot, without shelter, with a single pack and a bamboo staff. His hokku about kogarashi is not a poem about winter. It is a poem about vulnerability to nature (you can read more about his wandering here: A Narrow Path, a Wide Breath. Northward—into the country, and into oneself—with Master Bashō ).

A hundred years later, Yosa Buson (与謝蕮村), the second great master of hokku, wrote his own kogarashi – and it sounded entirely different:

木枯や

石碑を読む

僧ひとり

(kogarashi ya / ishibumi o yomu / sō hitori)

Winter wind (kogarashi) –

an inscription on a stone is read by

a solitary monk.

- Yosa Buson, hokku, 18th c.

In Bashō, kogarashi is brutal and corporeal. In Buson, it is the backdrop of solitude. The monk stands in an empty landscape, reading an inscription on a stone commemorating someone long departed. The wind blows, the monk reads, no one else watches. Buson does not describe pain – he describes a silence in which the only companions a person has are the wind and a memory carved in stone.

The difference between these two hokku says something essential about the nature of Japanese wind poetry. The same wind – kogarashi – in one poet is a fist to the face, in the other a silent witness. The wind does not change. The poet who encounters it changes. And therein lies the key: Japanese poetry does not describe wind. Japanese poetry describes the encounter between a person and the wind. And since every encounter is different, every poem is different. Ichigo ichie.

Kogarashi has yet another function in the Japanese imagination: it is a herald of death. Not in the literal sense – kogarashi does not kill. But by stripping trees bare, it announces the end of the year, the end of a cycle, the end of warmth. In the Buddhist tradition, a bare tree is a metaphor for mujō (無常, impermanence) – a reminder that everything alive will one day be stripped to the bone.

秋風

Akikaze – the wind of parting

If kogarashi is the herald of death, then akikaze (秋風, "autumn wind") is the herald of parting. In the Japanese poetic tradition, autumn is the season of departure – of leaves, birds, lovers. And akikaze is the force that sets that departure in motion. Not brutally, like nowaki. Not harshly, like kogarashi. Gently. Inexorably. Like someone closing a door behind them without slamming it, but knowing it will remain closed for a long time.

Princess Nukada (額田王), one of the first great female poets of the Japanese tradition, living in the seventh century, left in the anthology "Man’yōshū" a poem in which the autumn wind becomes the presence of a lover:

君待つと

我が恋ひ居れば

我が宿の

簾動かし

秋の風吹く

(kimi matsu to / waga koi oreba / waga yado no / sudare ugokashi / aki no kaze fuku)

Waiting for you,

I sit in longing –

the bamboo blinds of my house

are stirred

by the autumn wind.

- Nukada no Ōkimi, "Man’yōshū" IV:488, 7th c.

The structure of this poem is precise as clockwork. Nukada waits for Emperor Tenji. Instead of him, the wind comes. The wind moves the blinds – exactly as someone entering would. In a single instant, hope and disappointment become the same sensation: it is not you, it is the wind. But the wind touched the very thing you would have touched. And that is enough to make a heart race.

Five centuries later, the monk-poet Saigyō (西行, 1118–1190) wrote one of the most famous waka in the history of Japanese poetry:

心なき

身にもあはれは

知られけり

鵫立つ沢の

秋の夕暮

(kokoro naki / mi ni mo aware wa / shirarekeri / shigi tatsu sawa no / aki no yūgure)

Even in one who renounced all feeling,

sorrow arises unbidden –

a snipe takes flight over the marsh

in the autumn dusk.

- Saigyō, "Shin kokin wakashū," ca. 1187

Saigyō does not mention the wind directly. But aki no yūgure – autumn dusk – is inseparable in the Japanese imagination from akikaze. The snipes fly because the wind startled them. The dusk over the marshes is cold because akikaze is blowing. Saigyō, who at twenty-three abandoned his court career, his wife, and his children to become a wandering monk, writes here about the defeat of his renunciation: he was supposed to free himself from emotion, and yet autumn breaks his heart. Akikaze in this poem is invisible but omnipresent – like a sadness that cannot be pointed at but that changes the color of everything around it.

In saijiki, akikaze opens the autumn. It is the first wind that tells the body summer is over. Not through temperature – because autumn days in Japan can be hot. Through touch. Akikaze touches differently than a summer wind. It carries something the Japanese would call sabi (寂) – a gentle loneliness, a chill not of the air but of existence. One can say: "a cold wind blew." Or one can say: "akikaze arrived." The difference is the same as between a weather forecast and a farewell to someone dear.

