Tag: calligraphy

Frost Falls Approximately October 23th – November 6th

By:

October 23, 202272 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.

Autumn Equinox
Approximately September 23rd – October 7th

By:

Ai Kanazawa

September 21, 202272 Seasons Essays Chieko (Calligraphy)

The scrolls are read from right to left and the dates are approximate
Autumn Equinox (Shubun 秋分)
Thunder pipes down (Kaminari sunawachi Koeoosamu 雷乃収声) Sept. 23-27
Insects wall up in shelters (Chicchu to o fusagu 蟄虫坏戸) Sept.28-Oct. 2
Waters dry up (Mizu hajimetekareru 水始涸) Oct. 3-7
Calligraphy by Chieko

Waters Dry Up

When the sweet smell of orange tea olive flowers waft through the air, it is truly autumn. After the rice is harvested, the paddy fields that were drained in advance slowly dry up into mud cracks. Darkness descends earlier in the evenings and with that, my visits to the fields become few and far between.

Around the end of September, vertical banners in the shop front would announce the arrival of new rice at our local supermarket. The rice would be followed by a flood of seasonal delicacies such as Kyoho grapes, Kosui pears, Matsutake mushrooms, and most important, the pacific saury fish, which is my favorite fall delicacy called sanma in Japanese.

“Let’s eat sanma tonight,” my mother would say as soon as she spots the fresh fish in the supermarket aisle. Their long silver bodies are piled in a Styrofoam container packed with ice. “Pick a plump one with clear eyes and yellow nose,” she would say as she passes me a tong. As I pick each fish, she would indicate with a nod or shake of her head to put them into the plastic bag.

When I was growing up in Japan in the late 70s, we ate a lot of fish prepared Himono-style. Himono are split, cleaned, salted, and partially dried small fish, mostly skipjacks and horse mackerels. Raw fish like sashimi and sushi were only served on special days when we had guests. Sanma is unique because it is only eaten for a short period in autumn, grilled and served whole with its intestines intact.

To prepare a sanma, the fish is salted generously on the outside and popped into the fish grill —every Japanese household stove is equipped with one— to be roasted under the open flame for a few minutes. It is usually served on a long plate, uncut, horizontally with its head pointed to the left. A little mound of grated daikon radish topped with a dash of soy sauce should accompany it on the side, together with a wedge of Kabosu lime to squeeze over the caramelized skin. I enjoy eating sanma because its salty and oily meat paired perfectly with the new rice, which comes out of the rice cooker softer than older rice.

The other reason I loved eating sanma when I was young was to prove my fish-eating skills to my parents. This is because the things my parents particularly respected were proper greetings and excellent chopstick skills. “So-and-so can’t even greet people properly!” my mother would say about one of my friends who didn’t say hello to her on the street.

She also said, “a person who holds chopsticks properly and eats a fish clean to the bone has a good upbringing.” Sanma is very difficult to eat clean because it has numerous fine bones along its narrow body, but because we were well-trained by my parents, my sisters and I were expert fish eaters at a young age. My parents didn’t praise us easily, but they always complimented us for eating fish properly.

Several years ago, I was in the town of Tsu on the shores of Ise bay in Mie prefecture. I was interpreting for a group of people from the US visiting pottery towns in Japan. One night, the group photographer and I ate at a little local Japanese bar with two of the American members of the group. It was sanma season and one of the Americans ordered a sanma. When the fish arrived at the table grilled to perfection, he asked for a fork and a knife and started eating the sanma. Everyone, including the bar owners and the other customers surrounded the table and watched him artfully eat the fish with the cutlery. When he finished and the sanma was eaten clean to the bone, the crowd broke into cheers. So, it’s not just my parents, but many Japanese people have unconditional respect for anyone who knows how to graciously eat a fish.

Early Growth Abounds
Approximately May 21st-June 5th

By:

Ai Kanazawa

May 20, 202272 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.

Beginning of Summer
Approximately May 5th – 20th

By:

Ai Kanazawa

May 5, 202272 Seasons Essays Chieko (Calligraphy)

Frogs Start to Cry

When I was a little girl, I never saw my father during the week because he left for work before the children woke up and came home after we went to sleep. When he was home on the weekends, he was always very tired. If my sisters and I begged him to play, he would often suggest, “sure, let’s pretend to nap,” at which point we immediately refused and ran off. When we returned, we found our father snoring on the tatami mat with my baby sister on his side. She was a constant victim to his scheme because she quickly fell asleep “pretending” next to my father.

I think many Japanese salaryman fathers in the 1970s were just like mine, overworked and exhausted, because, it seemed, they were on a mission to contribute to Japan’s rapid growth and industrialization. My father couldn’t play with us often and, ironically, that’s the reason I vividly remember the times when he did. We played badminton in the car park and the Reversi board game that was popular in Japan at the time. These times were fun, but out of all the things I did with my father, I enjoyed singing with him the most.

My father had tuberculosis when he was in high school that almost took his life, and he lost a part of his lung through an operation. A big scar remains across his back that always surprised people when we went to the swimming pool together. When we were very young, my father told us that the scar was made by a big cat that clawed at him in a dark alley. So we never went into dark alleys.

After spending two years in the hospital, the doctor suggested to my father to take up singing as therapy to improve his lung capacity and breathing. My father obediently joined a choir for several years and because of this, he loved to sing and taught us many songs.

