Waka

Wandering through new-to-me fields can sometimes yield such interesting and unexpected things. The world of Nara and Heian Japanese poetry is both familiar and alien, so different from medieval Japan and yet speaking to such perennial human yearnings.

Partly this is because of the very different social norms for romance, which occasioned poetic chronicling of so-familiar suffering and desire. Relationships between men and women were invariably intermediated by a series of poetic letters. Women lived in their father's house before and after marriage, and the conventions leading to marriage began with a matchmaker, who informed the man (or his family) of suitable prospects. He then wrote the woman a poetic letter (a tanka), to which she answered with a reply tanka letter. If her calligraphy and poetics were sufficiently adroit, he might continue the exchange of poems. The marriage itself began with the man sneaking into the woman's room at night (probably an open secret). After their first night together, the man sent his lover a morning-after letter (後朝の文 kinuginu no fumi), conventionally expressing such things as dismay at the rooster's crowing. The woman's family celebrates this letter, and she composes another reply. He "sneaks" into her room again on the second night, but upon sneaking in on the third night, the family presents sacred rice cakes to the couple. Following the acceptance of the rice cakes, the couple is married, and the man can go openly to visit the woman. Afterwards, there is a feast to celebrate the event, featuring purification rituals such as the threefold drinking of sake (which itself later became the focus of the marriage ritual, rather than the presentation of rice cakes).

Nara- and Heian-period sexual mores were a very different balance of restriction and openness from contemporary society. One poem in the Man'yōshū by the Emperor Jomei possibly references a spring ritual in which people would gather fresh greens before an orgy. Takahashi no Mushimaro similarly memorialized ascending Mount Tsukuba (now a major scientific research center and near where I used to live in Japan) on the day of a kagai, in which men and women exchange amorous poems before sex:

washi no sumu
Tsukuba no yama no
Mohakitsu no
sono tsu no ue ni
adomoite
odome otoko no
yukitsudoi
kagau kagai ni
hitozuma ni
wa mo majirawan
wa ga tsuma ni
hito mo kototoe

On Mount Tsukuba
where eagles dwell,
By the founts
of Mohakitsu,
Maidens and men,
in troops assembling,
Hold a kagai, vying in poetry;
I will seek company
With others' wives,
Let others woo my own... (97)

It was an interesting period in which the synthesis of Chinese and indigenous Japanese elements of literary culture was still fresh. Plum blossoms, representing the scholar in Chinese literary tradition, had not yet been supplanted by the cherry blossom in the Man'yōshū poems of Ōtomo no Tabito:

nokoritaru
yuki ni majieru
ume no hana
hayaku na chiri so
yuki wa kenu tomo

Plum blossoms
Lingering in the boughs
Amidst the snow—
Do not fall too quickly.
Even if the snow melts away. (135)

One of my favorites from the late Heian era, however, is Izumi Shikibu (970-1030 CE). Women writers were central in the early development of a distinctively Japanese literary tradition, because the social context required literary writing as a a basic means of courtly and romantic interaction. Aristocratic women may have been cloistered in tedium at home, restricted by courtly marriage politics, or made insecure by polygamy, but they were not yet so constrained by patriarchal norms: women could inherit and keep property and conceivably live independently. Shikibu's poetry, written at age 16 or 17, appeared first in the Shuuishuu (compiled about 1005 CE).

kuraki yori
kuraki michi no zo
irinubeki
haruka ni terase
yama no ha no tsuki

Coming from darkness
I shall enter on a path
Of greater darkness
Shine on me from the distance,
Moon at the edge of the mount. (288)

The moon is a common Buddhist metaphor for enlightenment. Japanese esoteric Buddhist monk Kūkai, for example, (quoting the Aspiration to Enlightenment attributed to Nāgārjuna) instructed “...each devotee [to] visualize in his inner mind the bright moon. By means of this practice each devotee will perceive his original Mind, which is serene and pure like the full moon whose rays pervade space without any discrimination” (Kūkai, 218-219).

Shikibu's poems often feature such Buddhist themes. For example, after she was forsaken by her lover Prince Atsumichi, she composed this "...about the same time, when I was thinking of becoming a nun" (collected in the Goshuuishuu of 1086 CE):

sutehaten to
omou sae koso
kanashikere
kimi ni narenishi
wa ga mi to omoeba

I feel so wretched
I am ready even to
Abandon the world—
When I think that I was once
Intimate with such a man! (297)

Perhaps most evocative is Shikibu's reflection on the transience of life and passion.

hito no mi mo
koi ni wa kaetsu
natsu mushi no
arawa ni moyu to
mienu bakari zo

For love I am ready
To change even my human shape;
All that distinguishes
Me from the summer insects
Is that my flame is hidden. (296-297)

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All selections are from Keene unless otherwise noted.

