#japanese-mysteries-in-english

[happythoughtswithstefania]

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Positive Affirmations And Audio Stories podcast. We've got a very special Japanese Halloween story today, so why not settle in and have a listen! It was written by Lafcadio Hearn. We're continuing with our Sleep Stories series-and this is part 2 of this traditional story. It’s got a bit of mystery and a bit of chill! Coffee fuels us up ... donations keep us going... please pop over to ko-fi for a coffee donation if you'd like to financially support our work. If you would like to get more inspiration and motivation, there are lots of inspirational positive videos, messages and artwork over there. https://ko-fi.com/happythoughts Many thanks, your listens, likes, subscribes and support mean the world to us. This podcast is available on Spreaker, iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, iHeartRadio and most podcast platforms and apps. If you like what you hear please feel free to share and to leave a review on your site of choice. Visit my Bandcamp page for more inspiration affirmations, meditations and stories for purchase and sample. Helping you live the positive lifestyle that you deserve. https://stefanialintonbon.bandcamp.com __________ And for the children, do check out our other podcast "The Classic Children's Story Podcast ". Also, have a look at our YouTube channel of stories, affirmations, songs and more for kids: https://www.youtube.com/@SleepStoriesandFairyTales4U

[yukipri]

YURI!!! on ICE the movie : ICE ADOLESCENCE Officially Canceled

YURI!!! on ICE the movie: ICE ADOLESCENCE Cancellation Notice Thank you very much for always supporting "Yuri!!! on ICE." Regarding the postponed release of "YURI!!! on ICE the movie: ICE ADOLESCENCE," we have come to the decision to unfortunately cancel its production. We deeply apologize for not being able to meet the expectations of all those who have been waiting and have continued to support us throughout these years. The production committee and staff have been in constant discussions to create and to deliver the movie, but due to various circumstances, we have had to make the difficult decision to stop the production. We sincerely apologize to everyone who has been anticipating its release and thank you once again for your continued support. Yuri!!! on ICE PROJECT MAPPA Co., Ltd. Posted on the official Yuri on Ice twitter, @ yurionice_PR

Figure some YOI folks may still follow me, here's the news.

[smilepebble]

thanks to @drainbangle for reminding me how funny JPN grovyle is

[eggtrolls]

haiku misinformation: a fact check

there's an post going around about haiku that has a lot of incorrect information about haiku, its terminology, history, etc. I will try to debunk some of the biggest inaccuracies here. everything in quotes is a direct statement from the original post. this is also really, really long.

"Haiku are made of 14 on, which are essentially the equivalent to Japanese syllabic structures, except the nature of how Japanese as a language is constructed versus English means that any given proper haiku could be translated in extremely and intensely different ways, each giving a subtle but distinctly different meaning."

Starting off strong - haiku are (usually) made of 17 on. It's the classic 5-7-5 pattern! 5+7+5=17! [possibly this is a mix-up with wakiku (脇(わき)句(く)) which is another type of Japanese poetry that does use 14 on but who knows.]

Definitions: an on is a phonetic unit, the equivalent to a mora (pl. morae) in English. this concept a) exists in English and b) like on, is related to syllables but distinctly different from them (i.e. ba is one mora but baa with a long vowel is two morae). On can be counted using the number of hiragana (phonetic syllabic characters) when the text is transliterated, so a word like Osaka that has the long O sound (made up of 4 kana) would be 4 morae or 4 on (o-o-sa-ka; おおさか). it's not really a syllabic structure at all, and more importantly has nothing to do with translation. idk where that last part comes from because that's really...not the point here. Yes, any given "proper" haiku could be translated in different ways with a subtle but distinctly different meaning but that's true of just...translation, period. check out Deborah Smith's translation of The Vegetarian by Han Kang for more on that.

Furthermore, haiku were/are not rigidly locked into the 5-7-5 on pattern. That's just not true, which is why I said usually above. Easy example: a 1676 haiku by Matsuo Basho that uses 18-on:

冨士の風や　扇にのせて 江戸土産; ふじのかぜや おうぎにのせて えどみやげ; the wind of Fuji /I've brought on my fan/a gift from Edo <- that first line is 6-on!

2. "The best way I can explain what I mean is that in English a good poem can be defined as a shallow river, whereas a good haiku is a deeply-dug well."

Not dignifying this with a response. Deeply incorrect and untrue. @bill-blake-fans-anonymous can handle this assertion.

