The Place For My Writers Notes

Original posting 20 April 2009

I can think of three reasons why Japanese favors haiku, tanka, and other counted forms.

The first is... well, when I was first studying Japanese, my teacher recommended that I spend some time practicing speaking Japanese with a metronome. A good Japanese speaking style is for every syllable to be the same length -- the go-ju-on, or fifty phonemes, should theoretically each be pronounced and take one unit of time. English slows down and speeds up, Japanese shouldn't. There are certain words where this becomes very important, as the difference between them consists of a vowel with one unit of time and the same vowel with two units of time. Hospital and beauty parlor is one of those pairs of words that foreigners like me stumble over because the difference is simply how long you pronounce the vowel.

Incidentally, that same teacher recommended and showed me that Japanese can be spoken with a pencil between your teeth. Again, good Japanese speaking style is monotone, lacking the stress that English uses for accents.

This makes counting syllables much more reasonable.

The second reason relates to sentence structure. Japanese is usually considered to be SOV -- subject, object, verb. English is SVO. But even that is deceptive, because English depends on position much more than Japanese does. Japanese uses tags to identify what a word is doing in the sentence, and you can mix up the order of the words more easily. Although final verb is almost always final. The subject or topic is often dropped as implicit, and the other words making up the sentence are tagged to identify what they are. But most sentences end with a verb. And the verbs are very regular -- with tail endings that indicate past, present, future, etc. And those endings are regular. So if someone is writing in past tense, all of the verbs will end with the same ending. Whoops -- rhyming doesn't make a whole lot of sense if most of the words have the same sounds?

So -- counting syllables is easy when each phoneme should take one unit of time, and rhyming isn't a very good tool when most sentences automatically end with the same sounds.

Third is much more speculative. I mentioned you could omit the subject or topic. In fact Japanese conversation often drops lots of pieces. That paring of the sentence down to an essential core -- often just a verb, or a noun and a verb -- is very good style for Japanese. I think this makes counted forms more reasonable. Instead of working with the melody of the language, speeding up and slowing down, with stressed and unstressed syllables, Japanese conversation drops words into a counted matrix.

Kind of like feeding the koi in a pond, watching the ripples bounce away from their greedy little mouths.

I hope some of that makes sense. Yes, I think haiku and tanka are probably easier and somewhat more suited to Japanese. At the same time, it's a lot of fun trying to transplant these forms and see what happens.