How for a thousand years Japan said elegantly what could not be said

The first year of the Kenmu era, eighth month (August 1334). The bank of the Kamogawa, dawn. On the wooden notice board by the gate of an official building hangs a paper nailed there during the night – long, densely written, dozens of lines. It does not look like an edict: too rhythmic – and, if one reads closely, too sarcastic. A merchant on his way for rice stops for a moment, reads the first words, shakes his head, and walks on. By noon the placard will be torn down. But it will already be too late. By the end of the day its content will be known to every regular of the fish market in Shijō, by the end of the month – to the entire city.

Such is how a certain parallel current of poetry operates in Japan – satirical, parodic, at times obscene, at times politically sharp, almost always intelligent and witty. To add piquancy: it holds to the same measure as the dignified, classical courtly waka, the same five and seven syllables in their prescribed order, the same allusions to the classics – except that it turns them upside down. Where waka speaks of yearning for the moon, this current speaks of the price of rice. Where waka praises the emperor, it mocks the officials. Where waka describes the cherry blossom, it describes a morning hangover. It is called the “mad song” – with the caveat that mad here does not mean stupid. It means: freed from form.

Today's text will be a journey through a thousand years of such poetry. We will stop in various places and epochs – from the rice fields of ancient Nara to the harbor of Uraga in the year the black ships arrived from America. Each stop is one poem and a slice of the world that the poem reveals. A song about peasants from the eighth century, a mockery of a medieval reformer, a satire on samurai whose stipends came late, a parody of a sacred text. A culture which today we associate mainly with hierarchy and grave ceremony maintained for a thousand years a parallel current of literary anarchy. It was written by samurai of low rank, innkeepers, monks-turned-renegades, even anonymous passersby. For every imperial anthology from the Heian court, in which the canon sifted through a thousand poems about the moon and cherry blossoms, there fell as many again about drunkenness, poverty, officials, and what truly circulated between the back gate of a temple and the tavern. The latter had no imperial patronage – yet still flourished. Let us see, then, what was written on the back, unseen side of Japanese poetry.

Before we set out: what is a mad song?

The compound 狂歌 is built of two characters, and both are worth taking apart, for each has something to say. 歌 (ka, uta) is simply “song” – the same character opens the names waka (和歌), tanka (短歌), and even the old uta-awase (歌合, courtly poetry contests).

The other character, 狂 (kyō), is the more interesting. It is built of two elements: on the left the radical 犭 (animal, dog), on the right 王 (king). Old dictionaries saw in this a literal image – a dog who wants to be king, unrestrained, torn loose from hierarchy. Modern meanings move in the same direction: mad, wild, ecstatic, freed from form. The same character opens the names of an entire family of “mad” genres in classical Japanese culture – kyōgen (狂言, comic theatre), kyōshi (狂詩, the parodic “Chinese poetry” of the Japanese), kyōjin (狂人, a madman). Mad in this family does not mean deranged. It means: one who has slipped the rule.

The term kyōka itself appears in Japanese documents as early as the Heian period, but it is not yet the name of a genre – it functions as a loose label for a playful, private, unofficial poem. The comic poetry of that period finds shelter in Book XIX of Kokin Wakashū, in the section haikai-uta (俳諧歌, “playful songs”) – the direct ancestor of kyōka, though not yet kyōka by name. Through the entire Middle Ages the current exists in scattered form: poems appear in various places – in private collections and diaries, on anonymous placards and paintings, sometimes inscribed within comic theatre. The genre takes formal shape only in the seventeenth century in Kamigata, in the confectioner's shop of Taiya Teiryū opposite the Minami-Midō temple in Osaka. Its full eruption comes a century later, in Edo, in the Tenmei era.

Formally, kyōka is a tanka – five lines in the metre 5-7-5-7-7. The same measure as courtly waka. The difference begins where the courtly tradition imposes prohibitions: against colloquial, foreign, obscene, political words. Kyōka knows no such prohibitions. Everything waka would rather not see – prices at the market, corrupt officials, drunken folly, unambiguous situations – has its place in kyōka. At the same time, kyōka draws upon a technique that is itself classical: honkadori (本歌取り), “drawing on a source poem.” Classical waka quotes other poets in order to honour them and lend its own composition prestige. Kyōka quotes in order to overturn them. The more sacred the source, the better the joke. Only – for the joke to work – the reader must know the original. This is the literature of the educated against the educated; parody that respects what it parodies. Sometimes to the point of pain.