Keene, Donald. Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1993.

Kūkai. Kūkai: Major Works. Trans. Yoshito S. Hakeda. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971.

Morris, Ivan. The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan. 1964. Middlesex, England: Peregine Books, 1985. 199-227.

Nara period politics

The Asuka and Nara periods form one of the most dynamic and interesting eras of Japanese history, even if it is far more obscure than medieval Japan. Unlike the cloistered and largely ceremonial office of later eras, the Asuka- and Nara-period imperial court was the center of turbulent and violent royal politics.

The Nara period, for example, is when Japanese began to develop a written language, impelled by the imperial court's project of rapid modernization to counteract continental threats (following the rise of the Tang dynasty in China in 618 and especially following the Tang conquest of Paekche in 660). This effort culminated in the Taika Reform of 645 to 646, which implemented systems of land tenure, provincial government, and taxation along Chinese models. Waves of immigrants from Paekche also probably contributed to Japanese efforts to make their literary culture “civilized” in Chinese eyes (Keene, 86).

During this era, Japan had a significant tradition of female rulers, and gender politics that were rather different from the later Confucian-influenced patriarchal aristocratic norms of samurai-era Japan.

One of the most interesting stories from this period is the case of the sixth and last female emperor of early Japan, known as Empress Kōken when she reigned from 749 to 758 and Empress Shōtoku when she reigned from 765 until her death in 770. Kōken survived a conspiracy to depose her in 757, then abdicated in 758 in favor of Emperor Junnin. In 761, she encountered the Buddhist monk Dōkyō, who gained her affection. Following a conflict in which she deposed Junnin's prime minister, Fujiawara no Nakamaro, she re-assumed the throne in 765. Following the suppression of his rebellion, she sponsored the Hyakumantō Darani, an enormous production of woodblock-printed Buddhist texts and the first known use of the printing technique in Japan.

Over the next five years of her reign, Dōkyō, rumored to be the Empress's lover, became the leading figure in the court bureaucracy and became controversially involved in the imperial succession. In 769, an oracle from the shrine of the kami Hachiman in Kyūshū reportedly prophesied peace would come if Dōkyō were proclaimed emperor. An official sent to confirm this prophecy returned with an oracle instead reaffirming succession via the imperial lineage and advocating sweeping away "wicked persons". The Empress died the next year, and Dōkyō was banished from court, dying three years later while serving a humble post at a temple in Shimotsuke. Although early Japan had had a number of female emperors, Shōtoku would be the last female emperor for nearly a thousand years, until the ascension of the child Empress Meishō in 1629. Only 14 years after her death, Emperor Kammu moved the imperial palace away from Nara (a move which has been attributed at least partially to a desire to lessen the influence of the Buddhist institutions at the Nara capital) and initiated the Heian era with the move of the palace to Kyōto in 794.

---

Bender, Ross. "The Hachiman Cult and the Dokyo Incident." Monumenta Nipponica. 34.2 (1979): 125-153. Print. .

Keene, Donald. Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1993.

Seeley, Christopher. A History of Writing in Japan. Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1991.

My new project to learn the kanji

So, I've been using SRS with Anki to study languages since late 2009, almost three years. Mostly with Japanese, but French and other languages as well. It's been interesting.

I got suckered into the sentence-mining AJATT championed then, but apparently that site has abandoned that method in favor of something called "MCDs" or whatever. Sentence mining is interesting, but it's fairly labor-intensive to make new cards, which tends to lead to wide variation in study times. I think it's helped some with my particle use, but it's too hard for the reward I get.

I suspect that the best way to use Anki is to focus exclusively on reading comprehension, whether it's comprehension of the kanji or vocab more generally. Furthermore, I think it's best to use Anki to build on existing body of knowledge, rather than begin by introducing a whole new body of knowledge. And to introduce things slowly, rather than blasting through dozens of new flashcards a day.

So August 1, I started a new project to simply recognize individual kanji with basic definitions and meanings (in Japanese, not Heisig's method). I'll work up a deck and simply introduce 3 new kanji every day, including the 300-400 I already know. If I do three a day for a year, I'd be able to recognize 1000 or so by the end of next summer.

