The Niigata Ryōkan Study Group (新潟良寛研究会), founded 1975, has an excellent (but, sadly, Japanese-only) series of online "lectures" on Ryōkan's poetry by TANIKAWA Toshirō (谷川敏朗), author of an edition of Ryōkan's poetry in three volumes.

For example, here is Tanikawa's take on Ryōkan's well-known letter to sake brewer YAMADA Tokō (山田杜皐), his cousin Yose's husband and also apparently a good friend of Ryōkan's, after the 1828 Echigo-Sanjō earthquake in which 1600 people died. The Yamadas lived in Yoita (与板), and their youngest child was one of the dead.

The letter opens with some small talk—the earthquake was terrible, everyone here is all right—but the centerpiece is this poem:

うちつけにしなばしなずてながらへてかゝるうきめを見るがはびしさ
Uchitsuke ni/ shinaba shinazute/ nagaraete/ kakaru uki me wo/ miru ga wabishisa
Suddenly/ to have died... —Not having died/ I endure/ These woeful events/ The very sight of which is misery

The original of "endure" here is nagaraete, which literally means "live a long life." Ryōkan was in his 70s when he wrote this letter. This no doubt also contributed to his dead-envying stance.

The next few sentences are among Ryōkan's most celebrated:

しかし、災難に逢時節には、災難に逢がよく候。死ぬ時節には、死ぬがよく候。是はこれ災難からのかるゝ妙法にて候。

Still, when it is time for disaster to strike, it is best to let it strike. When it is time to die, it is best to die. This is the sublime dharma (妙法) by which one may escape disaster.

Even for a Zen-trademark paradox, I feel that this could have been worded better, but it's generally taken at face value: don't make yourself miserable trying to dodge your fate. Just grin and bear it, same as you do life's constant parade of lesser insults and indignities.

This is why a Nietzschean friend of mine used to really hate Buddhism.

Bonus Ryōkan trivia: Ryōkan's nickname in the Yamada household was "Hotaru" (firefly). Why? Well, consider this poem from another letter to Yose:

さむくなりぬいまはほたるも光なしこ金の水をたれかたまはむ

It is become cold/ Now even the Firefly/ has no light/ The water of gold/Who will give it to me?

The "water of gold" is booze. Ryōkan is openly asking "O-Yoshi" to hook him up, as the kids say. (Remember, she married a brewer.) Nor is this the only poem along these shameless lines in his complete works. He even re-uses the "water of gold" thing! It is not for nothing that even today people still name sake after him.

Dude must've lit up like a Christmas tree to get the nickname "Hotaru" in a brewery, though.

Via MetaFilter: The Virginia Quarterly Review has opened its archives going back to 1973. Things that might be of interest to No-sword readers include:

• "Some Buddhist Poems," by Graeme "I Am a Cat" Wilson. Dig the Ikkyu.

• "Godzilla's Footprint," Steve Ryfle's excellent article about the 2004 revival of the original Godzilla.

• "Starting from Zero at Hiroshima," a long 2005 interview with ŌE Kenzaburō by Lindsley Cameron.

• "The Broom Tree Revisited," a 1977 review by William S. Weedon of Seidensticker's then-new Tale of Genji.

That last review is a real past-is-a-foreign-country eye-opener:

But why a new translation when, in fact, a highly-regarded rendering of this work by the late Arthur Waley is easily available in English? This question is not rhetorical. If one were to list the really brilliant translations of the classics of oriental literature into our language, Waley's The Tale of Genji would certainly rank at or near the top. Most of us who have come to know and appreciate the literature of Japan cut our teeth, so to speak, on this translation [...]

Today, the tooth-cutter books are surely Murakami's (especially Jay Rubin's translations), leading back to Seidensticker's work from the 50s through the 70s on Tanizaki, Kawabata, Mishima, and, of course Genji. Waley has become a museum piece (appropriately enough), "surpassed as he imagined himself to be by the technically more proficient young Americans," around whose work a suspicious whiff of Orientalism lingers. But, of course, this is the whole point of reading Waley. [PDF]

Bonus Waley miscellanea

Something from my notebook about one of Waley's Shi Jing ("Book of Songs") translations.

Oh, the flowers of the bignonia,
Gorgeous is their yellow!
The sorrows of my heart,
How they stab!

Oh, the flowers of the bignonia,
And its leaves so thick!
Had I known it would be like this,
Better that I should never have been born!

As often as a ewe has a ram's head,
As often as Orion is in the Pleiads,
Do people to-day, if they find food at all,
Get a chance to eat their fill.

This poem demonstrates the two main qualities that keep Waley's books firmly in my collection:

1. Entertaining awkwardness. Waley's dangling "it" on line 7 suddenly twists the second and first stanzas into an impassioned tirade against the bignonia itself. I LOL'd.
2. Bizarre errors inspiring further learning. Waley's lines 9-10 are way off. The original is "牂羊墳首、三星在罶" which means, roughly, "the ewe has a big head, the three stars [Orion's belt, I guess] are in the fish-traps," i.e. the starving ewe's skinny body makes its head look big by comparison, and the fish-traps are so still and undisturbed by fish that they reflect the night sky overhead ("羊瘠則首大也。罶、笱也。罶中無魚而水靜、但見三星之光而已," as the traditional commentary puts it.) But I would never have learned that if his version hadn't been suspicious enough for me to check up on him.