The Official Who Saw Poverty

The earliest Japanese voice recorded in the kyōka manner, looking at the world from the very bottom, comes to us from Kyūshū. Yamanoue no Okura, governor (守, kami) of Chikuzen Province, in around 730–733 wrote a chōka and a shorter hanka, later known as Hinkyū mondōka (貧窮問答歌) – “dialogue-song on destitution.” Two voices: poor, and yet poorer. The first speaks of a night spent in a wretched hut, licking a handful of salt and sipping the dregs left from sake (kasu-yu, 粕湯酒); the second adds that in his own house there is no longer even that. The whole composition survives in Book V of Man'yōshū, as one of the first attempts in Japanese literature to look at life from the perspective of a poor villager.

The song closes with a hanka, a brief summing-up in five lines. Okura himself does not belong among the destitute – he is a state official, holds the rank of Jugoinoge and a salary. But his encounter with real poverty, in the field, leaves a mark of a kind that earlier Japanese poetry barely knows:

世の中を 憂しと恥しと 思へども 飛び立ちかねつ 鳥にしあらねば

yo no naka o / ushi to yasashi to / omoedomo / tobitachikanetsu / tori ni shi araneba

“This world –

so painful,

shameful even to live in;

I would fly away,

but I am not a bird.”

– Yamanoue no Okura, Man'yōshū V, 893 (ca. 730–733, Dazaifu)

The poem is not formally kyōka – too serious for that. But it is the same impulse that in later centuries would give kyōka its energy: to look at the world not from the heights but from the level of someone sitting in a hut with a leaking thatched roof, who knows the price of salt. Okura, one of the greatest poets of the Nara era, turned out to be – incidentally – Japan's first social “essayist,” though one cast into thirty-one syllables.

What does this poem say about eighth-century Japan? That already by then there existed a poet who saw the other side of the empire. And that is not at all obvious. It also says that song could be a tool for showing destitution, not only for praising refinement, subtlety, and beauty. And that the distance between an official and a peasant – though immense – was not so great that the former could not look at the latter otherwise than from administrative superiority. Later, in the Heian era, Japan would forget this gaze for several centuries. One would have to wait until the Edo period for someone to write again a poem in which rice cost more than the moon.

The Nightingale Who Did Not Want Guests

In the year 905 Emperor Daigo commissioned four courtiers – with Ki no Tsurayuki at their head – to compile the first imperial anthology of Japanese poetry. Thus arose Kokin Wakashū (古今和歌集), a collection of 1,111 poems in twenty books. Many of them were arranged in precise sequences depicting the passing of the seasons, the beginning and end of a love affair, the path of a pilgrim. It is the canon – for a thousand years this collection dictated what Japanese poetry should look like: which words might be used, which metaphors were admissible, in what situations one might mention, say, weeping.

And precisely in this canonical collection, in Book XIX, there is a separate section: haikai-uta (俳諧歌), playful poems. Several dozen pieces that the editors did not know how to weave into any serious sequence, yet judged good enough not to throw away. The first of them, number 1011, is anonymous:

梅の花 見にこそ来つれ 鶯の ひとくひとくと 厭ひしもをる

ume no hana / mi ni koso kitsure / uguisu no / hitoku hitoku to / itoishi mo oru

“I came here only

to look at the plum blossoms –

but the nightingale cries:

‘Someone is coming, someone is coming!’

– clearly resentful.”

The joke turns on the transcription of birdsong. The Japanese bush warbler (uguisu) has a characteristic call, which in Heian times was rendered onomatopoetically as hitoku-hitoku. That sounds exactly like the words hito kuru – “a person is coming,” “a guest approaches.” The anonymous poet reverses the situation: instead of writing how the warbler joyfully greets the arrival of spring, he portrays it as a watchman suspiciously warning the neighbours about a stranger. Which prompts a question – did the poet really come here only to look at the plum blossoms…

Beyond this ambiguous flavour, the poem tells us something more, something no one at the Heian court would have told us openly: the official aesthetic of miyabi, of refined taste, was exhausting. More than three hundred years of sitting on flat cushions and writing about the moon between pine branches had to find an outlet somewhere. It found one – in a single Book XIX, where improper poems might be smuggled in. Tsurayuki and his fellow editors left a discreet but telling space for it. Without that book there would have been no kyōka – only waka. And, as it will turn out, these are two entirely different cultures, though they each count the same number of syllables.

