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Serving As Your Voice of the Nikkei Community Since 1902
Vol. 63, Issue 10 / February 27, 2008
The Poetry of Japanese
By David K. Yamaguchi
The North American Post
Chiyo Sanada
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THROUGH WRITING for this paper, I have learned that many readers are gifted linguists. They hop back and forth between English and Japanese like robins, as the social setting, search for an exact phrase, or desire for nuance requires.
That such linguists include Japanese expatriates and their children is not surprising. What I find remarkable, however, is that one still encounters Nisei from old Japanese-American families from whom conversational Japanese pours forth as if from a brook. For the words of these true linguists are those learned from parents who left Japan more than 80 years ago--from before 1924, when early Japanese immigration ceased. That the surviving words were carried by Issei is not in doubt, for if one listens carefully, one hears an occasional rare or antiquated word, phrase, or usage that marks Nisei speech as that from another time.
"My father was a 'yobiyose'--one called here to work by his father," Florence [Chikata] Sumida recently told me. The term struck me like a bell, for across a decade of Japanese study with native speakers, including two in Japan, I had not previously heard it.
As a bilingual newspaper, I believe we should do what we can to foster the Japanese conversations that we still hear, and to encourage them among our youth. For as all who have managed to cross and maintain the bridge to a second language know, the journey is a gift that adds immeasurably to one's quality of life.
In this spirit, occasionally reviewing Japanese poetry in translation here would be good. For in addition to sharing poems, it is seeing such thoughtful passages in two languages side-by-side that reveals the differences between the languages like few other approaches.
As an example, here is a poem I happened on in early February while searching for something else:
Mada agesomeshi maegami no*
Ringo no moto ni mieshi toki
Mae ni sashitaru hanagushi no
Hana aru kimi to omoikeri**
Yasashiku shiroki te wo nobete
Ringo wo ware ni ataeshi wa
Usukerenai no aki no mi ni
Hito koisomeshi hajime nari
Your front hair swept back for the first time,
I thought, seeing the flower-comb in front,
That you were a flower too.
Stretching out your gentle, white hand,
You gave me an apple.
I felt a first stirring of love
In the pale crimson of that autumn fruit.
When I saw you under the apple tree
Dating from the Meiji (early Issei) era, the poem remains as timely today as when it was first written. To me, however, the poem also reveals the charm of Japanese. For it is essentially a phonetic language of five vowels and 62 consonant-and-vowel syllables. The pairs fit rhyme, music, and chants in a way that English syllables cannot.
As there are so few sounds-after all, there was no Norman Conquest that mixed Japanese with the language of the adjacent mainland-the art lies in how the sounds are strung together.
To me, what ends up are deep thoughts expressed with child-like elegance.
Calligraphy by Chiyo Sanada
 | Overlaid on the sound necklaces are verb endings that connote the relative levels of speaker and listener in society. "You are my teacher" such twists say. Or, "I am speaking to you as a peer," or woman to man, or man to man.
"It is all so simple, Anjin-san!" is the phrase burned on the brains of many students of Japanese my age, as teasingly spoken to a stranded 17th-century English sailor [Richard Chamberlain] by the aristocratic Mariko [Shimada Yoko] in the TV miniseries "Shogun" (1980). For those of us who took the bait, we continue to seek that simplicity, as it manages to flit ahead, always just beyond reach.
Perhaps the elusiveness of achieving simplicity in expression fosters the persistence of Japanese conversation among JAs today. As we don't use it everyday, we never truly get there-instead it is the quest that matters.
To all fellow lovers of words and languages, hanashi-mashou? Let us continue this conversation, as friends.
Chiyo Sanada is a calligrapher in Olympia (www.chiyosanada.com). The poem is Hatsukoi (First Love) by Shimazaki Toson (1872-1943), as translated by Donald Keene, 1984, Dawn to the West, Japanese Literature in the Modern Era: Poetry, Drama, Criticism. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 685 p.
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