Wind in Sei Shōnagon

Sei Shōnagon (a writer close to my heart, about whom I have written among other places here: My brilliant and spiteful teacher and friend: Sei Shōnagon, mindful with claws ), lady-in-waiting to Empress Teishi, opened her "Pillow Book" (Makura no sōshi, 枚草子) with the famous passage about the seasons. Spring is the dawn. Summer is the night. And autumn?

秋は夕暮れ。夕日のさして山の端いと近うなりたるに、烏の寝所へ行くとて、三つ四つ、二つ三つなど飛び急ぐさへあはれなり。まいて雁などの連ねたるが、いと小さく見ゆるは、いとをかし。日入り果てて、風の音、虫の音など、はた言ふべきにあらず。

(Aki wa yūgure. Yūhi no sashite yama no ha ito chikō naritaru ni, karasu no nedoko e yuku tote, mitsu yotsu, futatsu mitsu nado tobi isogu sae aware nari. Maite kari nado no tsuraneta ru ga, ito chiisaku miyuru wa, ito okashi. Hi iri hatete, kaze no oto, mushi no oto nado, hata iubeki ni arazu.)

"Autumn – it is the dusk. The setting sun touches the mountain ridges, and crows hurry to their roosts, three, four, two, three – even that moves the heart. Let alone the wild geese flying in formation, growing ever smaller in the distance – indescribable. When the sun has set entirely, the sound of the wind, the sound of insects – here words no longer reach."

The wind is not named here. There is no akikaze, no nowaki, none of the poetic names. There is only sound – kaze no oto (風の音). Sei Shōnagon does not describe the wind. She listens to it. Here the wind is not a character but a medium – an acoustic space in which dusk dissolves.

This is the fundamental difference between Heian poetry and prose. Poetry gives wind a name and makes it a protagonist. Prose leaves it anonymous – present but unnamed. In Murasaki Shikibu, wind is the engine of plot: nowaki reveals secrets, matsukaze carries longing. In Sei Shōnagon, wind is a mood. It does nothing. It simply is. And that is precisely why it is so poignant – because its presence requires no justification. Just as the sadness that arrives for no reason at dusk in October requires no justification.

The English critic John Ruskin coined in the nineteenth century the term "pathetic fallacy" to describe the literary device of attributing human emotions to nature. "The cruel sea," "the spiteful wind," "the weeping rain" – Ruskin maintained that these were marks of poetic weakness, a projection that obscures the truth about the world. But Ruskin thought in terms of a Western dichotomy: subject here, object there, and between them an abyss. The Japanese poetic tradition does not know this abyss. Wind is not "cruel" or "gentle" through metaphor. Wind is a force through which emotions pass – both the human kind and those that are larger than any person. Does the person give the wind its feelings, or does the wind give them to the person? Sei Shōnagon does not answer this question. She listens.

Fūjin

Not every Japanese wind is a bodiless voice tangled among pine branches. One of them has a face, a body, and a sack on its back. Fūjin (風神), the god of wind, is one of the oldest deities in the Japanese pantheon – older, as the "Kojiki" tells us, than Amaterasu herself. Wind existed before light appeared.

The most complete portrait of Fūjin is the famous folding screen by Tawaraya Sōtatsu (俥屋宗達), painted around 1639 and housed in the Zen temple Kennin-ji (建仁寺) in Kyoto – though the original, for conservation reasons, resides in the Kyoto National Museum, while a faithful replica hangs in the temple. The screen is two-paneled: on the left panel Fūjin races, on the right – Raijin (雷神), the god of thunder. Between them – nothing. Gold. Emptiness.

Sōtatsu’s Fūjin has green skin, wild eyes, disheveled red hair, and an enormous sack of winds slung over his shoulders. He looks like a demon – but his face is not menacing. It is joyful. Fūjin races through the sky with the expression of someone having a wonderful time. Raijin on the other side, with his drum of thunder – he too is smiling. Sōtatsu painted gods not as forces that inspire dread, but as forces that inspire wonder. Wind and thunder do not punish – they play.