3. "The presence of the kigu. There is a specific series of characters/words which are used to imply a season, and specifically a specific aspect of a season which the haiku revolves around. The creation of a haiku is often done as a meditative practice revolving around the kigu--you're essentially contemplating on this particular natural feature (nearly always the temporal aspect emphasizes either ephemerality or the opposite as well bc Buddhist ideas of enlightenment and beauty begin coming into play) and building an evocative and purposeful point that revolves around it like a hinge. It functions as both ground and anchor."

First (and largest) problem: the word. is. kigo. kigo. It's ki (季; season)-go (語; word) = 季語. Both the English and Japanese language Wikipedia, or a 3-second google search, will tell you this immediately. I have no idea where the term kigu comes from.

Second problem: plenty of haiku, both traditional and contemporary, do not use kigo. these are described as muki (無季; seasonless). Matsuo Basho, the haiku-writing poet non-Japanese people are most likely to know, wrote at least ten seasonless haiku that exist today. Masaoka Shiki, the Meiji-era haiku poet and reformist, wrote hundreds of kigo-free haiku and as an agnostic, tried to separate haiku from Buddhism and focus more on the shasei, the sketches from daily life. you can actually, today, buy what are called saijiki, which are lists of words and terms that refer to specific seasons (in the traditional Japanese calendar, so there are actually a lot of "micro" seasons as well). some saijiki include a whole section of "seasonles" words - here's an article about non-season kigo in a saijiki.

so the claim that English-language haiku are invalid or not "real" haiku because they lack a kigo doesn't hold up, unless you invalidate a whole bunch of Japanese haiku as well. the op also claimed they would categorize a lot of English "haiku" as senryū which is...an opinion. Yes, haiku tend to be focused around nature (more on that below) and senryū tend to be more comedic or about human foibles but...that's it! it's a tendency! it's not a hard and fast rule!

Third problem: the claim that a haiku is as meditative practice revolving around the kigu kigo...yeah, no. the earlier form of haiku, the hokku, were the introductory poems of the longer poetic form, the renga and the hokku gradually became a standalone poetic form known as haiku. the hokku had a lot of purposes and we have a historical record of them going back ~1000 years to Emperor Juntoku where they were declamatory poems tied to events (births, deaths, etc.) or social events (moon-viewing parties) - not really meditative. haiku, if a genre can focus on a single idea, focus on an experience and that can be real or imaginary, direct and personal or neither.

Here's another Basho poem for your consideration:

夏草や 兵どもが 夢の跡 (natsukusa ya tsuwamonodomo ga yume no ato; summer grasses--/traces of dreams/of ancient warriors)

both the dreams and the grasses are those of Basho (contemporary) and of the warriors (ancient); it's about travel, it's about connecting the present to the ancient past, it's not really so much about the summer.

(Fourth, minor problem that I'm not really going to get into: you'd have to take this 'Buddhist ideas of enlightenment and beauty' up with haiku scholar Haruo Shirane but he explicitly says in the Routledge Global Haiku Reader (2024) that "pioneers of English-language haiku [such as D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and the Beats] mistakenly emphasized Zen Buddhism in Japanese haiku".....so.)

4. "The presence of the kireji...it's a concept borderline absent from English because it's an intersection of linguistics and philosophy that doesn't really exist outside of the context of Japanese."

Let's begin with clarification. What is kireji (lit. a 'cutting word')? It's a class of terms in Japanese poetry that can do a few things, depending on the specific kireji and its place in the poem. In the middle of the poem, it can mark a thematic break, a cut in the stream of thought highlighting the parallel(s) between the preceding and following phrases. At the end of the poem, it provides a sense of ending and closure - it helps mark rhythmic division, to say the least, and it is seen as the 'pivot' word.

Two problems with claims above:

a. there are haiku that do not use kireji. For the hat trick, here's a Matsuo Basho haiku from 1689 AD that is kireji-free: 初しぐれ猿も小蓑をほしげ也 (hatsu shigure saru mo komino wo hoshige nari; the first cold shower/even the monkey seems to want/a little coat of straw) <- NB: I love this haiku so much

b. the idea of a kireji, as in a pivot word that provides an inflection point with rhythmic division and structure, exist not just in English poetry but in multiple different types of poetry across time and space! The caesura in Latin and Ancient Greek! The volta in sonnets! Whatever is happening in the third line of the Korean sijo!