A Placard on the Gate of the Magistrate

The term kyōka appears in Japanese documents as early as the Heian period, but as a separate genre it crystallises only in the seventeenth century. Between are scattered centuries – a poem here, a poem there, with no clear line of development. There is, however, a related genre whose role in the Middle Ages was disproportionately large: rakushu (落書), literally “fallen writings.” Anonymous poems, placards, and satirical pamphlets, attached to the gates of temples, magistrates, shops. One form of public opinion in a society in which, officially, nothing of the kind existed.

The most famous of the surviving rakushu is the one from Nijō-gawara, August 1334, the first year of the Kenmu era. Emperor Go-Daigo (1288–1339) had just toppled the shōgun from Kamakura and was trying to restore direct rule by the court. The attempt would last barely three years – in 1336 Ashikaga Takauji would drive him out of Kyoto and inaugurate his own shogunate. But in the summer of 1334 it was not yet clear that this restoration would fall apart. It was only clear that the capital was being flooded with strange parvenus, that decrees changed from one day to the next, and that new warriors walked through Kyoto with the heads of defeated enemies impaled on spears. Then someone – a monk? a courtier of low rank? simply a townsman? – hangs on the bank of the Kamogawa a long placard. It begins thus:

此頃都ニハヤル物　夜討強盗謀綸旨

召人早馬虚騒動　生頸還俗自由出家

俄大名迷者　安堵恩賞虚軍

kono goro miyako ni hayaru mono / youchi gōtō nise rinji / meshūdo hayauma sora-sōdō /

namakubi genzoku jiyū-shukke / niwaka daimyō mayoi-mono / ando onshō sora-ikusa

"What's lately the fashion in the capital: night raids, robberies, forged imperial edicts;

prisoners, couriers in panic, fabricated alarms; fresh heads, monks who throw off their robes;

people who put them on of their own accord; instant daimyō, men gone astray;

land grants, rewards, invented wars…"

The placard runs on much longer, almost two hundred lines. Read aloud, it is rhythmic – 7-5, 7-5, like the popular imayō songs of the previous century. The anonymous author laughs at every layer of the new order: at the forged imperial edicts (nise rinji) circulating in the provinces, at monks abandoning their monasteries for secular careers and at others who shave their own heads to avoid taxation; at “parvenus” suddenly granted titles; at fictitious rewards for battles that never were. He sums up an atmosphere of chaos that no official chronicle would have described so openly.

And no one was punished – for no one knew who had written it. The placard was torn down, but someone had already copied it, and it is being copied still. Fourteenth-century Japan had a public opinion – even though mass printing, newspapers, parliaments had not yet been invented. It had one in the form of an anonymous paper nailed to a gate at dawn. And it had, at last, someone who knew how to compose a critique of the new regime so that it rhymed and would not be easily erased from memory.

The Confectionery Across from the Monastery

We skip three centuries. Early Edo period, the beginning of the eighteenth century. Japan is unified, only recently emerged from the multi-generational and bloody Sengoku Wars. The years pass, the Tokugawa rule without serious threat, the townspeople of Osaka and Kyoto grow richer faster than the warriors. Merchants have more money than samurai, who in turn have more debts than income. In this world is born the first professional master of kyōka whose name is known to the history of literature: Taiya Teiryū (鯛屋貞柳), 1654–1734.

Taiya is the name of the shop sign – “under the sea bream.” His real name was Nagata Kiyobee. He kept a shop of wagashi, rice-flour confections (more about wagashi here: Wagashi – Japanese Sweets for Cold, Autumn Evenings), opposite the Minami-Midō temple in Osaka. His father and uncle were poets of haikai, so the son too sat in literature from childhood. But he chose a form that had earlier been only the secret hobby of haikai poets: the “mad song.” Only after him did people emerge who lived from composing kyōka as their principal occupation.

