Cool Announcement: Haruo Shirane's Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons

On September 30, 2012, Haruo Shirane, Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Columbia University and author of Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho and Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts, gave a talk, titled "Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts,"  the first one in a series of lectures focusing on the Rinpa aesthetic in Japanese Art at the MET

Listen to Haruo Shirane's Talk.

The talk began and ended with the following waka and haiku

So briefly rests the dew upon the bush clover.

Even now it scatters in the wind

by Genji on the impending death of Murasaki

("The Rites," The Tale of Genji)

Lodging for the night at Akashi

octopus traps --

fleeting dreams

under the summer moon

by  Basho

Below are the main pointes:

Secondary Nature: cultural surrogates for primary nature

-- textual (poetry, tales, etc.)

-- cultivated (gardens, meisho, ikebana, bonsai, food, etc.)

-- visual representations (painting, ukiyoe, architecture, dress, etc.)

-- performative (noh, kauki, festivals, annual observances)

Contrastive Typographies of Nature

waka-based nature: elegant, highly encoded, emphasis on color, scent, and sound (birds, insects, deer), harmony.

Satoyama (farm village)-based nature: nature as bounty/harvest, nature as feared and worshipped,animals/plants as gods (kami), and everyday animals, birds, and plants

Below are relevant excerpts from  Haruo Shirane's new book, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts:

One of the major reasons for the prominence of nature and the four seasons in Japanese literary and visual culture is the impact of Japanese poetry, particularly the thirty-one-syllable waka (classical poetry), the main literary genre of the premodern period. Indeed, all the major types of Japanese poetry -- kanshi (Chinese-style poetry), waka, renga (classical linked verse), and haikai (popular linked verse) -- use natural themes extensively.

Even those poems that appear on the surface to describe only landscape or nature serve to express particular emotions or thoughts. Japanese poetry rarely uses overt metaphor (for example, 'My love is a rose.'). Instead, the description of a flower, a plant, an animal, or a landscape became an implicit description of a human or an internal state.

Metonymy, especially the construction of a larger scene from a small detail, also played a crucial role, particularly in short forms like waka and seventeen-syllable hokku (opening verse of renga sequence). From the perspective of the reader, all such poetry will potentially have a surface (literal) meaning and a deeper meaning. Representations of nature in aristocratic visual culture -- whether painting, poetry, or design --- are thus seldom simply decorative or mimetic; they are almost always culturally and symbolically encoded, and that encoding tends to evolve with time and genre.

Each seasonal topic generated a cluster of associations, and the seasons (along with famous poetic places) developed associative clusters that became part of a cultural vocabulary.

The highly encoded system of seasonal representation created by poetry provided an enduring foundation for an increasingly complex and multilayered view of the four seasons.

In a country in which little original wilderness survives, reconstructed nature -- in the form of replanted forests, cultivated gardens, famous places (meisho), and shrinesand temple grounds -- has contributed to the greening of both the countryside and the urban environment. For city dwellers, who make up the vast majority of the population, representations of nature . . . raise awareness of the seasons . . . Although nature may be far away, it is relived or recaptured  in the cultural imagination.

The pervasiveness of secondary nature in Japanese culture has often been mistaken for a closeness to or a belief in Japanese harmony with nature.


Updated, Nov. 4:

The following is a relevant excerpt from Haruo Shirane's essay, titled "Performance, Visuality, and Textuality: The Case of Japanese Poetry: "

 An even more important feature of Japanese poetry, particularly of waka and haiku, is the use of poetic topoi (dai), which provides a base frame for the content of the poem. One of the chief characteristics of Japanese poetry, from at least the tenth century, was the practice of composing on an established poetic topic, usually taken from the seasons, nature, or famous places, each of which was centered on a "poetic essence" (hon'i), an established cluster of literary and cultural associations. Rain, for example, took on a different name according to the season and the type. Harusame (spring rain) referred to the soft, steady drizzle of spring; samidare (literally, rains of the Fifth Month) meant the wet season or the extended rains of summer; and shigure signified the brief, intermittent showers of early winter. In the poetic tradition these became seasonal topics with specific poetic associations, which were derived from classical precedent and commonly recognized as the most appropriate subjects of composition.

Spring rain, for example, became associated with soft, dreamy thoughts; the wet season, particularly that of the Fifth Month, implied a sense of unending depression; and the intermittent showers of winter connoted impermanence and uncertainty. These poetic topics and their associations are, in a fundamental sense, imaginary worlds, which join the poet and the reader, and represent a communal, shared imagination. In writing about the scattering of the cherry blossoms, the Japanese poet is not just writing about a specific, direct experience; he or she is writing a supplement to or a variation on a commonly shared body of poetic associations with respect to the seasons, nature, and famous places based on centuries of poetic practice. Here, as in the allusive variation (honkadori), originality or individuality is not the touchstone of literary genius, as it often is in the Western tradition. Instead, high value is given to the ability to rework existing subject matter.

 The waka and haiku are very short forms in the context of world poetry. The advantage of the short form is that it is very versatile; it can be employed by a wide range of people in a wide variety of social, religious, and political settings in highly performative ways. The disadvantage of the short form is that it does not allow room to indicate the context in which an individual poem was first performed. This potential weakness is offset in part by the reconstruction of contexts in prose and the extensive use of headnotes. The poem can also exist intertextually, as in an allusive variation that connects the new poem to a pre-existing text, or it can exist as part of a long tradition of compositions on an established topic. Later generations cannot reproduce the original context or the performative aspect, but they can read the poem in relationship to earlier poems and topics, which are preserved and transmitted. So while the poem as performance is eventually lost, the poem as text continues to exist in a larger, communal, trans-historical context.