I’ll be completely honest, year’s ago I could not make (or care try to make) a simple rhyme; not a structure, not a single piece of poetry could ever come to my head – let alone do it in Japanese. One day, while evading homework and surfing the net, I came across a name that actually changed my perception of Japanese culture: Matsuo Basho.

Again, with a terrifying honesty I dare to confess that I thought “great.. another never-able-to-remember Japanese name” but there was something written underneath, 17 syllables of text:

古池や

蛙飛び込む

水の音

furu ike ya

kawazu tobikomu

mizu no oto

(an ancient pond, a frog jumps in, the splash of water)

I couldn’t help but imagine the precise moment that fat, ugly and slimy frog hit the water and the splashing sound it made. I couldn’t help but chuckle. But then, I noticed the kanji were not that difficult and copied them (as I’m still learning japanese, I need a LOT of help learning the kanji, you know, a love/hate relationship with the little evasive rascals) anyway, that day, I started to look at Haiku with a different perspective.

You start surfing the Internet with just one site, then the links get you to another, and another and yet another completely different site; in this way I stumbled on more and more of the history of Haiku itself. The samurai, before they knew they were going to die would write some sort of “epitaph”. Buddhists monks accustomed to another much more complicated Japanese poetry style called “Tanka” also adopted the Haiku as a farewell to this mortal life.

However, I was still wondering.. “What is a haiku?”, our friend the Internet defined it as: “an epigrammatic Japanese verse form of three short lines” but I didn’t get anything by that definition. So I suggest this definition to you: Haiku, is the pure heart and soul of Japanese culture.

It took me like several minutes to figure that out, it was amazingly simple yet involved so many things. Matsuo Basho’s haiku about the frog wasn’t about a frog at all, it was about an instant in eternity, when the ancient, silent, still and tranquil pond became disrupted by the impulse of the frog to leap in … then everything returned to how it was before, since there’s no follow up to the haiku (as far as I know).

For me, haiku takes you to the instant the author is describing. It is a shard of reality embedded in print, eternity in a millisecond, Japanese culture at is peak.

Then, my life continued and I had to prepare a 3,000 word essay for the next day, and yet I understood that I had an eternity to do it. My life changed and I still read and write haiku; describing a single moment that will now last forever.

I recommend that if you really want to get to know what Japan really is at its heart you should get into Haiku.

http://www.ivoox.com/podcast-sol-azteca-naciente-san_sq_f1603_1.html