Rather than using the order of the kyōiku kanji, in which Japanese children learn them, or by levels on the JLPT, I'm crafting a more idiosyncratic order: first, all kanji by stroke count, up to six strokes; then, the rest of the kanji used as radicals (which can have up to 13 strokes). After that, it's either more kanji by stroke count or instead kanji by frequency of use. The Japanese Wikipedia Kanji Frequency List, discussed further in this thread, is a fascinating resource: 173 kanji make up 50% all kanji in Wikipedia, 454 kanji cover 75% of all kanji, and 874 kanji cover 90%. Here's a list of the 2,500 most common kanji in Japanese newspapers, used by jisho.org.

I've wanted to put together a learner's semantic dictionary of kanji compounds, which gives examples of kanji compound words in each entry that contain only kanji prviously introduced. But that's a huge amount of work, a years-long project, and I'd never get started if I waited to do that. =/

SRS after three weeks

So, three weeks in, and I still think this SRS stuff is pretty cool. Even though I started reviewing even the most basic Japanese, I've polished up a recollection of Japanese postpositions of motion that I hadn't realized had gotten so weak. Starting with Japanese vocab and sentences that are relatively easy, as well as stuff that needed review, studying the flashcards has been fun.

It's fairly easy to make flashcards that review front and back, so that (for example) you're testing your understanding of the phrase from Japanese to English and from English to Japanese. Creating the cards to do this is a little different from the introductory instructional screencast video, possibly because Anki is frequently updated. I'm using Anki 0.9.9.8.5 with the Japanese plugin. To create forward and reverse cards in the Basic model, choose "Cards: Forward, Reverse" before you create in the cards. In the Japanese model, make sure it's set to "Recognition, Recall".

My strategy is essentially based on sentence mining, studying grammar and vocabulary in full sentences (even if it is something as basic as "This is a chair"/"Iste es un sedia"/"これはいすです"), and say the phrase on each card aloud in the target language before I check and score it. For Interlingua, I've created Forward and Reverse cards focusing on vocab and sentences from "Curso de interlingua pro comenciantes anglophone"; I've gotten through the first four lessons in three weeks at the default settings (20 new cards a day). For Japanese, I've created Recognition and Recall cards for model sentences and vocab from "しんにほんごのきそ I" and "漢字マスター, Vol. 1: 4級漢字100, 100 Kanji in 10 Days, The Easy Way". In three weeks, I've gotten through two lessons of each book. At this rate, I'll finish the Interlingua text in about four weeks, the kanji text in 12 weeks, and the Japanese grammar book over a period of several more months.

The workload is pretty managable. As long as I study every day, reviewing the flashcards doesn't take more than about ten to 15 minutes. Making cards does take some time, but spending an hour or two once a week usually creates enough cards for the rest of the week. I'm working on two decks, which means I'm spending twice as much time reviewing cards.

So, for example, on December 1, I spent 13 minutes reviewing 86 cards, which was pretty typical. Then I spent a few days away from the computer, so when I came back on December 5, I had to spend 38 minutes reviewing 243 cards (with some modest distractions). On December 6, I spent 9 minutes reviewing 60 cards; on December 7, I spent 14 minutes reviewing 90 cards; and today I spent 5 minutes reviewing 39 cards, because I had run out of new cards.

I can see the need, apart from SRS, to create a language-immersion environment for yourself. This method doesn't teach you to think in the target language, or teach fluency or creativity. However, I always found memorization through flashcards to be rather a chore; this is more like a game. And making memorization of vocab relatively fun is both remarkable and useful.

Spaced Repetition Systems

One of my friends is a big fan of the kanji-learning method of James W. Heisig, in which you first memorize the meanings of all the characters, and then later go back and attempt to learn their readings. I'm pretty skeptical of this system of learning to read Japanese, for many of the reasons discussed by Nihongo PeraPera. It may be that those of us who first learned a few hundred kanji are a little more dubious of this strange method, and ascribe success students may have with it to enthusiasm and diligence.

But it has become popular on the Internet. Many people use it with specialized flashcard software, known as spaced repetition systems or SRS ( 1, 2, 3, 4 ). This is a component of the method of study championed by AJATT ( 1, 2 ) and others.

After reading about it on Omniglot the other day, I've been re-evaluating SRS. I've always read about is as part of learning the kanji Heisig's way. But it seems like a feasible way to memorize things, regardless of what you're trying to memorize.