Teiryū writes in Kamigata, that is, in the Kyoto–Osaka region. This variant would later be called Naniwa kyōka, from the old name of Osaka. Its character is different from the later kyōka of Edo – less political claw, more cheerful merchant-class craftsmanship. He writes about food, about neighbourhood festivals, about love in an inn, about the wagashi of his own making. At times he plays with the content of his own confectioner's advertising; at times he writes something as down-to-earth as a funeral poem for a friend. In every case the language descends to the level of the street – which, for the Japanese poetry of those times, is a gesture almost subversive.

百いても　同じ浮き世に　同じ花　月はまんまる　雪は白妙

momo itemo / onaji ukiyo ni / onaji hana / tsuki wa manmaru / yuki wa shirotae

“Though I lived a hundred years –

in the floating world

still the same flowers,

the moon round,

the snow white.”

– Taiya Teiryū, jisei no kyōka

(辞世の狂歌, parting kyōka). Osaka, 1734

Toward the end of his life his confectionery burned down. He moved to a modest house in Kōzu, on the hills at the edge of Osaka. Witnesses recall that he did not look despairing – on the contrary, he seemed liberated from the troubles of running a business. He died at the age of eighty-one, in 1734, the nineteenth year of the Kyōhō era. He was buried in the Kōden-ji monastery in the Tennōji district, where his grave still stands.

What did Teiryū leave behind? The idea that comic poetry could be a full-time profession. That one need be neither a courtier nor a monk to compose verse; it is enough to know how to sell it – to sign it and serve it with a sweet. After his death the centre of kyōka would shift to Edo. The administrative capital, with its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, would give this form an audience that Osaka had never had.

Hatamoto Instead of Emperor

The years 1716–1745. The reforms of the Kyōhō era. The eighth shōgun, Tokugawa Yoshimune, tries to rescue the finances of the bakufu by cutting expenditures, raising taxes, and introducing economies. The consequence – among many others – is delay in the payment of stipends for the hatamoto, the middling-ranked vassals of the shōgun. Men who formally belong to the warrior class but who in fact have lived for generations on a state pension paid in rice. When the pension does not arrive, the hatamoto has to step out of his role and think how, literally, to feed himself.

Then someone – again anonymous – composes a kyōka parodying a poem by Emperor Kōkō from the anthology Hyakunin Isshu (poem number fifteen). The original reads: “For your sake I went out into the spring fields to gather young shoots; snow falls upon the sleeves of my robe.” It is a simple little love scene – the emperor gathers wakana for his beloved, ready to bear the cold of spring snow. In this delicate courtliness lies the whole aesthetic of the Heian period. The anonymous poet of Kyōhō times writes:

世わたりに 春の野に出て 若菜つむ わが衣手の 雪も恥かし

yo-watari ni / haru no no ni idete / wakana tsumu / waga koromode no / yuki mo hazukashi

“In order to live,

I go out into the spring fields

to gather young shoots –

and even the snow on my sleeves

is a thing of shame.”

One change – instead of “for your sake” (kimi ga tame) we have “in order to live” (yo-watari ni) – is enough to make the whole scenery collapse like dominoes. No longer an emperor offering his beloved a gesture of love, but an impoverished samurai gathering wakana because he has no money to buy rice. The snow on his sleeves is no longer a metaphorical delicacy – it is shame at the fact that the robe of someone of his class is being soiled by work. A reader of 1730 understands everything at once, because every child from a court school, or even from one of the better terakoya, knew the original poem by heart.

This is how honkadori (本歌取り) works, the classical technique of quoting earlier poems – only in kyōka it is turned, as it were, against the original. Classical waka quoted others in order to honour them. Kyōka quotes in order to “profit” from them. The more sacred the source, the better the joke. Emperor Kōkō, his moving wakana – all serves to illustrate just how hungry the hatamoto is when there is no money again, and work, after all, brings dishonour.

Manzai kyōkashū and the Heart of Tenmei

Tanuma Okitsugu (1719–1788), a rōjū (老中 – member of the council of elders) of the shogunate, between 1767 and 1786 pursues an open, even mercantilist policy. He accepts bribes, supports trade, grants merchant monopolies rights they had not previously held, and looks with a lenient eye on publishers of satirical literature and woodblock prints (traditionally the pet target of shogunal censorship). The consequence – alongside corruption – is an extraordinary flourishing of urban culture. It is then that Hokusai begins to sketch, Utamaro designs his first portraits of courtesans, illustrated novels kibyōshi (illustrated stories for adults) appear in print. And it is then that kyōka in Edo bursts with energy long suppressed.