Technically, the screen is a masterpiece of the Rinpa school. Sōtatsu used the tarashikomi technique – applying silver ink onto a wet base, which gives the clouds on which the gods ride an impression of dynamism and lightness. The gold background is not decoration – it is infinite space from which the deities emerge and into which they will shortly vanish. Notably, Sōtatsu placed both figures at the very edges of the screen – as if wind and thunder could not fit within the bounds of ordinary art and were forcing their way in from outside.

Sōtatsu’s screen became one of the most frequently copied works in the history of Japanese painting. Ogata Kōrin (尾形光琳, 1658–1716) faithfully copied it around 1710 – with one difference: in Kōrin’s version, the gods look at each other, whereas in Sōtatsu’s they gaze downward, at the world of humans. Sakai Hōitsu (酒井抱一, 1761–1828) copied Kōrin’s version without knowing that Sōtatsu’s original existed. Three generations of Rinpa artists conducted a dialogue with the same image – each seeing something different in it. In 2015, all three versions were exhibited side by side for the first time at the Kyoto National Museum.

The Calendar of Wind – saijiki and the seventy-two micro-seasons

Japanese poetry does not exist without a calendar. Every hokku must contain a kigo (季語) – a seasonal word that anchors the verse in a specific time of year. Poetic calendars known as saijiki (歳時記) catalogue thousands of such words, organized by season and category: plants, animals, astronomical phenomena, festivals – and types of wind.

In saijiki, winds have their place in every season. In spring, haru ichiban (春一番, "the first of spring") blows – a strong southern wind heralding the end of winter. This is an official spring kigo, announced by the meteorological agency just as kogarashi is announced in autumn. It is followed by kochi (東風) – warm, vernal, from the east. In summer comes minami (南, "southern") and the humid yamase (山背), a cool wind from the Pacific that brings fog to the Tōhoku coast and historically caused crop failures time and again – yamase was one of the factors behind the great Tenpō famine (1833–1836), which killed hundreds of thousands of people. In autumn blows akikaze, followed by nowaki. Winter opens with kogarashi, followed by kitakaze (北風, "north wind") – dry, biting, arctic.

But the most fascinating classification of winds in Japan is the shichijūni kō (七十二候) – the seventy-two micro-seasons (you can find a description of all 72 seasons here: The 72 Japanese Seasons, Part 1 – Spring and Summer in the Calendar of Subtle Mindfulness and here: 72 Japanese Micro-Seasons, Part 2 – Autumn and Winter in the Calendar of Conscious Living). The year is divided into twenty-four periods of roughly fifteen days, and each of those periods into three micro-seasons of five days. Many of them are defined by wind: "the warm wind blows" (harukaze, roughly the end of February), "kogarashi ceases to blow" (early March), "a cool wind arrives" (early August). Here, wind is not a phenomenon but a unit of time. You do not measure the season with a thermometer. You measure it by which wind is currently blowing.

There is something deeply non-Western about this system. In European meteorology, wind is speed, direction, and temperature – data. In Japanese saijiki, wind is character, mood, and identity. Haru ichiban is not "a southern wind at 8 m/s in February." It is the return of a familiar figure – someone who comes every year, whom you recognize and greet. The Japanese word for weather – tenki (天気) – contains the kanji 気 (ki), which means energy, breath, mood. Weather in the Japanese language is literally the mood of the sky (you can find an analysis of the character 気 (ki) here: The Kanji 気 (Ki) – What Can We Learn from the Japanese Concept of Energy in Human Relationships?.

Kamikaze – when wind became propaganda

There is one Japanese name for wind that the entire world knows. And almost no one knows it correctly.

Kamikaze (神風, "divine wind") first appears in Japanese history in 1274 and again in 1281, when the mighty fleet of Kublai Khan, ruler of the Mongol Empire, twice attempted to invade Japan – and was twice scattered by typhoons. The Japanese called these storms kamikaze – the divine wind that saved the islands. In the Shinto narrative, the interpretation was obvious: the gods – kami – sent the wind to protect the sacred land. Japan is untouchable because heaven watches over it (I wrote more about these events here: Kamikaze – Two Divine Typhoons of Life, One Grim Wind of Death).

