This is a follow-up to my Néojaponisme post (and related No-sword post) about the introduction of the Western calendar to Japan. The question: What about days of the week? The answer: Obtained from Meiji kaireki: "Toki" no bunmei kaika 明治改暦 「時」の文明開化 ("The Meiji calendar modernization: The bunmei kaika-tion of 'time'"), a book published in 1994 by Okada Yoshirō 岡田芳朗.

Let me start with Okada's conclusion, from page 274:

週休制は官庁・学校・軍隊など公的機関に始まり、大企業や貿易関係会社を中心に、都市部で普及したが、中小企業や特に地方では太平洋戦争後になってからやっと普及しはじめ、ことに昭和三十年代の経済大発展期を経てようやく全国的に行なわれるようになった。[...] 週休制の採用は勤労と有給休暇日という、経済的側面が強く、社会全体の構造の変化が必要であった。

The weekly-rest system [i.e. the system where rest days were determined by day of the week rather than "days with a date ending in 1 or 6," as was typical up until this point] began in government, schools, the army, and other public institutions, then spread to metropolitan areas, particularly in large corporations and companies involved in foreign trade. However, it was not until after World War II that it finally began to spread to small and medium-sized companies and especially rural areas. The economic miracle of the late 1950s and early 1960s was when the system finally became standard nationwide. [...] The adoption of the weekly-rest system had a strong economic effect with respect to labor and paid holidays, and required a change in the overall structure of society.

It seems that the first people in Japan to adopt "the week" (as something other than a divinatory tool) did so because they had no choice: they were dealing with European or American traders in Yokohama, or they were working alongside "hired foreigners" in government, education, or the military. It made no sense for them to turn up to work when your trading partners or co-workers were taking the day off, or vice versa.

Okada doesn't mention why the Meiji government didn't just write "must work on Sundays" into their contracts for hired help, but the religious component was probably a factor. Back then more Christians took the Sabbath seriously. In any case, if all of your external consultants say "a seven-day week with 1.5 days off is the only way to run a government/army/school," eventually you're going to start to believe it.

Anyway, this led to a situation where "the government and the people have different days off" (官民其休日を同じふせず), which in turn caused mutual indolence when they saw each other slacking off on work days (相見て互いに惰心を生ず).

The above quotations, by the way, are from the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun in the tenth month of Meiji 5, before the calendar had even gone solar. So the week-system issue was to a great extent independent of the solar-calendar issue.

Anyway, in Meiji 7 the government declared Saturday afternoon and Sunday the official holidays in all schools and, a few months later, public offices. (Kanagawa prefecture had already done this locally — they had that port full of foreigners to deal with, after all.) After that, it began to percolate down through the rest of society, finally saturating Japan after WWII as noted above. The end.

Here's a poem by Ikkyū that I probably don't understand. Its title is 自然外道, i.e. "The Naturalist [or Senika] Heresy." This is the belief that there is no such thing as causality so you should just do whatever, man, because everything will spontaneously happen as it should, and you're, like, already Buddha. Dōgen in particular got very worked up about the naturalist heresy. He believed in discipline.

大道廢時人道立
離脱智慧義深入
管弦歌吹人倫能
風雨世間之音律

When the Great Way is abandoned, the Way of Man arises.
Who breaks from wisdom sinks deep into ideas.
Pipes and strings, singing and playing: these are within humanity's power.
The wind and rain is the music of the world.

The first two lines are a reference to chapter 18 of the Tao Te Ching: "When the Great Way was abandoned, ethics appeared. When wisdom emerged, deceit appeared." (大道廢，有仁義；智慧出，有大偽.) Of course, Ikkyū is no doubt talking about the way outlined by Buddha rather than what Laozi had in mind, which might be why he changes the second line: 智慧 (here translated "wisdom") is a term of art in Buddhism, and a desirable thing. "Ideas" (義), which could also have been translated "reasoning," "logic," "words," etc., are no substitute for 智慧.

Ishii "de Sade Trial" Kyoji 石井恭二, the editor of the Ikkyu edition I have, claims that the first line is subtly altered too: "人道" means not just ethics, morality, the right thing to do, but also the "human" level of the six realms: we are down here because we have quite literally lost our Way.