It all begins with a young samurai of low rank: Ōta Tan, with the pen name Ōta Nanpo (大田南畝), another pen name Yomo no Akara (四方赤良), yet another Shokusanjin (蜀山人). Born in 1749, died in 1823. By day an official of the bakufu, by night a poet, prose writer, satirist, commentator on ukiyo-e prints. His first book, Neboke sensei bunshū (寝惚先生文集) – “Writings of Master Half-Awake” – was published in 1767, when the author was nineteen years old. The preface was written by Hiraga Gennai (1728–1780), a polymath and early promoter of European science. This opens the path: a nineteen-year-old writes, and a serious intellectual judges him worthy of patronage.

In 1769, at the residence of Karagoromo Kisshū, a vassal of the Tayasu house, the first meeting of a kyōka-ren takes place – a club of poets of the “mad song.” It is the moment when kyōka ceases to be a private amusement and becomes a social institution. Fourteen years later, in 1783, Nanpo, together with Akera Kankō (1740–1800), edits the first great anthology of the genre: Manzai kyōka-shū (万載狂歌集) – “Mad songs of ten thousand generations.” The title parodies the series of classical imperial anthologies ending with Senzai wakashū, “songs of a thousand generations.” Manzai – ten times as many.

Among the seven hundred and forty-eight poems of the collection is the following composition by Nanpo, which parodies a poem by Tokudaiji Sanesada (1139–1192), number eighty-one of Hyakunin Isshu. The original reads: “The cuckoo – when I looked toward where it sang, only the dawn moon remained.” The parody:

ほとゝぎす 鳴きつるあとに あきれたる 後徳大寺の 有明の顔

hototogisu / nakitsuru ato ni / akiretaru / go-tokudaiji no / ariake no kao

“The cuckoo

has sung and flown away –

and to Tokudaiji there remained

only that stunned

morning expression of the face.”

One change is enough – the moon ariake (有明の月) replaced by a face ariake (有明の顔). The whole emotional weight of the original, the romantic melancholy of a glance into the sky, falls to earth in the form of a single facial expression: dull, sleep-heavy, mouth ajar. The courtier is left with nothing, because the bird has already flown, and the morning moon will tell him nothing. The reader who knows the original by heart laughs twice: once at the parody, once at the fact that the classic yields itself so easily to inversion.

The Tenmei era (1781–1789) lasts only eight years, but in the history of kyōka it marks the culmination. The masters gather in two currents: the warrior-class (Yamanote-ren led by Nanpo, Yotsuya-ren around Kisshū) and the merchant-class (Sakaimachi-ren around the actor Ichikawa Danjūrō V, Yoshiwara-ren in the pleasure district, led by the publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō, the same who publishes Utamaro). Wealthy merchants commission from Hokusai and Utamaro costly, luxurious surimono with kyōka inscribed into the image. High art and urban wit cease to be separated.

The Worse the Poet, the Better

The third of the four great masters of Tenmei is Yadoya no Meshimori (宿屋飯盛), pen name of Ishikawa Masamochi, 1754–1830. A name semantically ambiguous – “Meshimori” literally means “one who serves the rice,” that is, a servant in an inn, but in Edo slang it was also a synonym for a roadside prostitute. The pen name says: I am nobody, I am the one who serves rice to others. Ishikawa indeed kept an inn in Edo, in Kodenmachō, and alongside it pursued kokugaku – the study of classical Japanese literature. A man who in the morning served his guests bowls of rice, in the evening commented on Kokin Wakashū.

The most famous kyōka of Meshimori parodies a celebrated sentence from the preface to Kokin Wakashū by Ki no Tsurayuki. Tsurayuki wrote: “That which without effort moves heaven and earth, which awakens pity even in invisible demons, which softens the hearts of men and women, which consoles even the wild hearts of warriors – is song.” It is one of the most frequently cited sentences in Japanese literary criticism. Nearly religious. Meshimori turns it a hundred and eighty degrees:

歌よみは 下手こそよけれ 天地の 動き出してたまるものかは

uta-yomi wa / heta koso yokere / ametsuchi no / ugokidashite / tamaru mono ka wa

“Let poets be

as bad as can be –

for if heaven and earth

really began to move,

how could it be borne?”

