Some Tanka from February

Mar4

Blizzard 4
Maple tree under snow in my backyard, photo by myself

平成三十一年二月二十一日

A blanket of grey
The scent of snow in the air
Winter’s cold caress
My tears frozen to my face
I wonder why I’m crying

平成三十一年二月二十二日

Pain, past and present
Winter is not my season
Knife-sharp, the twisting
Of my body, of my mind
Warped into a silent knot

平成三十一年二月二十六日

My brush hesitates
Hovering over the page
Like a dragonfly
My words are soft and cloudy
As a midwinter’s morning

平成三十一年二月二十七日

How to speak of it
World weariness infusing
Each waking moment
No rhyme, reason, or excuse
The sleet falls unrelenting

Art-Streak Day One

Mar1

So I decided to start “100 Days of Arts and Sciences” because I have a lot to get done, especially regarding sewing since not much of my old wardrobe fits anymore. 100 days from today will land me on the first Sunday of Lilies War. Seems like I did a lot today but some of it was continued from earlier and I am also counting study/practice because any project I do has a lot of practice/experiments/humiliating failures as part of the process. And research, always research.

Anyway, today I

1. Finished taking those huge wool curtains apart. Washing comes next but I need to figure out how I want to do that. (Dryer? Air dry? Can I even use Wa Paste in a high efficiency washing machine?)

Wool curtain harvest 1

Wool Curtain harvest 2

100_days_as_1_wool

2. Cut out material for a sloper to experiment with my kosode pattern. This pattern is for summer wear, so unlined.

100_days_as_1_kosode_sloper

3. Got in some yojijukugo (4 kanji idiom) calligraphy practice with the medium brush. It’s a good way to work out space and balance, and easier to see your mistakes.

100_days_as_1_shodo

4. Continued my study of kanji radicals. Not technically shodo since I use a pen or pencil, but important for learning stroke order and proportion.

100_days_as_1_radical_study

5. Also practiced my recorder a bit but forgot to take a picture. But I do have an awesome new wooden soprano recorder to play with! But here’s a picture of me at music practice a few weeks ago, with my friend’s cat helping me out!

Me and Tux 1

Definitely will not be able to do this much every day but here’s to a good start!

Dat Hat

Jan14

So a question came up on the SCA-Japanese page about a certain print of the famous general, Uesugi Kenshin. Here is the picture posted:

Uesugi Kenshin by Kuniyoshi

This depiction is by the artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi, from the book “Stories of 100 Heroes of High Renown” published in 1843/1844. The question regarded the headwear that Kenshin was wearing. Was it some kind of zukin?

First off, probably not a zukin, as those are much more simple in design. There are a few options that occurred to me.

It could be a Kato-no-kesa, which I have written about previously here and here. As Kenshin was famed for being a devout Buddhist, it would not be unheard of for him to wear a kato-no-kesa into battle.

However, I looked around at other depictions of Kenshin. In some, it is obvious he IS wearing kato-no-kesa, such as this statue of him which stands on the site of the ruins of the former Kasugayama Castle.

uesugi_kenshin_kato_no_kesa Photographer unknown.

However, other pictures depict him wearing what is clearly a sunboshi 角帽子 “peaked hat”, like this statue that stands at the Uesugi Jinja Shrine in Yonezawa, Japan.

Uesugi kenshin.jpg
パブリック・ドメイン, Link

Several years ago, I stumbled upon a picture on Pixiv where an artist had drawn several varieties of mosu (which is simply another pronunciation of boshi 帽子, which just means “hat”, however, it is only utilized for Buddhist headwear–no written source for that fact, I learned that from a Japanese professor I was talking to at a convention. If you look at the Chinese pronunciation of that kanji, you can see how that term evolved). It’s really a remarkable drawing, showing these various Buddhist headdresses from several angles. I didn’t find the artist’s name, but I did manage to pin down the blog it originally came from (not where I found the image originally), which is here. Hasn’t been updated in a few years, though.

mosu_variations

Looks to me like Kenshin is wearing a variation of that. The peaked hat you see on the top row is sunboshi 角帽子 “peaked hat”, as mentioned above, but if you search in Japanese with that word, it LITERALLY MEANS peaked, so hats with horns or cat’s ears and such are also included in the term.

So it could be in Kuniyoshi’s depiction of Kenshin, he is either wearing some kind of mosu or it could be a sunboshi that was folded over and tied down. It’s hard to tell due to the stylization, but with the side-flaps in the picture, I’d lean towards maybe a sunboshi. OTOH, the way the headdress flares out seems more like kato-no-kesa to me.

So in conclusion, I’m not sure 100%. Kenshin probably wore both at one time or another. Although in this portrait from the Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art that was painted much closer to his lifetime, he was depicted with no headdress at all!

Uesugi Kenshin with Two Retainers (Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art).jpg
By Muromachi-period artist – http://www.suntory.co.jp/sma/jp/merumagakaiin/vol49/index.html, Public Domain, Link