The second half is the interesting bit. My interpretation would be something like this: "Yeah, the wind and rain happen spontaneously as they are supposed to, and that's the music of the universe — but humans make their own music, and that's the flaw in the Naturalist Heresy." But I wouldn't bet very much money on it. Anyone got a better interpretation?

Today I am going to look at the haiku written by Bobby Shaftoe in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, in the original English and in the Japanese translation by Nakahara Naoya 中原尚哉, volume one of which I happened to get hold of the other day.

(Brief note on terminology: It is of course perfectly acceptable for there to be a genre of poetry in English called "haiku" defined "5/7/5 syllable count, no other rules." I have no beef with this idea, but I'm going to discuss Shaftoe's haiku with reference to the classical Japanese conception of a haiku, as this makes for a more interesting and meaningful blog post.)

The first haiku in the novel appears right at the beginning, after epigraphs from Alan Turing and the New York Times, kicking off the action as follows:

Two tires fly. Two wail.
A bamboo grove, all chopped down
From it, warring songs

First, the good. Everything in this haiku is happening right before the author at the time of composition. Strict reliance on immediate perception is often cited as a key rule for haiku, although of course it's not hard to find examples of its having been profitably broken. The "bamboo grove" might be too metaphor-y for some, in this context; me, I'm okay with it.

Next, the bad. This haiku exemplifies the Two Great Evils of English haiku: strict adherence to 5/7/5 syllable structure, and too much information. The two are related: because there is more information, on average, in an English syllable than a Japanese mora, if you insist on 5/7/5 syllables, you end up with more information than can fit in 5/7/5 morae. The result here is that Shaftoe's haiku overflows with imagery. It is a riotous collage rather than a careful juxtaposition. The lingering impression it leaves is not "Ah! How poignant!" but rather "What the hell just happened?"

In Shaftoe's defense, he wrote this haiku "standing on the running board [of a truck teetering on two wheels], gripping his Springfield with one hand and the rearview mirror with the other," but since his main aesthetic concern is syllable-counting ("Is 'tires' one syllable or two? How about 'wail?'") it seems fair to assume that this haiku's flaws derive from Shaftoe's 11-month-old understanding of the art rather than his circumstances, however extenuating the latter. And, indeed, in chapter 3 we learn that although Shaftoe learned about haiku from a real-live Japanese person, Goto Dengo, "as far as he could tell" it was about counting syllables and nothing else.

Anyway. How does Nakahara translate Shaftoe's book-opening haiku?

片輪泣く　竹林倒れ競う歌
Katawa naku/ chikurin taore/ kisou uta
Half of the wheels cry/ The bamboo grove fallen/ Competing songs

Notice how much has been shaved off getting it into 17 morae — and it's still too busy. Those three images should be whittled back to two. I would remove the katawa naku bit, since it superimposes the author too vividly into the scene. The jostling forest of bamboo sticks and singing money-porters is more than enough.

(Brief note on katawa: Normally, this would mean "one wheel," because it dates from the age when kuruma meant "rickshaw" rather than "automobile." Back then, one wheel was half of the wheels. I've translated it more abstractly here because we are talking about a four-wheeled truck. Also note that the word is also used metaphorically to describe a person with a physical disability, roughly equivalent to "crippled" and considered quite offensive now.)

Enough of this novel-opening haiku. Let us return to the beginning of Shaftoe's haiku-writing career, December 1940, when he composed "a quick and dirty adaptation of the Marine Creed":

This is my rifle
There are many like it but
This rifle is mine.

Nakahara sez:

おれの銃　似たものあれど　おれの銃
Ore no jū/ nita mono aredo/ ore no jū
My gun/ Others like it though there be/ My gun

This is so far outside standard haiku aesthetics that it's almost in again, like Eric Dolphy. I mean, talk about immediacy of perception. I feel that Nakahara could have tried more to capture the subtle shift from "this is my rifle" to "this rifle is mine," but a good solution eludes me. (Again, I blame this on syllables-vs-morae.)

