#japanese haiku

[niddy-writes-randomly]

Just me and the moon, We spend our time in silence, Alone, growing cold.

— Haiku by Nidhish Shirur

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

"All in calmness -- the earth with half-opened eyes moves into winter..."

~ Dakotsu Iida, from Haiku: An Anthology of Japanese Poems (tr. Stephen Addiss, Fumiko Yamamoto, and Akira Yamamoto)

[godzilla-reads]

Best Haiku by Bashō

Original:

Furu ike ya

kawazu tobikomu

mizu no oto

Translation by Lafcadio Hearn:

Old pond — frogs jumped in — sound of water.

Check out this site for some different translations 🐸 (art below by Matsumoto Hoji)

[zeraphimtwins]

The temple bell stops -

but the sound keeps coming

out of the flowers.

- Bashō (1644-94)

[philgennuso]

Haiku by Issa (#Nature #Haiku)

Photo by Phil Gennuso Arts engulfedin sunsetred leaves *********************************** Iconic haiku master Kobayashi Issa, 1765 – 1828

[metamorphesque]

Blossoms at night, and the faces of people moved by music.

Blossoms at Night, Kobayashi Issa ("The Spring of My Life: And Selected Haiku by Kobayashi Issa")

[0nelinerwordplay]

https://kimonocatsoncups.etsy.com

[the-cricket-chirps]

Cat with a Cricket with a Haiku (Poem by Nikkan Ehagaki)

[itsmarjudgelove]

Haiku

Dreams of autumn

Colorful leaves in the streets

crowded thoughts

Ikki 2024

[ariadnethedragon]

The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu

[niddy-writes-randomly]

Gazing at flowers, The colours fading away, Deep in the mountains.

— Haiku by Nidhish Shirur

[yoga-onion]

The sigh becomes a butterfly  in the flower field

This is a haiku poetry written by a 17-year-old Japanese schoolgirl.

I've introduced it here because the sensibility of "a sigh becomes a butterfly" is so wonderful.

On the back of the Oi, Ocha tea bags, haiku by boys and girls from all over the country are introduced, and I look forward to reading them every time I make tea.

Green tea is one of the oldest Japanese zen traditions, originating from Eisai, a Zen monk around the 12th century. The supposedly bitter matcha green tea flavour is now mixed with sugar and milk and is popular all over the world. I regularly use "Oi, Ocha" tea bags for this time-honoured green tea, which is super easy and tasty.

"ため息は、蝶になりけり、花畑"

これは日本の17歳の女子高生が作った俳句。「ため息が蝶になる」という感性がとても素晴らしいので、ご紹介した。

「お〜い、お茶」のティーバッグの裏には、全国の少年少女たちの俳句が紹介されている（以前は大人バージョンだったような）毎回、お茶を入れる度に楽しみに読んでいる。

緑茶は、12世紀ごろの禅僧、栄西由来の日本古来の伝統の一つ。苦ーいはずの抹茶味は、砂糖とミルクを混ぜ、現在では世界中で人気の味となっている。その由緒正しい緑茶を、私は超簡単で美味な「お〜い、お茶」のティーバッグを常用して飲んでいる。

絵画で言えば、気の遠くなるようなルネサンスのテンペラ技法から、油で描けるが乾くのに時間がかかり面倒な油絵具へ、そして乾きが早く水で洗えるアクリル絵具に進化し、今やAIアプリを使えば、手を汚す必要すらない…みたいなものだ。

[ichijin]

shirakumo o aogu shirokuma heiya kara

白雲を仰ぐ白雲平野から

a polar bear looking up to white clouds from an open field

[the-judicial-assistants-notebook]

rip, ryuunosuke's ability to spontaneously compose haiku. you are missed 😔✊

[ougougougoug]

😅👉🏽

this is a haiku that uses just two symbols.

so, let me explain:

(while editing this post i found out that a few emojis i use are not supported on certain browsers. clearly im being silenced.

if you paste them in discord, then they should display, otherwise, suffer?)

haikus are simple, but have a rigid structure, which is why they’re fun. just five syllables, then seven, then five again, arranged in three lines.

what I think is fun is what I like to call a ‘minimal haiku,' which is where you try to use as few symbols as possible to write all three lines of a haiku. so, for example, we start with numbers.

