Tag: 千恵子の書

Frost Falls Approximately October 23th – November 6th

By:
72 Seasons Essays Chieko (Calligraphy)
The scrolls are read from right to left and the dates are approximate
 Frost Falls (Soko 霜降)
First frost falls (Shimo hajimete furu 霜始降) Oct. 23-27
Gifts of light rains at times (Shou tokinihodokosu 霎時施) Oct. 28-Nov. 1
Maples and ivies turn yellow (Kaede tsuta kibamu 楓蔦黄) Nov. 2-6
Calligraphy by Chieko

“Maples and Ivies Turn Yellow” marks the end of autumn, and this will also be my last essay following the 72 microseasons for 2022. The fast-changing seasons caught up with my slow writing and I need a little more time to write the remaining two seasons. I’ll continue working on them and hope to share the essays for winter and spring after next year.

Thank you for your kind comments, emails, and encouragement, which kept me going for the last 6 months because writing these essays has been the most difficult thing I have ever done. And, most important, thank you for taking the time to continue visiting my website.

Maples and Ivies Turn Yellow

The name of this microseason immediately brought to mind the Japanese children’s song “Momiji (fall foliage)” with lyrics written by Takano Tatsuyuki and music by Okano Teiichi:

In autumn’s setting sun,
a glowing mountain of fall foliage
Dark to light colors,
among the numerous trees
Adding colors to the pines,
the maples and ivies
Decorating the mountain foot
with a patterned hem

I clearly remember the day when the black Yamaha U3H upright piano arrived at our house through the balcony window of our second-floor apartment. It was in 1976, and all the neighbors in the surrounding apartments were curiously looking out from their windows and balconies to watch it get slowly winched up by a crane into our living room.

Convincing my father to buy the piano was a challenge that fell to my older sister. “Dad was adamant that I prove to him that I won’t quit practicing the piano,” she recounted. “He made me practice on a paper foldout keyboard that was attached to the back of a piano lesson book. It was pathetic.” To the grown-ups’ amazement, my earnest sister continued practicing on that sheet of paper for nearly a year to persuade him.

All the while, my mother was secretly itching to buy a piano. Like many Japanese mothers of her generation, she grew up yearning to learn the piano, which became popular as it became more affordable after the war. When my father finally agreed to buy it, my mother went all out and bought the tallest Yamaha upright piano that our family could afford.

The piano arrived a few months later and took up a third of our living room space in the apartment. But this imposition didn’t bother my mother, who was ecstatic. “I spent all of dad’s summer bonus salary on this piano,” she proudly said.  “Now you can all learn to play it.”

My mother’s fantasy of having her three daughters play the piano, unfortunately, didn’t materialize. My little sister and I dropped out quickly. We had a lot of motivation to imitate our big sister but lacked the determination to learn an instrument, which is mostly done alone. My older sister saved my mother by continuing with her piano lessons for many years.

But the impact of the piano on my family didn’t end there. Not long after my older sister learned to read music, she started playing well-known and popular songs to relax after practicing difficult piano pieces. She invited me to sing, and we soon discovered that we really enjoyed this musical collaboration. After a few years, we had an extensive repertoire of Japanese and foreign language songs that we harmonized and sang with the piano.

The song “Momiji” at the beginning of this essay is one of the first songs that I sang to accompany my sister on the piano. I know it by heart and sang it before I even knew the meaning of the words. This training, coincidentally, helped me greatly to pronounce English words after I moved to Singapore a few years later. The Beatles and Culture Club became my best English teachers.

When I revisited the lyrics to children’s songs’ written by Takano Tatsuyuki many years later, I realized that many classic children’s songs are renditions of great poems. And I think what sparked my interest in languages evolved from these poems that are etched in my memory from childhood. Throughout my life, I have been curious how the sounds and rhythms of the words can convey meanings and emotions to the listener.

The Yamaha piano that was my mother’s pride and joy is still making music. It is now singing with my niece who is dreaming of becoming an actor. And speaking of singing, the world might not know this, but I think a lot of Japanese people love to sing. We didn’t invent Karaoke for nothing. It’s baffling that so many Japanese are fearless about singing in public but awkward about speaking English, which they spend at least 6 years studying at school. Maybe Japanese schools should start teaching English like they teach music.

Lesser Heat
Approximately July 7th – July 22nd

By:
72 Seasons Essays Chieko (Calligraphy)
The scrolls are read from right to left and the dates are approximate 
Lesser Heat (Shosho 小暑)
Warm winds arrive ( Onpu itaru温風至）July 7-11
Lotus blossoms (Hasuhajimete hiraku蓮始開) July 12-16
Falcons learn to fly  (Taka wazaonarau鷹乃学習) July 17-22
Calligraphy by Chieko

Falcons learn to fly

Before our family moved to Singapore in the spring of 1980, we lived in a cluster of apartment buildings called danchi, in suburban Chiba. The complex, which was completed in 1972, housed approximately 2000 families, and although this sounds like one of those terrible soulless mass housing projects of the 20th century (they were almost identical to the Soviet style Khurushchyovka), it was actually wonderful to live there as a young child because there were so many other children to play with.  Each building housed 20 families on 5 stories with 4 apartments on each floor, and there were no elevators.

Our family lived on the second floor of a danchi, right above my grandparents who lived on the ground level apartment with a small garden. They were my father’s parents, and would have been around 80 years old when we lived together. Their front door was usually unlocked so, often after school, my sisters and I would simply barge into their apartment like it was our right. They were always happy to see us though, so we spent many hours sitting together sipping tea, watching sumo, and eating rice crackers.