Shaftoe's second haiku was more ambitious, although he himself "cringes" when he remembers it:

Antenna searches
Retriever's nose in the wind
Ether's far secrets

Too many ideas stuffed in here, too, but the comparison of an antenna to a snuffling dog is interesting, if more senryū than haiku. Nakahara renders it thus:

アンテナや　秘密かぎとる犬の鼻
Antena ya/ himitsu kagitoru/ inu no hana
The antenna!/ A secret-sniffing/ dog's nose

"Wind," "ether," and "searches" all had to go, but the core image is retained. Note that Nakahara indulges in ya, a traditional "cutting word" used to delineate intra-haiku structure.

One more, this from much later in Shaftoe's career.

Manila's perfume
Fanned by the coconut palms
The thighs of Glory

(Glory is Shaftoe's lover.) Obviously traditional haiku criticism would have very harsh things to say about the sudden dip into vulgarity at the end. Even for a senryū this would be pretty edgy. Glory's thighs are also problematic because they represent an intrusion from Shaftoe's imagination on what is actually there. I do like the interlocking processions of ideas, although the coconuts-and-perfume imagery for Manila is cliched.

I was curious to see if Nakahara would retain her name, because it would take up a whole line transliterated into Japanese, but no:

椰子から吹く女の匂い　マニラの香
Yashi kara fuku/ onna no nioi/ Manira no ka
Blown from the palm trees/ the smell of women/ Manila's perfume

Shaftoe's thighs of Glory have become much more generic though no less crude. This is a net loss, although probably unavoidable.

tl;dr: Shaftoe's haiku are carefully crafted to stuff in maximum information. This increases their vividness and therefore their utility as storytelling tools, but affects their quality qua classical, Japanese-style haiku. It also presents intriguing and difficult challenges to the translator, which depending on your point of view might actually be a benefit.

The nue is one of the more bizarre Japanese mythological creatures. It is a chimera that makes no sense at all: monkey's head, tanuki's body, tiger's legs, snake for a tail. Oh, and the voice of a nue. Before you say "Well, duh," though, let me point out that what was meant by this was "voice of the bird known as nue since ancient times in Japan, probably White's thrush."

This is already getting confusing. Let's rewind. The nue appears in the Kojiki, specifically in the courting song of Ōkuninushi (a.k.a. Yachihoko no kami):

... 我が立たせれば　青山に　鵼は鳴きぬ　さ野つ鳥　雉はとよむ　庭つ鳥　鶏は鳴く　心痛くも　鳴くなる鳥か　この鳥も　打ち止めこせね　いしたふや　天馳使　事の　語言も　是をば

... While I am standing [here], the nuye sings upon the green mountain, and [the voice of] the true bird of the moor, the pheasant, resounds; the bird of the yard, the cock, crows. Oh! the pity that [the] birds should sing! Oh! these birds! Would that I could beat them till they were sick! Oh! swiftly-flying heaven-racing messenger, the tradition of the thing, too, this!" (Basil Hall Chamberlain's 1919 translation)

Here, the nue (nuye being the old form) is just a regular bird like any other, representing for the mountains. But when we encounter the same bird in the Man'yōshū (example), it's associated with melancholy and grief. Nuedori, literally "nue bird," is actually a pillow word for cheerful concepts such as unrequited love and weeping in one's soul (uranakeru).

By the Heian period, the voice of the nue had become an omen of ill import, the sort of thing you needed to hire a consultant to deal with. ("Which is the most auspicious direction in which my retinue and I can flee?") Things got even worse for the poor nue when someone noticed that it was described in Chinese texts as a 怪鳥, literally "monstrous/uncanny/eerie bird," although this really just meant "nocturnal bird" in Chinese.

So, by the Kamakura period when the monster-nue made its first appearance in the Heike monogatari, it totally makes sense for it to have the voice of a bird which is by now associated with supernatural doom and woe.