The argument is pseudo-logical, and precisely for that reason funny. Tsurayuki promises the reader that good waka moves heaven and earth. Meshimori takes that promise literally and draws from it practical conclusions: if that is so, we must pray for incompetent poets. The more talentless, the more surely we shall live in peace. The poem strikes not only at Tsurayuki himself, but at the entire apparatus of courtly gravity which for eight hundred years had cited his preface as a manifesto of art.

What does this tell us about Japan at the end of the eighteenth century? That the classics, though still obligatory in school, by now had enough readers for one to be able to laugh at them with the knowledge that the listener would recognise the source. Kyōka in this form is a perverse homage – one cannot understand it without knowing the waka it parodies. The more educated the reader, the funnier the joke. And the more educated the author, the subtler may be the distance toward the source.

Longing for Murky Water

Tanuma Okitsugu lost his office as rōjū in the eighth month of Tenmei 6 (August–September 1786). A year later power is taken by Matsudaira Sadanobu (1759–1829), who proclaims the reforms of the Kansei era (1787–1793). Cuts in spending, a moralising campaign, sharp censorship of publishers, restrictions on the pleasure quarters. Kyōka, kibyōshi, prints depicting courtesans – all come under censorial supervision. The publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō loses half his fortune; Koikawa Harumachi and Santō Kyōden face trial for inciting immoral conduct; Ōta Nanpo lays down his pen for several years and returns to the discipline of his official duties. The Tenmei era ends for merchant-class art not by natural death, but with a sharp brake.

Matsudaira Sadanobu comes from the Shirakawa domain – from a han whose name literally means “White River.” At the same time, the deposed Tanuma Okitsugu is remembered as the symbol of an era in which, true, corruption flourished, but so did culture. The surname Tanuma means etymologically “muddy rice paddy” – the contrast was obvious to every inhabitant of Edo. An anonymous kyōka then circulates which turns this contrast into an entire political thesis:

白河の 清きに魚も 住みかねて もとの濁りの 田沼恋しき

Shirakawa no / kiyoki ni uo mo / sumikanete / moto no nigori no / Tanuma koishiki

“In the clear water

of the White River

even the fish cannot live –

it longs for the old

muddy paddy.”

The wordplay is many-layered. Shirakawa is at once a river and Sadanobu's district. Tanuma is at once the family name of the deposed politician and, literally, a muddy rice paddy. “Clear water” is here ambiguous: officially praise of the moralising reforms, in practice an accusation of sterility – so clear that nothing lives in it. And the “muddy paddy” – pejorative on paper, but in reality an environment in which one could breathe. The whole poem sounds like an ordinary observation of nature, but is in fact a biting political commentary.

The author could not be established. Some suspected Ōta Nanpo, but he – summoned for questioning by superiors in the bakufu hierarchy – denied it. Wisely. Another kyōka from the same period uses the same motif of surveillance:

世の中に 蚊ほどうるさき ものはなし ぶんぶといひて 夜もねられず

yo no naka ni / ka hodo urusaki / mono wa nashi / bunbu to iite / yoru mo nerarezu

“In this world

nothing is as irritating

as mosquitoes –

they buzz ‘bun-bu, bun-bu’

and will not let one sleep.”

Sadanobu pursued a policy under the banner of bunbu (文武) – “culture and the martial arts,” a return of samurai to intellectual and physical discipline. The buzzing of a mosquito is precisely bun-bu. The whole poem sounds like a private complaint about insects on a summer night – yet it is an allusion that the moralising reforms are as irritating as the drone in one's ear in the heat. Authority knew. Authority asked Nanpo whether it was he. Nanpo denied. That was enough, but barely. After that conversation Nanpo laid down the pen of the mad song for several years and returned to the discipline of his office. Kyōka after Tenmei would never again have the same breath.