There are a couple of open-source programs for SRS: Anki and Mnemosyne are the most notable ( 1, 2, 3 ). SuperMemo is Windows-only and reportedly very buggy, and my friend has used both smart.fm and Anki. I think I'd prefer to use Mnemosyne, but the latest client only runs on the Intel Macs. On first use, making a deck of flashcards is easy, but using it to organize a system of self-study is somewhat more complex and non-intuitive.

Rather than the Heisig method, I suspect sentence mining, perhaps something like Kanji in Context after starting with my trusty old "しんにほんごのきそ". I may try it with Interlingua or such first, to figure out how best to organize a deck.

I also suspect that while relying on flash cards may be an effective means of improving reading comprehension, it'd be a weaker method of developing fluency, listening comprehension, and other aspects of language proficiency. Of course with Japanese, where this method is most commonly used, vocabulary, literacy, and reading comprehension are very serious barriers to proficiency.

Sumo

I gained an appreciation for sumo when I lived in Japan, but I've never been able to keep up with that sport since I moved back to the US. It's a strange sport: fast, ritualistic, confrontational, and absurdly athletic. The prepatory purification rituals are as much a part of the aesthetic appeal of the bout itself, and some of the kimarite (決まり手) can be amazing.

I attended a basho in Tokyo about 10 years ago, but for the most part, the way to watch it is the daily recap on NHK. Hopefully, once the next basho starts, I'll be able to figure out a way to watch these online. Every time I've thought to check when the next basho will be, though it turns out that I just missed it, and have to wait another two months. As it turns out this time, the Nihon Sumo Kyokai says the Kyushu begins this weekend. & soon the Japan Times sumo section should have some info.

Winter certainly seems like the time for some chanko-nabe.

The Tengwar in English and Japanese (日本語のテングゥアのモード)

J.R.R. ト−ルキンの文字は美しいけど、英語はその字がちょっと複雑です。テングゥア（トールキンの字）で、英語より日本語は書きやすいよ。そして、これは”日本語のテングゥアのモード”です。上の図はいろは歌 です。中の図は用例です。下の図は五十音です。
このウェブサイトに、テングゥアについて英語で読める。

J.R.R. Tolkien's tengwar, used for writing his Elvish languages as well as English and other European languages, is truly a beautiful script: it is steeped in the calligraphic traditions of medieval European writing, elegantly and systematically represents most consonant sounds, has strong lines and a hypnotic, engaging repetition of basic shapes.

But, as a script, the tengwar causes me great frustration. Tolkien devised an extraordinarily elegant way of representing consonants, but he never really settled on a way of consistent or systematic way of representing vowels. There are full modes and tehta modes, all varying. Even the full modes barely have enough vowels for English, and the tehta modes are wholly inadequate. Furthermore, many fans of the scripts find phonemic English writing confusing, and so most people write in the so-called "orthographic" modes, which often write consonants phonemically and vowels according to their representation in the Latin alphabet.

Using the five vowels of the Latin alphabet to write the dozen-plus vowels of English is an ugly hack. Using the Latin vowels as written in English in an otherwise phonemic script is an ugly hack of an ugly hack.

Many people are intrigued by the idea of writing English in an abugida, and the tehta modes are probably as close as it's practical to come. But I find it pretty awkward. There are a two main problems with writing English this way: English has numerous consonant clusters, and English has too many vowels to use diacritics easily.

But it'd be great for Japanese! Japanese has a simple syllable structure, a simple vowel inventory, and is already written with a syllabary. So here is a Japanese mode for the tengwar.

For more information about the tengwar, consult the guides at Amanye Tenceli or Tolkien script publishing. These samples were created using the Code2000 font, which encodes the tengwar as in the ConScript Unicode Registry. The iroha is above, a a few sample sentences follow, and the tables of tengwar and kana are at the bottom.

These tengwar here generally follow rōmaji. The usage of súle for つ and anto for づ are unsystematic, but seemed like the best borrowing. The long vowel carrier is used in an unusual way; it is merely placed after a letter to show that the vowel is long. Note also the bottom bar used for palatized consonants, and I've offered no way to represent the sokuon っ.

このモードはロマ字みたい。本当は日本語を日本語の字で書くことがいいけど、テングゥアが面白い。





EDIT (July 26, 2009)
Significantly revised, so one can write with a sokuon. Use the doubler bar (underbar) to mark a consonant that would be proceeded by a sokuon.