The Frogs’ Song (kaeruno uta) was one of the first songs that everyone, including my little sister, could sing because it was simple and short. Like the song “row, row, row your boat”, the song is sung in a round and as a child I thought that we really sounded like a group of frogs when we sang the “gwa gwa” part together. Until recently, I was convinced that this song was Japanese in origin but discovered to my surprise that the melody is from a German folk song from the 19th century called Froschgesang.

For my father’s work, our young family moved to the suburban areas of Kanagawa, Fukuoka, and Chiba in a span of a few years. In Chiba, there were many rice paddies close to our apartment. In the early summer when these fields were filled with water, a massive chorus of frogs could be heard. These frogs laid eggs that looked like delicate strings of beads covered in jelly.

Once, my friend and I went to look for tadpoles in the rice paddies after daycare. We loudly sang the Frogs’ Song in an endless loop as we walked in our rain boots because this never-ending song was perfect for our childish persistence, and we were happy that no adult was telling us to stop. When we arrived at the rice paddies, we saw many tadpoles swimming in the shallow warm water.

Some tadpoles had already started to grow legs. We gently scooped a few in our hands and flipped them to look at the spirals in their bellies. We were completely absorbed in our play until my friend tried to take a step and lost her boot in the mud. We pulled and pulled to retrieve it, but the suction of the mud was too strong. Soon the boot disappeared completely into the mud, and we had to give up because the five o’clock song played from the loudspeakers and this was the time that we had to go home.

My friend used my shoulder to hop on her single booted foot, so we trudged very slowly. As darkness began to fall, we started sobbing quietly as we walked. I felt responsible for her boot and hoped that her mother won’t scold her for losing it. I was also worried that my mother would be angry when I got home covered in mud.

I can’t remember my friend’s name now, or what happened after we got home that evening. Shortly after the incident, my friend moved away because her father had to work in Kansai. My father also stopped singing because the opportunities simply disappeared from our lives as we grew up. Now when I hear frogs cry, I think about singing the Frog’s Song with my father, and the little orange rain boot stuck in the rice paddy field.

Essays for the 72 Microseasons with Calligraphy by Chieko

By:

Ai Kanazawa

May 5, 202272 Seasons Essays Chieko (Calligraphy)

2022 marks the 10th anniversary of my small business. I was so excited to embark on this endeavor after waiting 8 years for a green card that finally allowed me to work in the US. For this anniversary year, I wanted to push myself to write more as I find the whole writing process difficult. So I was delighted when I found the perfect literary enkindler: the 72 microseasons of old Japan.

When Meiji Japan replaced its calendar in 1872 as it sought to modernize and catch up with the rest of the world, many of the seasons expressed in the traditional version were no longer used in the new Gregorian calendar. In the old lunar calendar called kyureki, the year was divided into four seasons with each season sub-divided into three mini-seasons called sekki. But the most curious aspect of the kyureki were ko or microseasons that further divided each sekki into three, making a grand total of 72 microseasons in a year.

“East wind melts the ice” microseason marking the beginning of spring around February 4th-8th calligraphy by Chieko

The 72 microseasons are fascinating because they have names like “east wind melts the ice” and “barley ripens” that literally depict subtle but distinct phenomenon in the surrounding nature. They are a testament to our farming history and how our ancestors lived close to the land that they depended upon. These days most Japanese have never heard of these microseasons, but in the last decade there has been a renewed interest with numerous books and online content published on the topic.

These microseasons have had the profound effect of triggering my memories in unique and personal ways. From childhood, summer has been my favorite season of the year and since today, May 5^th, marks the start of summer in the Japanese calendar, it is the perfect day to begin recounting them. I hope that you will find my stories interesting and in some way intersect with your own experiences because I feel that it is my lifework to create deeper connections by communicating delicate gradations and subtleties of thought that transcends culture and language.

My essays will be accompanied by the vivid calligraphy of the 72 microseasons by Chieko, the mother of a good friend, who is a contemporary Japanese calligrapher currently residing in Kanagawa prefecture. Chieko first put ink on paper more than 70 years ago and her talent was soon recognized by her teacher who encouraged her to pursue the art form. She later studied under Kumagai Tsuneko (1893-1989), a renowned contemporary calligrapher at Daito Bunka University, who also taught calligraphy to the Japanese Empress Michiko.

Kanamoji calligraphy by Chieko
Hananoirowa utsurinikerina itazurani wagamiyonifuru nagameseshimani
by Ono no Komachi (9th Century poet)
100 waka poems by 100 poets

Some of the100 poems by 100 poets karuta in kanamoji by Chieko

Chieko’s love is for kanamoji calligraphy, a graceful and unique writing style using Japanese alphabets that were developed during the Heian Period (794-1192). However, for this 72 microseasons project, I requested Chieko to write the seasons in Kanji using regular to semi-cursive script, so that they will be legible and entice many people, even beginners learning kanji, to engage.

In creating the 72 microseasons calligraphy, Chieko used three kinds of ink: chaboku (brown ink), seiboku (blue ink), and kuro (black ink), which are rubbed on wet stone to release the pigments. Each piece is created quickly and deliberately because calligraphy is an ephemeral art form with no opportunity to make changes later.

For Chieko, the brushes are extensions of her hand and her work expresses her heart. Her immense focus lets the brush move freely, creating work that powerfully provokes strong emotions.

Calligraphy, while intrinsically imbuing meaning, leaves space for the imagination of the viewer that actual landscape photos do not. It is not necessary to be able to read the characters. Instead, please enjoy the flow, contrast, composition, and grace of the strokes, just like you would enjoy a painting.

Continue to read the 72 microseasons essay “Beginning of Summer” ->