I really promise I’m not going to push this anymore, but it’s been part of my research and lived experience in Japan, so I have to do one follow-up on poetry and Japan. I was interested because I lived in Hiraizumi for a couple of years. It is now a small town of about 20000 that relies on Buddhist pilgrimages to its two main temples (Mōtsuji and Chūsonji) and general tourism.

In the couple of centuries before 1189 when it was mostly destroyed in war, it had prospered under a family who took the name Fujiwara. That name was an honorary name given to a family that helped an imperial prince stage a family coup in 645 in what is now called Kyoto. But Hiraizumi was located in the far north of Honshu, the main island, and was a frontier zone where Japanese and non-Japanese called emishi both fought and intermixed.

1189 was the year that Hiraizumi was demolished after a clan called the Minamoto defeated a rival clan called the Taira in what is known as the Genpei War (Gen means Minamoto and h/pei means Taira; the war was really two wars but fought between 1180 and 1185). The brains behind the rallying of vassels and strategizing was the older brother, Yoritomo; the dashing man in the field was his younger brother, Yoshitsune. Legends say that rivals of Yoshitune poisoned the mind of his brother by saying that Yoshitsune planned to take over from his brother. At any rate, as children, both brothers had been sent into exile after there father was killed by Taira forces in 1159. Yoshitune spent time in Hiraizumi and so when he found out that his brother had it in for him, he escaped there; later his wife and children joined him under the protection of the “northern Fujiwara.” But this was unpacified land. So it seems to me a kind of “two birds with one stone.” Yoritomo sent his troops north to wipe out his brother, but also to take control of this part of Japan. It was in 1689 that Basho took is trip on the “Narrow Road to the Deep North” (Oku no hosomichi). I happened to be living there in 1989. So there was much ado about this history: 1189, 1689, 1989. Of course, I learned by heart the two poems I cited in the last thread:

夏草や　natsukusaya
兵どもが tsuwamonodomoga
夢の跡 yume no ato

Summer grasses—
All that remains
of warriors’ dreams

and

五月雨の　Samidare no
降り残してや furinokoshiteya
金色度 konjikido

Something like:

Undimmed by summer’s early rain
The golden temple (I know that’s not how I rendered it in the earlier post, but it’s the same).

I was doing calligraphy lessons with a local teacher and she did a very nice stylized rendering of the latter that I have framed and have put on the wall of my office.

Anyway, here’s the Konjikido (the mummified remains and/or heads of three generations of northern Fujiwara are under the dias):

I know that’s too much info and I hope that my posting doesn’t make those interested in Japan hesitate to post their thoughts or experiences for fear that I’ll shit all over their posts. It’s just what I know best and I don’t have many chances to share.