Wooden tablets dotted along a path between office buildings and the Sendaibori river in eastern Tokyo mark the start of a journey by Japan’s most revered poet that would result in his greatest collection of verse.
The tablets showing haiku by Matsuo Bashō are steeped in the seasonal certainties of the late 1600s. There are references to full moons, chirping cicadas and, of course, cherry blossoms.
Awareness of the seasons, and the seamless transition from one to the next, is found in myriad aspects of Japanese life: cuisine and traditional dress, the performing arts and, perhaps most conspicuously of all, in haiku poetry.
Almost four centuries later, Bashō’s words continue to inspire admiration and countless amateur exponents of the 17-syllable form, including the former EU president and published haiku poet Herman Van Rompuy, who credits the verse with making him a more effective politician.
But they are also a reminder that haiku faces what some of its enthusiasts fear is an existential threat: the climate crisis.
The poems displayed at regular intervals along the Sendaibori promenade are intended to evoke the cooler climes of autumn but this year they feel off kilter even though it is late September.
The walk begins outside the hut Bashō stayed in before setting off on an odyssey that would result in his most famous work, Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North).
The sun is beginning to dip, but the air is still heavy with humidity. The exertions of walkers and cyclists, in T-shirts and shorts, making their way to the crown of the bridge are written in the sweat on their brows.
One of the poems encapsulates the feeling of seasonal misalignment.
Ishiyama no
Ishi yori shiroshi
Aki no kaze
A whiteness whiter
than the stones of Stone Mountain
The wind in autumn
Bashō wrote those words after a visit to a hilltop temple in Komatsu, near the Japan Sea coast, on 18 September 1689.
Read contemporaneously, they would have evoked the arrival of cooler, crisper days – a subtle shift in the seasons the master poet would have doubtlessly welcomed on his epic travels on foot. Today, though, they belong not just to another century, but to an age of symmetry between culture and the seasons that is being irrevocably blurred by the climate crisis.
Disrupting the ‘year-time almanac’
Japan is no stranger to extreme weather, but summers once described as uncomfortably muggy are now so hot that they represent a real threat to human life, especially among Japan’s large and growing population of older people. The country has experienced a series of unusually strong typhoons in recent years, causing deadly floods in low-lying areas and landslides in mountainous regions. Scientists say global heating is resulting in warmer oceans around the archipelago, threatening some marine species and affecting the migratory habits of others.
The rhythms of the natural world have informed countless haiku verse in the centuries since Bashō lived and wrote. In their purist form, each haiku must comprise three lines of five, seven and five syllables, and include a kireji – a “cutting word” that lends the verse contrast, and, crucially, a kigo, or seasonal reference.
The climate crisis is wreaking havoc on the Saijiki – the “year-time almanac” of thousands of seasonal words that are widely acknowledged as acceptable for inclusion in haiku. A kigo could refer to a particular plant or animal, the weather, seasonal festivals, the sky and the heavens. When read at a corresponding time of the year, it is supposed to stir emotions in the reader.
“With kigo, you’re compressing three or four months into a single word,” says David McMurray, a haiku poet who has curated the Asahi Shimbun newspaper’s Haikuist Network column since 1995. “Take the word mosquito … the entire summer is packed into that one word, and it conjures up so many images.”
The premature first pops of sakura buds in spring and and the arrival of typhoons in the summer instead of the autumn are two notable examples of seasonal dissonance.
“The seasons are important to haiku because they focus on one particular element,” adds McMurray, a professor of intercultural studies at the International University of Kagoshima, where he lectures on international haiku. “But typhoons arrive in the summer now, and we’re getting mosquitoes in the autumn, even in northern Japan.
“The risk is that we will lose the central role of the four seasons in composing haiku, and the Saijiki will essentially become a historical document. The Saijiki is very specific in the way it presents the words. But they no longer reflect reality.”
‘You can’t really empathise with … that season and emotion’
With more warmer days being recorded in Japan well beyond the end of summer, the diversity of seasonal words is under threat, according to Etsuya Hirose, a professional haiku poet.
“Take koharubiyori, a kigo of late autumn to early winter used to express a day of warm, mild, sunny, almost springlike weather in the midst of harshly cold days, associated with a sense of soothing and comfort,” Hirose told the Nikkei business newspaper. “Nowadays, more days are warm at that time of year, so you can’t really empathise with that kigo, that season and emotion.”
As global heating accelerates the process of natural misalignment, the haiku writer can either down tools in despair or simply adapt, according to Toshio Kimura, a poet and director of the Haiku International Association. Warmer, more unpredictable weather is blurring the transition from one season to the next, but haiku has the versatility to adapt, he believes. “The purpose of haiku is not to praise seasons themselves, but to try to see the human essence through nature.
“Of course, several poets will lament climate change in their haiku. However, to describe a certain climate is not the aim of haiku.”
However, an understated form of environmental activism is now making its way into haiku, according to Andrew Fitzsimons, a professor in the department of English language and cultures at Gakushuin University in Tokyo.
“With later and shorter rainy seasons, longer summers, and warming seas and oceans, with the effect on vegetation, on animal life, and on the timing and duration of blossoms, for instance, there is a sense of being out of step with the way things have been and have been written about,” said Fitzsimons, author of Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō.
He offered this example by the poet Namiko Yamamoto:
Spring in the mind
if not actually
in the air
Bashō didn’t know it at the time, of course, but modern-day admirers have had to adjust their reading of his haiku as a result of climate change. After this year’s long, record-breaking summer, discussion among haiku poets turned to zansho, a reference to a phenomenon that, in Bashō’s time, was a rarity – an early autumn day of lingering summer heat.
In 1689, Bashō wrote during his journey between Echigo (now Niigata prefecture) and Kanazawa:
Red on red on red
unrelenting the sun yet
the wind of autumn
“One of Basho’s most famous poems captures what is now a much more common phenomenon,” Fitzsimons says.
“Haiku, like all poetry, deals with reality, both inner and outer, so haiku can’t but concern itself with what it sees and what it feels about what it sees. More than most forms of poetry, though, haiku is particularly keyed to the everyday. Climate change, and the effects it will have on how we go about living with its daily consequences, will be an ever-present, pressing – and depressing – theme.”