7 is so cool everybody likes 7 7 is funky

in this haiku here, although '7' is only one symbol, it counts as two syllables, because that's how it's pronounced. so, obviously, we can just kind of run with that, right?

so here is the smallest haiku i think you can make using numbers in this way.

here is the haiku:

77 707 77

"seventy seven seven hundred and seven seventy seven"

this haiku uses (fittingly) seven symbols, but it kind of sucks. we're playing fast and loose with what we're calling a haiku, but it would still be nice if the minimal haikus we wrote kind of, at least, sort of made sense, i think.

so here's the smallest haiku i have written so far using only numbers and letters.

alright, here is the haiku:

33 x 3 funny 700x 69 ha ha

"thirty three times three funny seven hundred times sixty nine ha ha"

its not exactly high art, but it's technically comprehensible as a series of words that express a full thought, and that's good enough.

obviously, you can go further than this, and the next logical step is ascii. I don't think there's any ascii symbols that can be pronounced as seven syllables, but there are a few that can do five.

so here's the smallest haiku i could make using just ascii symbols:

) :) !

"close parentheses colon, close parentheses exclamation mark"

wow! just four symbols, which tell the relatable story of a guy who wakes up and sees that he's slept through his alarm. (it conveys this thought pictorially, but it does convey a thought.)

of course, we can go further.

our next stop is emojis.

now, one thing that's problematic about these is that not everyone might agree on how they should be pronounced, but i say we just play with this, and use whatever makes our haikus work, because, well, it's more fun that way.

so, here's a fun haiku:

🌑 🌓 🌕

"new moon emoji first quarter moon emoji full moon emoji"

wow! just three symbols.

here's a haiku about a working class trans girl:

🧑‍🏭 👩‍🏭 ⚧️

"factory worker woman factory worker transgender symbol"

so, we've managed to make some haikus with just three symbols. but i think we can go smaller.

ive been limiting myself to writing haikus with three visible lines when written down, but you can't do that with just two symbols. so we're just gonna forget about that from this point on.

(as a quick little aside, i said before that, using just numbers,

77 707 77

was the best i could do, but if you ignore how it is written down,

77777

"seventy seven thousand seven hundred and seventy seven"

is a haiku in just one number. anyways, back to emojis)

😵‍💫 🤢

this is a haiku. let me explain to you why.

most emojis are single unicode characters. but some of them are secretly just combinations of two other emojis with a symbol called a 'zero width joiner' between them, which means, although they're displayed as just one symbol, you can break them up into three. here's the wiki page for 'face with spiral eyes', which lists the three unicode symbols that make up the emoji. with that knowledge, you can pronounce this fun haiku as:

"face with crossed out eyes zero width joiner, dizzy nauseated face"

which is a haiku about a person who's sick and might just frow up.

one common type of emoji sequence is for modifying the skin tone of certain emojis. for these, we won't think about what the zero width joiner is doing (in fact, i think some, but not all, of these don't even have one? it's unclear to me, but all the more reason to ignore them.) what we'll do instead is just use the 'CLDR Short Name', which you can find listed here and here on unicode.org. These are about as official as you can get with emoji names, and will cover the emojis i'll be using for the last haikus.

so let's look back at the haiku at the top of this post, shown again:

😅👉🏽

"grinning face with sweat backhand index pointing right medium skin tone"

this takes advantage of the skin colour of the pointing emoji.

so that's another haiku that uses just two symbols, which depicts an anxious person doing finger guns (perhaps they're anxious because they spilled some yellow paint on their face. who knows. like any great artist, my works are up to interpretation.) so this leaves us all asking...

is it possible?

we've done two symbol haikus, but what about...

one?

any emoji which shows a person can be modified both by skin colour and by gender. if there is more than one person in an emoji, then each person can be given their own modifiers.

This means it's just a matter of going through the list of emojis and hoping that you can find one that works.

and, well that's just what i did:

👨🏾‍❤️‍👨🏽

couple with heart: man, man, medium-dark skin tone, medium skin tone

this is the smallest haiku possible to write. it's just a single symbol.

and it's two gay men. a wonderful queer couple. and i think that's great.