今このモードで促音を書ける。

My experience with alternate orthographies

I think the first non-Latin alphabet I learned to read was Japanese, when I moved there back in 1998. I perused some Japanese in rōmaji books, but when confronted with having to get by in Japan, one of the first things I learned was the kana. It's certainly the most important thing to do if you want to learn a language—to learn the script that best represents its speech and grammar.

Learning the script takes a week or so. Learning the language is much harder, and takes some years and hundreds of hours of study.

When I left Japan, I could get by in ordinary conversations, read the kana, and understood about 300 of the 2,000 or so jōyō kanji.

Rather than flying home, I took a boat from Ōsaka to Shanghai and spent two months travelling around China third class. The Chinese ideographs are the lingua franca of East Asia, and although I could barely speak any Chinese, I was able to get around the country, reading maps and place names and train destinations, deciphering menus in a basic way. It wasn't my understanding of the Chinese language that helped me get around China, so much as my understanding of the script shared between the Chinese and Japanese languages.

• 東京 means "East Capital." In Japanese, it's pronounced "Tōkyō." You could pronounce it "Dongjing" in Mandarin.


• 北京 means "North Capital." In Mandarin, it's pronounced "Beijing." You could pronounce it "Hokkyō" in Japanese, although most people don't.


• 台北 means "Platform North." The capital of Taiwan is pronounced "Taibei" in Mandarin and was "Taihoku" under Japanese administration.


• 仙台 means "Wizard Platform." It's the Japanese city "Sendai."

I've been fascinated with Central Asia for some time: the steppe, the Altay Mountains, the Gobi Desert, to Siberia and the coldest places on Earth. I went to Tibet on my trip to China, and I'd like to traverse the Silk Road from Beijing, to Mongolia and Kazakhstan, and to Tehran and points south. One of the things I find so fascinating about this region is that the terrain is similar in many ways similar to the dramatic Western landscape of my childhood, the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, but has a completely different cultural history which has been recorded for hundreds and thousands of years.

Uyghur is a Turkic language spoken around the Tian Shan, the mountains of heaven, from Kashgar to Ürümqi. Over the centuries, it had been written in Old Turkish runes, a variant of the Sogdian alphabet derived from Aramaic, variants of the Perso-Arabian script, several variants of the Latin alphabet, and Cyrillic. The Old Uyghur alphabet was adapted by the Mongols during the time of Genghis Khan to write Mongolian, and Nurhaci adapted the Mongolian alphabet to Manchu before laying some of the groundwork for the Qing Empire; the Manchu alphabet is one of the world's loveliest scripts.

In other words, Uyghur has been written in most of the dominant scripts of Eurasia, and some original ones besides. I wondered: why shouldn't English be so diversely written? What would English look like if it were written in a truly phonemic orthography? What would it be like to write poetry in a script in which words that rhyme, like "mate" and "weight" were written in a way that looked similar?

I have been a fairly digitally-oriented person in this decade, but I came to be interested in the book as a physical object about a year and a half ago after reading about the surprisingly many tomes bound in human flesh.

In a thousand years, all our DVDs and hard drives will be as blank, meaningless stones. The historians of the future will look back for individual objects to interpret to corroborate what data survives, as they look back to the baked clay tiles the Sumerians scratched, the carved obelisks of Egypt, the ink-scrawled bamboo strips of wartorn China. No book can be more uniquely individual than one bound in the skin of a person, and such a precious work would deserve to be handwritten rather than blogged or printed on an inkjet.

So I got some calligraphy pens to see about writing insular miniscule, perhaps the most attractive script used to write English in the years before Charlemagne made it Europe's standard Latin script. I also set about learning to write in the Read alphabet.

It was interesting going at first, trying to re-discern the phonemes of my idiolect, using guidebooks keyed to Received Pronunciation and northeastern dialects. First I had to figure out that my basically Oklahoma dialect, mixing Western and Southern elements, had undergone all the vowel mergers one might guess, including "pin-pen," "Mary-marry-merry," and "cot-caught."

Writing it has become fairly easy, although most everything there is to read is stuff I wrote myself or things written by people with very different dialects. Except for copying back notes, I have little practical reason to read it, so writing is actually much easier than reading. I want to see what can be done scribing it with some proper calligraphy tools.

While Quikscript is an easy-to-write and attractive script, useful for many purposes, a truly phonemic script has some drawbacks. It's problematic to create a universal English dictionary when dialect and pronunciation varies so. And I wonder if there is a more appropriate way of representing English vowels.

日本語

日本語で書けるかな。。。

たぶん大丈夫な。