Haiku Hankerings -- The Start of My Brief Poetic Journey

When I made my first haiku, it was on a trip with my haiku teacher and some of his poet friends to Iga-Ueno, a town in Mie Prefecture, where Matsuo Basho, the founder of haiku poetry, was born and raised. (A prefecture, for those of you not used to the term, is like a state in the U.S., or a province in Canada.) It was quite fitting to make my first haiku there; interestingly enough, Iga-Ueno is also known for another feature-- it's the birthplace of the ninja, and there is even a ninja museum there.  Because of this fact, some people believe that Matsuo Basho made his trip to the northern part of Japan in 1689 as a ninja spy. (This is probably because the timeline of his trip, as reported in the reports he made about it, would be difficult to do for normal humans; I guess none of these people ever heard of artistic license, but I digress.)

We were deep in the countryside when we came upon a temple by the name of Kokubun-ji in Japanese. ("Ji" represents 'temple', so it could be translated as 'Kokubun Temple'.)  The temple name seems to be fairly common, as there is another, much more famous Kokubun Temple that played a part in the founding of the country of Japan, but it's located in a different prefecture. This smaller Kokubun Temple was just a rural temple, and I didn't even see a priest there as we walked around on that dreary February day when the weather was skittish. Small rain showers (called "shigure" in Japanese) could be seen in the distance and a few sprinkles fell on us, too, but not enough to call off the trip.

As we wandered around the temple grounds, my poet companions were busy trying to come up with the perfect haiku. Meanwhile, my haiku teacher was telling me about the basics-- the 5-7-5 syllabic structure, the use of a word to denote the season, and so on, which I already knew from my elementary school education.  I was still skeptical about trying my hand at writing haiku, but I listened to him. One thing I found about poetry in Japan is that their poetic sense can be vastly different than American sense.  A full moon, for example, occurs in any month, but in Japanese poetry the moon somehow represents winter. I also knew that the Japanese were far less direct than Americans about expressing their opinions and feelings in public. In my college courses on Japanese literature, for example, I was told that Japanese typically didn't directly talk about crying-- they used euphemisms like "my sleeves are wet from the dew", or "the gentle rain falls" to express sadness. Anyway, even while I had my reservations about my skills as a poet, I still kept an open mind and tried to take in as much as I could about the words and phrases I heard my teacher mention so I might be able to use them in the future if I ever decided to write haiku.

In the interior of the temple grounds, there was a 'small mountain'-- I guess you could call it a hill because it wasn't that high, but it was steep, and formed from volcanic upheaval like the rest of the Japanese archipelago.  There was a small waterfall rolling down one side of it, which I found very neat, but assumed that it might have been a man-made system, as there was not enough rainfall to account for the stream. Going up the side of the 'mountain' was a very wide set of stairs, and each step on the stairs was covered with hundreds of small Buddhist statues, and most of them were decorated with some small red cloth. There had to be at least a thousand of them in all, and for such a small country temple, it seemed strikingly odd.  I asked my teacher about them, and he explained that each of the statues was of Jizo, the Buddhist protector of children. Jizo escorts the souls of children to Paradise, so each of these statues represented the death of a child, whether it was an infant, stillborn, or aborted. The local women would make small jackets or caps to put on the statues so they wouldn't get 'cold'. That alone was enough to make me feel sad, but there was one more thing in the temple grounds that broke my heart...

Small mountain of Jizo statues (not the ones at Kokubun Temple)

In the center of the grounds, there was a larger (life-size?) statue of Jizo standing on a wooden platform. The statue held a baby in one hand.  Dangling from the wooden framework on which the statue stood, just below the statue's feet hung a large Mickey Mouse doll.  When I realized that the doll meant that the child was dead, tears welled up in my eyes.  All of the preparation of the parents, all of the expectation and all of the joy of bringing new life into the world had come crashing down around the family with the death of the child. I will never know how the child died, but I imagined some young woman was crying in inconsolable despair for their lost loved one, whose journey through life ended so abruptly, so early. The overwhelming sadness was too much to bear, and yet... and yet, out of that, came the words that brought together all of the college coursework, all of what I had heard from my teacher, and from out of the blue, I had my first-ever haiku: 

時雨（しぐれ）ふる　　   旅（たび）のはじめや     　国分寺（こくぶんじ）
Early spring drizzle       At the start of the journey     Kokobun Temple

You see, sadness is not expressed directly in Japanese; the early spring drizzle expresses the sadness I felt.  The start of the journey represents the journey of life; and when life has just begun, or was just about to begin, but ended so early for these children remembered at Kokubun Temple through the offerings to Jizo, it is truly sad...and even to this day, the sight of all those statuettes and that doll is fresh in my memory, as a collective impression of the parents who lost their hopes and dreams in Japan...

I checked my Japanese syllables feverishly... 5... 7... 5!  Perfect!  When my haiku teacher asked me on the train back home if I had been able to create any haiku, I gave him the above poem, and he broke into a grin.  "Just like Master Basho!" he said, and I felt really, really proud of myself, and I was on my way to writing more.