Four Cups of Tea, Four Ships of Perry

The third day of the sixth month of the 6th year of the Kaei era – 8 July 1853 by the Gregorian calendar – Commodore Matthew Perry leads four American ships into Edo Bay. Two paddle steamers, two ocean-going sailing vessels. He demands the opening of ports. The bakufu, after more than two centuries of sakoku – the policy of cutting off the country from the world – stands helpless. After nine days Perry sails away, announcing his return in the spring. He returns in February 1854 with a larger squadron (he had hastened, to forestall the Russians, the British and the French). The Treaty of Amity is signed on 31 March 1854. Japan, until then closed on all sides, begins to open.

Between Perry's first and second visit there circulates around Edo a kyōka – one of the last historically memorable in this genre. Anonymous. Some attribute it to Manabe Akikatsu (1804–1884), but authorship remains contested:

泰平の 眠りを覚ます 上喜撰 たつた四杯で 夜も寝られず

taihei no / nemuri o samasu / jōkisen / tatta shihai de / yoru mo nerarezu

“The peaceful sleep

is broken by Jōkisen –

four cups

are enough

to take away the night.”

The full sound of the wordplay is difficult to convey outside Japanese. Jōkisen (上喜撰) is the name of an expensive green tea from Uji, known for its high caffeine content – after four cups one will indeed not sleep. But jōkisen (蒸気船) is also “steamship.” “Four cups” – shihai – is in Japanese also a counter for counting ships: four units. The poem ostensibly describes how someone overdid it with the tea; in reality it describes how, with four steamships, an American commodore put the entire bakufu on its feet. The irony is twofold: both deference before foreign technology, and mockery of officials who cannot sleep because – like someone after too much tea – they have fallen into a mild panic.

Within a few weeks the poem appears in dozens of variants on sheets of kawaraban (more on the “newspapers” of Edo here: “Suicide in Yoshiwara! Fire in Honjō!” – What kind of “newspapers” were read in the days of the Tokugawa shogunate?), sold on the streets of Edo. Some variants have survived to this day. This is the last “fifteen minutes” of kyōka as a public and political art. After the Meiji reforms, after 1868, the genre slowly fades. Kyōka rested on knowledge of classical waka, which it parodied. When waka ceases to be a living form of elite education – when Japanese schools begin to teach physics, chemistry, and English instead of Kokin Wakashū – kyōka loses its ground. Senryū, its younger cousin, seventeen-syllable, simple, mercantile, independent of the classics, survived and exists to this day (more about senryū here: Poetry with Sake – Master Senryū and His Joyfully Malicious Insight). Kyōka ended together with the courtly canon of which it was the mirror.

A Somewhat Gloomy Conclusion

The poem from the gate at Nijō-gawara was torn down at noon on an August day in 1334. Teiryū's jisei no kyōka was printed in a modest, private collection in the year of his death. Yomo no Akara's parody of Hyakunin Isshu circulated in the notebooks of friends, never in an imperial anthology. The Jōkisen of 1853 was first a joke in a tea shop, only later did someone write it down. Each of these poems had its short, uncertain medium – and each of them outlived it. Not thanks to imperial anthologies or bakufu archives. Only because they were so apt that, in spite of the odds, people resolved to preserve them.

They have one more thing in common. All of them – from eighth-century Dazaifu, from medieval Kyoto, from the Edo of Tanuma's day, from the harbour of Uraga – are contained within a single brief form. Thirty-one syllables. The measure in which waka spoke of the moon is of exactly the same size as the form in which kyōka spoke of corrupt officials and mendacious politicians. Five and seven syllables, five times. A single adult's portion of memory.

The placard the state knew how to tear down. The poem in someone else's head – no.

Thirty-one syllables in English fit into three breaths. In an age in which we remember the passwords to our accounts and our PIN codes, one may ask oneself whether we have not exchanged one kind of capacity for another. How many of our own poems can we still repeat from memory? And what price do we pay in our lives, if the answer is: “not many”?

Sources

1. Gill, Robin D. Mad in Translation: A Thousand Years of Kyōka, Comic Japanese Poetry in the Classic Waka Mode, 2009.

2. Hibbett, Howard. The Chrysanthemum and the Fish: Japanese Humor since the Age of the Shoguns, 2002.

3. Iwasaki, Haruko. The World of Gesaku: Playful Writers of Late Eighteenth-Century Japan. PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1984.

4. Cranston, Edwin A. A Waka Anthology, Volume One: The Gem-Glistening Cup. Stanford University Press, 1993.

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"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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