The remaining mystery is how that monster came to be called a nue too. It is not actually given this name in the Heike monogatari. It isn't given a name at all. A. L. Sadler's 1928 English translation, the one now available from Tuttle, includes the sentence "The Nue they put into a boat and set it adrift," but the original for this is "Sate kono henge no mono o ba, utsuhobune ni irete nagasarekeru to zo kikoeshi", i.e., "They put the monster into a boat [made of a hollowed-out log] and set it adrift" + "lo have I heard" storytelling cruft. Helen Craig McCullough's 1988 translation for Stanford, incidentally, renders the same sentence as "The monster was put in a dugout and shipped downstream."

Now, the text does follow the monster story up with another nue-killing anecdote, and in this second story the word nue is used to describe the victim — but this nue is specifically described as a 怪鳥, a bird-monster, and not the weird chimera of the first story which has become the standard nue-monster of today.

So, if the monster was originally nameless, at what point did people start calling it a "nue"? Yamaguchi Nakami 山口仲美, from whose most readable book on birdsong onomatopoeia through the ages, Chin-chin chidori no naku koe wa (ちんちん千鳥のなく声は, "Chin chin, the plover's cry" — it's a song), I obtained most of the above, believes that it happened quite early in the monster's career. She observes, for example, that in the Genpei Jōsuiki (a sort of director's cut of the Heike monogatari), the name had already stuck:

大国の養由は、雲上の雁を落し、我朝の頼政は深夜の鵺を射る
In China, Yang Youji shot a goose down from above the clouds; in our land, Minamoto no Yorimasa shoots a nue in the middle of the night.

And why did this happen? Looks like the author merged the chimera-nue and the monster-bird-nue anecdote mentioned above, creating a super-story featuring a super-chimera with the body of a chimera and the name of a nue. Yamaguchi also suggests that the monster was dubbed "nue" because, well, what else are you going to call it? Everyone knows what a monkey or a tiger is. Not everybody knows what a nue is, except that it's scary and flies.

Anyway, the result is that today, a nue is a monster, with the bird a distant, oft-forgotten secondary meaning. There's even a derivative word, nueteki ("nueic"), used to describe things that are mysterious or unknowable.

I (finally) wrote a new article at Néojaponisme: The solar calendar, the two Ms, and Fukuzawa Yukichi. It is about the remarkably sudden adoption of the solar calendar over the Meiji 5−6 new year, and about Fukuzawa Yukichi being kind of a jerk about it. As usual.

I spent most of last week's train rides reading Kōki, Banpaku, Orinpikku: Kōshitsu brando to keizai hatten ("The Imperial era, expositions, and Olympics: the Imperial Household brand and economic development", 皇紀・万博・オリンピック　皇室ブランドと経済発展), by Furukawa Takahisa 古川隆久. The book consists in large part of close examination of proposals and memos sent back and forth between minor Meiji bureaucrats, meaning that at times it is almost too information-rich: it's not easy to maintain a grip on the big picture when you are simultaneously being peppered with mini-resumes of every functionary involved in its creation. But this same information-richness can also be a source of great entertainment.

For example, here's a paragraph from chapter five, where Furukawa discusses the celebrations in 1940 of the 2600th anniversary (calculated Ussher-style from the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki) of Emperor Jimmu founding Japan:

では、一般国民はどのように新年を迎えたのだろうか。まず、新聞、一般雑誌からうかがってみよう。新聞では、一九三九年末には「珍妙・楽壇人のトクトウ[禿頭]コンクール　光輝二六〇〇年の施し」と題して、山田耕筰はじめ音楽会の頭自慢四人（山田のほか、作曲家小松耕輔、海軍軍楽隊楽長内藤清五、新交響楽団員小森宗太郎）が頭の輝き具合を競うというふざけた企画を紹介する記事（『国民新聞』一二月五日朝刊。ちなみにこの企画が実行された形跡がない）もあるが、正月三が日の記事や論説は政府の宣伝方針におおむね沿った、まじめでしかも紀元二六〇〇年にちなんだ内容が多い。広告も紀元二六〇〇年にちなんだデザインが多く、それは遊廓の広告にまで徹底している。息抜きのための読み物さえ、元旦の『国民新聞』に載った、エノケン・ロッパ（榎本健一・吉川緑波）の「辰歳漫才」のように、ロッパ「聖戦第四年の春です」、エノケン「早いもんですねえ」、ロッパ「しかも紀元二六〇〇年」、エノケン「二六〇〇年」、ロッパ「西暦で一九四〇年」、エノケン「僕は荏原の五三七三番」、ロッパ「電話みたいなことをいうな」、エノケン「オホホホホ」と、かなり苦しまぎれのギャグを入れているほどである。

