Japan Haiku poets hit

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.

Almost four centuries later, Bashō’s words continue to inspire admiration and countless amateur exponents of the 17-syllable form, 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 promenade are intended to evoke the cooler climes of autumn, but this year they feel off kilter.

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.

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. 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.

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. The country has experienced a series of unusually strong typhoons in recent years. 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. 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 widely acknowledged as acceptable for inclusion in haiku. A kigo could refer to a particular plant or animal, the weather, seasonal festivals, the sky or the heavens. When read at a corresponding time of the year, it is supposed to stir emotions in the reader.

‘The risk is that we will lose the central role of the four seasons in composing haiku’

David McMurray Haiku poet

“With kigo, you’re compressing three or four months into a single word,” said 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 the arrival of typhoons in the summer instead of the autumn are two notable examples of seasonal dissonance.

“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,” McMurray said.

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.”

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.

“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

“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,” Fitzsimons said. “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.”