New Néojaponisme article: "Transliterating Shiki." It's about Harold J. Isaacson and his unique solution to the problem of translating haiku.

The final list of candidate characters for the great 2009 jōyō kanji update has been announced. Mutantfrog have a typically interesting and well-commented post covering the basics. Here are some additional observations I've been saving for this occasion.

I. 俺 (ore, "I")

It might seem unbelievable that the kanji used to write the most common first-person pronoun used in informal male speech was even up for debate. In fact though the 俺 debate is symbolic of much deeper issues in educational policy.

This article summarizes the position of the committee members who argued against 俺 as follows: The jōyō kanji list is about official/public standards, not informal/private ones. Putting 俺 on the same footing with 私 (watashi, the polite first-person pronoun) would send the wrong message to schoolchildren about appropriate language in formal settings.

The counter-argument is that 俺 is an irreplacable part of the Japanese language as a medium for communication. Even if most men know enough not to refer to themselves as 俺 while meeting a client, they identify "in their hearts" as an 俺 (男性が心の中で自分を主語にして考えるときはほとんどが「俺」). It is therefore cruel and unusual to leave 俺 off the list when 私 and 僕 (boku, another casual first-person male pronoun) are on it.

Ultimately it comes down to what role the government should play in promoting literacy: Should focus strictly on getting all future voters to a baseline level where they can participate in public debate, ignoring all other possible applications of reading/writing, or should it spread its resources more broadly and try to sow the seeds of "private literacy" as well?

It should be obvious where my personal sympathies lie, although I always just write it 己 anyway. Good enough for Akutagawa is good enough for me.

II. 誰 (dare, "who?")

I still remember my first clash with this goddamn character. It was when I had just started reading books without furigana (kanji readings), meaning that I was looking a lot of characters up. I must have spent fifteen minutes unsuccessfully trying to find 誰 in my kanji dictionary — it looked so familiar, I was sure it had to be in there, maybe under a different radical or something. Later at home I looked it up at WWWJDIC or somewhere and found it easily. I also learned that it wasn't a jōyō kanji, and oh yeah those were the only ones my dictionary contained. But hey, why would you need a non-jōyō kanji? It's not like people ever ASK FUCKING WH- QUESTIONS OR ANYTHING.

So yeah, good decision.

(That was also the incident that prompted me to buy a real kanji dictionary.)

III. The losers

Five kanji are to be dropped from the list, and word on the street says that they are:

1. 銑, zuku. Pig iron.
2. 錘, tsumu. Spindle.
3. 勺, shaku. Obsolete unit of measurement.
4. 匁, monme. Obsolete unit of measurement.
5. 脹, hareru etc. To swell.

The first four are no-brainers. I don't even know what "pig iron" means in English. And classicist though I am, even I see no need to burden 21st-century kids with monme. It's an even bigger waste of time than learning the imperial system, which at least is still used in backwaters like Burma and the United States of America.

脹 is not being dropped so much as replaced. Most dictionaries give two possible spellings of hareru meaning "to swell": 脹れる and 腫れる. Despite the fact that the latter is far more commonly used, only the former is currently on the jōyō list. So 腫 has been scheduled for addition, and 脹 is to be shown the door. A triumph for descriptivism.

IV. Food

Two of the new characters are 串 (kushi, "(food on a) skewer") and 丼 (don, "bowl (of rice with something else on top)"). I wonder if this reflects some social phenomenon: changes in restaurant industry, weakening food snobbery...?

I also wonder if it's really worth adding 串. Just look at it. There are probably people out who don't even realize it's actually a character and not a picture.

No-sword: Most educational blog about Japan in the world, insofar as I personally am like a mad professor broadcasting Liquid Liquid from an abandoned lighthouse.

Thanks to Seek Japan for the recognition and, of course, to everyone reading, e-mailing and commenting. Without you all I would have given up and started just running J-List ads under YouTube anime mashups long ago.

Behold this splash page from 8-Man (８マン), a 1960s cartoon drawn by KUWATA Jiro (桑田二郎) and written by HIRAI Kazumasa (平井和正).

Looking at this picture is like, say, listening to one of Telemann's solo fantasias. Its details — the immobile, expression-neutralizing monobrow, the weirdly fluid animal physiology — thwart our modern expectations of the genre, and yet these echoes of a more iconic age are swept up in the artist's determined progress towards the future of his medium. Also, that dog exploding into flames is one of the coolest things I have seen on a page in a long time.

8-Man was not a minor hit, incidentally. According to Hirai's site above, when 8-Man was animefied, it outrated Tetsuwan Atomu (Astroboy), and it was even imported to the U.S., under the title Tobor, the Eighth Man. He was so called because the division of the Tokyo MPD to which he belonged has seven squads of seven detectives each, yet he is a robot (Tobor, get it?) working independently outside that structure, making him... the eighth man. Robot.

Oh yeah, and he was reliant on special cigarettes to fuel his internal nuclear reactor. Yes: in sixties Japan, even the robot men smoked.

In closing, I give you 8-Man slapping a bunch of birds around.