For the next six hundred years, kamikaze was a poetic concept with religious and patriotic overtones, but fundamentally innocent. It was used in poetry, in rituals, in stories. And then 1944 arrived. Vice Admiral Ōnishi Takijirō (大西澷治郎), facing the prospect of inevitable defeat in the Pacific, formed special squadrons of pilots whose mission was to crash their planes into the decks of American aircraft carriers. He named them Shinpū Tokubetsu Kōgekitai (神風特別攻撃隊) – "Special Attack Units of the Divine Wind." In the Western understanding: kamikaze.

This is the moment when a poetic name for wind is confiscated by propaganda. Kamikaze ceases to be a force of nature that protects – and becomes a label affixed to the deaths of young boys. Many of those pilots were in their early twenties; by the understanding of many of us today, they were still children. Many wrote letters to their mothers before their final flights – letters containing not a trace of fanaticism, but fear, sorrow, and a plea for forgiveness. I wrote about them in another essay (The Real Kamikaze — Boys’ Letters to Their Families Before Death). Here I want to say something different: propaganda does not only kill people. It kills words too.

Contemporary Japan virtually never uses the word kamikaze in any context. The term that for seven centuries was a poetic name for a providential wind has been so tainted that many Japanese, upon hearing it, think not of the typhoons of the thirteenth century but of planes plunging into aircraft carriers. In the West it is even worse – "kamikaze" has become an adjective meaning mindless suicide, and after September 11, 2001, it began to be applied to attackers who have nothing in common with Japan, the medieval Mongol invasion, the poetry of the Kamakura era, Shinto, or wind as such.

What happens to a poetic name for wind when history confiscates it? It loses its original meaning. Kamikaze of 1281 is a story of salvation, of the power of nature, of the conviction that the world is not indifferent. Kamikaze of 1944 is a story of desperation, of the instrumentalization of death, of the cynicism of generals. The same word – but as if in two different languages. Japan, which created twenty names for wind, lost one of them. Not because the wind stopped blowing. Because people stole its name.

Who blows?

There is a certain irreversible effect of reading Japanese wind poetry. Once you know that kogarashi is not just "cold wind" but the specific one that strips branches of their last leaves and leaves trees naked as skeletons – you can no longer feel a November gust without recognition. Not with your mind. With your skin. Something changes in the sensation itself, as though someone switched on a light in a room where you had been sitting in the dark. The room is the same. You are the same. But you see more.

This is the power of naming. It is not about cataloguing – about creating lists, classifications, taxonomies of winds. It is about the fact that a name changes a relationship. You do not give a name to something that is indifferent to you. A name is a gesture of intimacy. Japan did not classify its winds – it befriended them. Each of these names is proof that someone once stood in the gusts and listened so attentively that they heard a difference. And that difference was important enough to record.

Michizane stood before a plum tree and asked the wind to remember. The sisters of Suma waited on the beach for the wind in the pines to bring back a lover’s voice. Bashō walked on foot through winter with a face swollen by kogarashi. Saigyō sat over the marshes and lost the battle with his own heart. Each of them listened to the same air – and each heard something different in it. Because wind does not say the same thing to everyone. It speaks to each person separately – provided that person is willing to listen.

SOURCES

Borgen, Robert. "Sugawara no Michizane and the Early Heian Court." Harvard University Press, 1986.

Zeami Motokiyo. "Matsukaze" (松風). Trans. Royall Tyler: "Japanese Nō Dramas." Penguin Classics, 1992.

山根有三 (Yamane Yūzō). 「宗達研究 I–II」(Sōtatsu kenkyū). 中央公論美術出版, 1994.

佐竹昭広他編 (Satake Akihiro et al., eds.). 「万葉集」(Man’yōshū), "Shin Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei." 岩波書店, 2004.

McKinney, Meredith (trans.). "Gazing at the Moon: Buddhist Poems of Solitude by Saigyō." Shambhala, 2021.

歳時記 (Saijiki) – 新日本大歳時記 (Shin Nihon Dai Saijiki), ed. 飯田龍太他. 講談社, 2000.

Every Gust Has a Face – Wind in Japanese Poetry Has a Name, Intentions, and Feelings

In Japanese poetry, the wind does not blow – it arrives, remembers, and grieves

Kochi – the wind that carries longing

Matsukaze – the wind that waits

Nowaki – the wind that reveals

Kogarashi – the wind that strips bare

Akikaze – the wind of parting

Wind in Sei Shōnagon

Fūjin

The Calendar of Wind – saijiki and the seventy-two micro-seasons

Kamikaze – when wind became propaganda

Who blows?

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Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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