Fujiwara no Yoshitsune

This month's poet is one of the younger members of the group of one hundred; he died at the age of 38, in 1206. When I went through the translation of the long title that you see carved on this print, 'Gokyogoku no Sessho Saki no Daijo Daijin', I learned that it indicates that he was the highest adviser to the Emperor and a former Prime Minister. That of course makes me speculate about the idea of a thirty-eight year old person in this day and age reaching such positions. It hardly seems likely. It is very difficult to form an image of what the pace of life must have been like for people in that era. Although we generally have the belief that today's society is a very fast-paced one, and that 'back then' things moved a lot more slowly, when we look at it another way, it is their lives that must have been the ones that passed quickly. There were no 'teen' years, and people moved from childhood directly to 'young adulthood'. Prime Minister in one's early thirties, and then at thirty-eight ...

There is another interesting thing that strikes me - what do you think about the idea of a contemporary Prime Minister writing a poem like this one?

Is it because leaders these days are usually older men, that it seems so impossible to imagine one of them writing this? Or is it because our leaders are purely political leaders, and don't have any particular cultural influence? As a Westerner, of course I am thinking of leaders of countries in North America or Europe, and the idea of one of these people writing forlorn love poems is quite frankly ridiculous. But in Asian societies perhaps the idea of a political leader writing poetry seems quite natural. With such different expectations of what a 'leader' is, it seems hard to believe that international conferences and summits between countries can result in much real communication. Maybe instead of the Japanese Prime Minister going to Europe for annual economic summits, those leaders should come here for 'poetry summits' ...

And now to the print itself ... I suppose that some of you may be wondering just what this design depicts. What is that object over which our poet is leaning? Of course when I began carving I didn't know, but upon asking for advice, found that the answers fell into two camps. The first group thought that the object is a kind of 'hibachi', the charcoal warming device that has been used in winter since ancient times in Japan. But nobody had heard of a hibachi having holes in the sides, or the kind of lid we see here ... The second group thought that rather than charcoal, it contains slivers of burning wood - and he is a connoisseur of 'kohdo', the art of scent, enjoying the fragrance that seeps from the openings ... A further confusing point is the season - the poem reflects a late autumn mood ... a hibachi would signify winter ... but surely those blossoms and buds that we see on the side of the container represent spring! It is all quite confusing ...

If you have any thoughts on this, I would like to hear from you. Maybe I should ask the Prime Minister ...

September 1996

Translation by Clay MacCauley (in 1899 already the second English edition of Hyaku-nin Isshu in print.)