So, how did the common people greet the new year? Let us begin by examining newspapers and general-interest magazines. In the newspaper world, we do find at the end of 1939 articles like "Astonishing! Conductor bald-off: a gift for the shining year 2600," a facetious proposal for a contest in which Yamada Kósçak and three other bald stars of the music world (composer Komatsu Kōsuke, navy band bandleader Naitō Seigo, and New Symphony Orchestra member Komori Sōtarō) would compete on the basis of shininess of head (Kokumin Shinbun, December 5 morning edition; there is, incidentally, no evidence of the contest having actually been held), but articles and editorials in the first three days of the new year tend to treat the topic of the 2600th anniversary seriously, taking their lead largely from the government's own announcements. Many of the advertisements also have Year 2600-themed designs, including advertisements for red light districts. Even the light-reading sections had topical jokes, if rather desperate ones. For example, Enomoto "Enoken" Ken'ichi and Furukawa Roppa's "Dragon year manzai," which appeared in the Kokumin Shinbun's New Year's Day edition: Roppa: "Spring has arrived in the fourth year of our holy war"; Enoken: "How time flies"; Roppa: "And it's also the 2600th anniversary of Japan's founding"; Enoken: "2600 years"; Roppa: "In Western terms, the year 1940"; Enoken: "And I'm Ebara-5373"; Roppa: "That's your phone number, dummy"; Enoken: "Heh heh heh"

I tried to find some pictures of Year 2600 advertisements online, but failed.

Here's an essay I wish I'd read earlier: "The myth of zen in the art of archery" [PDF], by Yamada Shouji 山田奨治. The central thesis: Eugen Herrigal's famous Zen in the Art of Archery depicts not a relationship with a wise and inscrutable zen master, but rather a relationship with a deeply idiosyncratic archer-mystic who may have dabbled in zen a little, rendered inscrutable by an imperfect interpreter.

That is to say, whatever subjective meaning Herrigel and his modern fans may have found in his experiences and book, objectively speaking the work has very little to do with zen or non-fringe Japanese culture.

How idiosyncratic was Awa Kenzō 阿波研造, Herrigel's archery teacher? Well...

On the basis of [a misunderstanding of a traditional archery text], Awa began to call kyūjutsu "a kind of hereditary disease (idenbyō 遺伝病) that regards technical training as an art" and began to preach his own style of "shadō" 射道 (the way of shooting), which he characterized as being "austere training in which one masters the study of humanity" (ningengaku wo osameru shugyō 人間学を修める修行). As a result, the kyūjutsu community treated him like a lunatic, and on occasion people even threw rocks at him when he went to places where traditional kyūjutsuwas firmly entrenched. Honda Toshitoki 本多利時, the grandson of Honda Toshizane and the person who later became headmaster of the Honda-ryū, harshly criticized Awa's style of shooting, saying that Awa shot merely as his whims and moods moved him. Ōhira Zenzō 大平善蔵, who was Awa's senior among the disciples of Honda Toshizane [...] said that it was idiotic to tell people to just persevere until they dropped dead (SAKURAI 1981, p. 162). Honda's other disciples were equally merciless in their criticism of Awa. [...]

Herrigel became Awa’s student [...] one year before Awa began to talk about founding Daishadōkyō 大射道教 (Great Doctrine of the Way of Shooting)—a proposal that provoked fierce opposition among Awais students at the Number Two College and at Tōhoku Imperial University 東北帝国大学. In 1927, in his forty-eighth year, Awa overruled the bitter objections of his students and formally established a new organization named Daishadōkyō. Awa's students at the Number Two College later testified that Daishadōkyō consisted of "archery as a religion," that "the founder [of this religion] is Master Awa Kenzõ," and that "the master described his rounds of travel to provide guidance (shidō suru 指導する) in various regions not as [archery] lessons (keiko 稽古) or as instruction (kyōju 教授); he said that he was doing 'missionary work' (fukyō 布教)" (SAKURAI 1981, pp. 210–11).

