Haiku

Haiku as a tool for popular obedience

by Autumn Valley continued from "Nobunaga"

This absence of logical cohesion yields a peculiar cultural phenomenon in the Japanese literature, "Haiku". Haiku is composed of 5+7+5 syllables. On the assumption that a single Japanese word has three syllables, a Haiku can contain 5-6 words within. If you try to compose a poem with only five or six words without rhyme, you must be supplied with the words that contains rich emotional resources. Hence, the words that construct the Haiku must not be defined rigidly, because a definition reduces the contents of the word in proportion to the clearness of the outline increased by the defining process, like a mathematical differentiation. In addition to that, suppose you are trying to impress people with 5 to 6words. It seems almost impossible! Your failure could not be your fault. But if you are to succeed, there must be something unusual about it. The reason of your success might depends not on your ability, but on on your reader or audience. The key factors could be reader's emotional tention and homogeneity. However, to be more precise, tension can be defined as a property of homogeneity. When you compose a Haiku in Japanese language, you are not supposed to use the Chinese Characters( like the Latin language in Western culture), instead you must use the Yamato language, something like Celtish words lying deep beneath the English language filled with French vocabularies. The reason is simple. The Chinese characters are used in Japan to express the Chinese philosophies or Buddhist Doctrines etc. They are very finely defined. Like a tune-upped engine within a F1 machine can not be loaded in an usual car on the city road, a finely defined word can not be used in a short poem like Haiku. On the contrary, traditional Yamato language is rich with the words without definition but loaded with affluent sentimentality. It is quite natural to further assume that if people get indulged in making Haiku with illogical, or without-definition words, they get easily alienated from social and political events around them. Whatever events of political significance may happen, he/she becomes less and less involved in them. This is the reason why so many people were encourged to make Haiku-poem in Japan, where Samurai rulers were intensely careful at handling their people to

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obedience. And another reason why Japanese people love to get indulged in that Haiku culture has its root in their antipathy toward LOGOS, or logical cohesion.The antipathy has something to do with the Eight Million Gods and Goddeses(Yaoyorozu no Kami). Well, I must anticipate an objection. For instance, an English poet G.G. Byron (1788-1824) had a political passion to engage in the Greek Independence War. So we can not say that being a poet necessarilly results in of political indifference or of politically-castrated(what a nasty world)! I must agree with it. But the case is somewhat different in Japan. To think about this, we must go further back into the past and check the present time. It can be said that the past is a lens with which you look into the far-away present. A concavo or convex lens? It's up to you!

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