My grandmother was an introvert who mostly stayed home, cooked, did some needlework, and watched TV. She occasionally practiced shamisen that she wasn’t particularly good at and made delicious home-made pickles that she shared with my family. She was also a constant guardian to my younger sister, who spent a lot of time at home because she was often sick.

My grandfather was a very tall man for someone born in the Meiji period, and he was active in the community as the president of the senior citizens club of our danchi. I often spotted him cycling around the neighborhood and chatting with people in the community park. He also had a myriad of hobbies that he practiced seriously, including oil painting, poetry writing, singing, and gardening, all of which he picked up after retiring from running a soba restaurant across the street from Komazawa park in Tokyo.

“Grandpa used to be very strict, but he is so gentle with you grandkids,” my father once said, “my friends never wanted to come to my house because they thought grandpa was too scary.” I remember feeling thankful that my grandfather had mellowed before I arrived in this world because it was terrifying to imagine someone who could intimidate my father, who frightened us with his thunderous temper from time to time.

My grandfather sometimes allowed me to sit and watch him paint in the dark tatami room that smelled of turpentine, mixed with the smell of incense from the modest wooden buddhist alter he had in the same room. Many of the paintings that he made were of some distant mountains or fields. He said they were paintings of Nagano, where he grew up before moving to Tokyo.

Once, when my grandfather was painting, I told him that I wanted to learn to draw, and this made him very happy. He immediately flipped a piece of advertisement paper and used its blank back to show me how to draw a mug that was sitting on the table. “Cups are three-dimensional,” he said, as he started to pencil the outline of the mug. “And to depict that, you draw shadows.” I was about 6 years old and couldn’t even write Japanese alphabets properly, so ‘three-dimensional’ and ‘depict’ were big words for me. I remember I paid as much attention as I could because I understood that he was sharing his passion with me wholeheartedly.

My grandfather was never cynical about my ability, and I loved that about him. If I live to be 80 years old, I hope that I’d still be the person that can share my own passion with anyone without contempt, just like my grandfather.

My grandfather died in the spring of 1990 when I was a senior in high school. I was studying abroad and only found out about his death after I returned that summer. My parents said that they didn’t call me back because he wouldn’t have wished to interrupt my study.

In the corner of my messy workroom in San Diego, I still have the square paper board with a tanka poem that my grandfather wrote for me before I went abroad. It reads: –

Granddaughter,
Off to a school in distant Canada
The old hide their tears, and send her away

Many years have passed since he left us, but I think of my grandfather often. There are many things I would have liked to tell him and many questions that I wish I had asked. I never wrote to him when he was alive, but I want to write a letter to him now. There is no question that he would send me a reply, if only he could.

 

Early Growth Abounds
Approximately May 21st-June 5th

By:
72 Seasons Essays Chieko (Calligraphy)
The scrolls are read from right to left and the dates are approximate
Early Growth Abounds (Shoman 小満)
Silkworms Start Eating Mulberry Leaves (Kaiko okite kuwao kuu 蚕起食桑）May 21-25
Safflowers Bloom (Benihana sakau 紅花栄) May 26-30
Barley Ripens (Bakushu itaru 麦秋至) May 31-June 5
<Calligraphy by Chieko>

 

Barley Ripens

When the loudspeakers in our neighborhood blared the song “Seven Baby Chicks” at 5pm, it was time to return home for dinner:

Crow, why do you caw so?
Because up in the mountain
I have seven adorable baby chicks…

I really disliked this song because I always wanted to play outside longer and had very little interest in going home to eat. Decades later, I was amused whenever my nephews and nieces fell asleep at the dinner table because it confirmed that apathy for eating ran deep in my family during infancy.

But occasionally I was excited about food, in particular when my mother made us barley rice, called mugigohan, which was a mixture of white rice and rolled barley. A rolled barley looks just like a whiter rolled oat and it is flat with a line running down the center. When I spotted these telltale faint brown lines mixed into the rice, I would exclaim with joy. I picked the barley out with chopsticks and popped them individually into my mouth to enjoy their chewy texture. “Mugi is healthy, but a politician once said it’s food for the poor people,” my mother would often say as we ate our mugigohan. This made me think that “politicians” are nasty if they were telling poor people what to eat.

The word mugi in Japanese means wheat or barley. A rolled barley is called oshimugi, and barley tea is called mugicha. The other mugi that we grew up with was mugiwara boushi, which means straw hats. When we were young, many parents made us put on straw hats during the summer and because of this, they are synonymous in our minds with carefree adventures and summer holidays. So, anime fans, it is no coincidence that the protagonist “Luffy” of the popular anime series, “One Piece,” wears a straw hat as he continues his adventures while building friendships.

Straw hat also reminds me of the advertisement for the movie “The Proof of the Man” which was widely broadcast on TV in the summer of 1977. The movie was adapted from a popular murder mystery book written by Morimura Seiichi. I was too young at the time so I actually never saw the movie or read the book, but I vividly remember the commercial that started with an image of a straw hat falling into a ravine. The scene was accompanied by a poem by Saijo Yaso, called “My Hat,” somberly read by the voice of a young man:

Mother,
I wonder what became of my hat
The straw hat that fell into the bottom of a ravine
On the way from Usui to Kiritsumi
That summer…

I think most Japanese children who grew up in this era learned the beginning of this poem thanks to that TV commercial. It was, when I think back, the first time I heard a poem read aloud and experienced how words can evoke feelings.

I felt great sympathy for this man without his hat because I thought about the terrible feeling when I lost something and of the woefulness of having to tell mother. Once, probably a few months after watching the commercial, I lost my water bottle at school and my mother asked where it was. I said in a solemn tone, “mother, I wonder what became of my water bottle…,” at which point she burst out laughing. “You are just impossible,” she groaned, and laughed until tears were streaming down her face.