A Wolf Shrine

I've been doing more reading on Japanese Wolves.

It seems they were opportunistic predators sometimes preying on humans and their horses and yet sometimes tolerating human presence. There's a belief that at least one Japanese dog breed is part Wolf and reported sightings of this officially extinct species are probably of feral dogs with wolf genes.

The stories vary from place to place however in one special place nearly lost there is a whole shrine ceiling covered with paintings of wolves.

The Yamatsumi shrine up in Fukushima was damaged by a fire a few years back but fortunately someone had photographed the ceiling art and and a group of scholars and painters got together to restore the paintings when the shrine was rebuilt.

The wolf lives on in spirit and art !

Fox or Wolf ?

#ukiyo-e #japanesewolf #wolf #fox #japaneseprint

This is one of the #Yoshitoshi print sereis called 100 Aspects of the Moon in English.

I have often see the animal in this print identified as a fox however recently I have discovered it is not a gray fox but the probably extinct Japanese Wolf. Yoshitoshi was probably working of a fur or older pictures and had never seen a live wolf. Also Japanese wolves regardless of what you see in a certain #miyazaki film seem to have been rather small and slender and shy canids. They rarely seem to have attacked humans in Japan but tradition suggests they might follow humans walking by night and they were often thought of as protective spirits possibly because like foxes they might prey on herbivores that damaged crops.

This print suggests hostile intentions but given its a Heian aristo may simply be a legend based on some overtly sensitive poet encountering wolves courting and howling at the moon.

Here's a statute of a wolf at one of the last remaining shrines where they are honored as guardian spirits and servants of Oguchinomakami .

It looks like a modern copy of an older work to me.

There are said to be 20 wolf god SHINTO shrines but I've only found info about a copy of them.
I'll share more of what scraps I've found in the next post!

The Foxes' Wedding

THE FOXES WEDDING

In #Japanese #Folklore strange lights seen at night were often attributed a cause of being #foxes having a procession to a #SHINTO shrine for a wedding.

I've tried to find some lesser known pieces of art showing this.

#lacquer #inro with the foxes shown in the costume of samurai retainers

note the use of the white robes and mist to make thing spookier !

Another lacquer piece I just found this morning!

FOX TECHNOZI

Next Sequence for the Year of the Dog  #FOXES #FOX

Starting with this revised #technozi #hanzi #kanji #hanja #unihan

An FULL COLOR Reward will be posted on my  Patreon based on this character !

Hiragana and Cursive some observations

YES #Hiragana is derived from cursive forms of #Hanzi and #Kanji !

okay yes I borrowed this from Wikipedia but many thanks to the creators of the diagram and the comments are all mine!

Now remember that Japanese is not Sinitic. Most words are polysyllabic and verbs .... well Japanese verbs especially in literary forms tend to be L O O O N G.

When the Japanese borrowed Chinese characters Chinese writing had already developed several ways to write down characters, small seal script, clerical script , running script, and other variants. however Chinese lacked a method for for indicating tones or dialectal variations of pronounciation.

The Japanese scholars who visited China often wee also studying Buddhism and were aware that Sanskrit was written with characters that rendered syllables, a knowledge of which was very important in Tantric Buddhist rituals for  the Tendai and Shingon sects and for Sutra reciting generally.

Plus along writing poetry in Chinese lots of people were creating poetry in Japanese.

Teaching everyone Sanskrit would not have been a good solution.

They needed a script form that could help people learn Chinese characters, was easy to write with a brush, and had as few signs as possible to learn and remember.

Now scroll back up to that chart.

They're all quite common words and they can be written with usually just one continuous brush stroke in the cursive form of the hanzi/kanji and likewise in HIRAGANA!

One wonders what would have happened if some unorthodox Chinese scholar had seen a visiting Japanese student adding notes in kana as he copied a text and had the idea of using kana to record his personal dialect or some non Sinitic minority language like Mongol or one of the frontier turkic languages? 

UMEMI

While #sakurami #cherryblossom viewing is a well known cultural event it is not the only form of #hanami Flower viewing .. there's also #Umemi plum blossom viewing as depicted in this print set by #kunisada Note the brighter pinks blues and purples introduced in the 19th  century !

I'm lonely and it's autumn

I'M LONELY AND IT'S AUTUMN

An irreverent look at themes in the #HyakuNinIsshu
#waka #autumn #japanesepoetry #heianpoetry

The#Hyaku-Nin-Isshu anthologyof 100 #Heian poets includes many of the major and popular subjects and themes that appear in that era's poetry.

Here's a tally of certain themes

I'm very clever at with word play and double meanings 15X

OH the Moon the moon preferably rising over mountains 10X

Perhaps because even the most poetry obsessed Courtier had gotten fed up with them the two common themes of
Yet another pun on oosaka and ausaka barrier and Naniwa beach and bamboo nodes
curiously only appear twice

Maple leaves make early autumn tolerable and an excuse for a picnic 6X

My sleeve is wet with rain or tears
will someone please invent the umbrella and tissues  4x

OH the white on the whiteness!
UNseasonal snow or frost  contrasting with something matte white or dark 5X

WAH I'm all alone expect for my house boy and the other servants and the peasants down the bottom of the hill from my "hut" or my actual country house with spring and garden. 18X

Pathetic annoying animal and bird noises ... bloody rutting stags etc 3X

Late Autumn is cold windy and dreary especially at dusk and I am very sad 9X

I like Japanese poetry but sometimes its easy to see why the Japanese of the Tokugawa era developed Haiku!?