final thoughts:

the op included language, which I won't quote here because it was messy and tied into other rbs, about Orientalism and appropriation in English-language haiku, which is definitely a real thing. but this blanket statement ignores that the relationship between haiku and "the West", much like Japan and "the West", was and is not a one-way street. Western writers were influenced by haiku and, in turn, those writers influenced Japanese writers who wrote haiku inspired by these influences - this process has been going on for well over a century. Furthermore, English and Japanese are not the only languages in which haiku are written! Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore was writing haiku in Bengali; other Indian poets were and are writing them in Gujrati and Malayalam, particularly by the poet Ashitha. the Pakistani poet Omer Tarin has written haiku about Hiroshima! The Spanish poet Lorca published haiku in, get this, Spanish, in 1921 and the Mexican poet José Juan Tablada published more in 1922! Italian translations of Yosano Akiko were published in 1919! any discussion of the idea that English/non-Japanese-language haiku aren't really haiku because they don't hold to the "rules" (which Japanese authors have been revising, adapting, critiquing, and/or straight up flouting for centuries) or because English/non-Japanese poetry is "a shallow river whereas a good haiku is a deeply-dug well" just shows a lack of knowledge around traditions and depths of...well, poetry itself.

my god this is so long.

in summary: this is a complex topic. If anyone would like some actual information about haiku, its history, common themes and forms, or a collection of good poets, the Routledge Global Haiku Reader (2024) and Haiku Before Haiku : From the Renga Masters to Basho (2011) are great references and really accessible in their language! hmu if you're interested and I can send you some pdfs.

[bmpmp3]

how did i not know there was an amnesia: memories musical..... an entire decade ago...................................................

[liquidsevens]

Solidus: "... (he mutters something. Mouth movement only. Leave the dying words up to the users' imagination)"

probably the most famous trivia for MGS2 revolves around all the content cut due to the aftermath of 9/11.

a lot of people think that extends to Solidus Snake's final words before he dies. many folks believe that before censorship, the script, and by extension, the game, contained some final words that may have even been fully voice acted.

in reality, there was nothing. it was always meant to be a moment where we, the players, try to imagine what he might have said. the storyboard above (and the text excerpt) is from "The Document of MGS2", an interactive disc that includes the WIP translation, character models, etc. for the game. if you're a fan of MGS2, especially its aesthetic, i highly recommend you explore it. its got a ton of content to just watch, read, listen, or generally mess around with.

Sources:

The Document of MGS2 (NTSC-U)

Agness Kaku (Translation)

[matoitech]

my favorite thing is watching youtube videos talking abt stuff that requires sources and then going into the comments and seeing ppl give actual sourced information on what the youtube video got wrong

[probablygayattorneys]

Katrielle Layton and Maya Fey aren’t allowed in the same universe because their friendship would be too powerful

[xbuster]

This is a question that only like two people on this website could even have an opinion for, but does the American opening for Esteban, Child of the Sun (The Mysterious Cities of Gold) count as an anime OP? Like idk if I would say the American Pokémon themes count as anime OPs since it’s not like you’d say the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers theme is a Super Sentai song. But also Esteban, Child of the Sun was a Japanese-French co-production that was written and directed by French and Japanese creators.

The English and French versions share the same OP but sung in different languages while the Japanese OP is completely different. Like it’s undoubtedly an anime, but what should be considered the “actual” OP? It aired in Japan first and DIC was going to use that soundtrack for the western release, but the French side of the production opted for a new score from Satan Entertainment. And despite airing in Japan first, it really is a French anime for all intents and purposes.

[kalosbian]

you know i think it's fucking hilarious how people were (and maybe still are idk) so vehemently in denial of amarys' feelings for kieran bc it's like. you just know if that club room conversation went exactly the same except amarys said she was thinking about carmine these same people would be all over that shit. talking about "ohh she likes carmine" and "there's no heterosexual explanation for this" but because she said kieran you got people jumping through hoops desperately trying to find a platonic explanation for this

[lehguru]

the more i think abt it, the more i love neuvi's japanese va bcuz he's so soft spoken it makes me want to curl up in a ball and cry

[sunjoys]

looking back at the last few books i read.... ive been reading a lot about murder lately huh . anyway time to start reading a murder mystery!

[basslinegrave]

favorite pastime is going thru peoples faves on pixiv but making the jerma cat puke noise whenever i see one of my works in there

[lupizora]

Since I finished my yearly re-read of the Tantei Gakuen Q/Detective Academy Q manga, I guess it's time I finally started reading the Kindaichi series after all this time 🤔