Extra scuttlebutt: a scathing review of Zen and the art of archery by Earl Hartman, translator of Yamada's article (with comments!). And here's Hartman again, flaming zensters on a martial arts bulletin board. And here are some miscellaneous zen-critical essays.

Yamada also wrote a follow-up about Herrigel's Nazism, but it's in Japanese only and apparently not easily available online to us plebs. I mean, we plebs.

So I'm reading Dōji kō 童子考 ("Thoughts on children") by Gunji Masakatsu 郡司正勝, and in a discussion of little-person entertainers known as shuju 侏儒 I come across this:

『信西古楽図』は、平安末期のものとされ、あるいは絵そのものが中国伝来のものか、日本へ伝えられた舞楽散楽を写したものかに疑問の余地はあるが、侏儒の舞と考えられるものが幾種かある。たとえば「入馬腹舞」とか「入壺舞」などというもので、馬のお尻から入って口から出るとか、壺の口から出たり入ったりして、長袖を翻すといったもので、あきらかに侏儒の舞と思われる。

Shinzei kogaku zu ["Shinzei's illustrated guide to venerable entertainments"] is said to date to the late Heian period, and although there is some room for doubt over whether the pictures came directly from China or whether they represent dances and entertainments transmitted to Japan, there are a number that appear to be shuju dances. For example, the "Enter-a-horse's-belly dance" and the "Enter-a-pot dance" involve entering a horse from its behind and coming out of its mouth, or popping in and out of a pot while waving long sleeves; these are clearly shuju dances.

Whatever the literary equivalent of the movie-trailer record-scratch sound is, I heard it in my head about halfway through this paragraph. Excuse me? The "Enter-a-horse's-belly dance"? This looks like a job for research on the internet.

So, first, I found a copy of Shinzei's scroll online. Is the horse thing there? Yes, it is. (The pot dancers are there, too, but whatever, dude.)

Now, obviously this did not really happen. The Heian period was not a Police Academy movie. The Tang dynasty was not a cartoon from Oz magazine. Nevertheless, here we have this picture. What are we to make of it? Fortunately, Kawai Masaru 河合勝 and Saitō Nobuhiro 斎藤修啓 have already done the heavy lifting for us here, with a poker-faced monograph entitled A Study of Horse-Swallowing Illusion ("Donbajutsu") of Japanese Classic Magic (日本古典奇術「呑馬術」について).

The trick, they say, was simply to hang a black curtain behind the horse, and allow the performer to disappear behind it and reappear at the other side. This, they note, is known as "the black art" in modern magic, and they hypothesize that horse-swallowing was effected the same way. Thus, they argue, the pictures of people swallowing horses in brightly-lit rooms, before audiences spread too widely to the side, do not reflect actual performance conditions.

I sort of prefer to believe that horse-swallowing is possible. But I do not feel the same way about the enter-a-horse's-belly dance.

So hot! But I learned a new Japanese proverb: Natsu no mushi, kōri o warau, "Summer bugs laugh at [the idea of] ice." Use it to describe someone who knows less about the world than they think.

The source is interesting: it comes from Zhuangzi 荘子, from the "Floods of Autumn" chapter. In the original and James Legge's translation:

北海若曰、井蛙不可以語於海者、拘於虛也。夏蟲不可以語於冰者、篤於時也。曲士不可以語於道者、束於教也。

Ruo, (the Spirit-lord) of the Northern Sea, said, "A frog in a well cannot be talked with about the sea - he is confined to the limits of his hole. An insect of the summer cannot be talked with about ice - it knows nothing beyond its own season. A scholar of limited views cannot be talked with about the Dao - he is bound by the teaching (which he has received)."

Yes! Zhuangzi is also the source for the famous "frog in a well" analogy (meaning basically the same thing). Although he used that one more than once.