Creation of Classical Haiku and Painting Site for Web-based Learning

　 Recent development of information technologies has brought us new possibilities for teaching and learning classical art and humanities in several different ways. Image plays a key role here. In learning classical Japanese poetry, it is quite important to examine original books and manuscripts because even the published books were printed from the wood blocks of engraved words which were written with brush by, in many cases, the authors themselves. Not only the visual art works, but also the literary materials as such pose the problem of authenticity, and this problem itself is closely linked to the interpretation of the literary works and the life history of the authors. Yosa Buson (1716-84), a poet-painter, and his followers best represent this type of artists and must be studied with both texts and images they created.

Buson was a leading haiku poet of the 18th century and, with Basho and Issa, one of the great names in haiku. He was also a distinguished BUNJINGA (literati-style) painter, and perfected haiga or cursive sketch with poems as a branch of Japanese pictorial art. Buson read classics extensively and studied different styles of Chinese and Japanese paintings. Poetry and painting affected each other in his art. His poems were, diversely enough, rich in imagery, clearly depicting fine movements and sensual appearances of things, dynamic with wider landscapes, lyrical, sensitive to human affairs, romantic with hidden stories, graceful, and longingly time-conscious. Buson completed his own style of painting in his later years when he was using the name of Sha-In. Freed from the influence of China, he created genuine Japanese landscapes.

Creation of the Site

The web site for the study of Buson and his group has thus been created at http://www.nime.ac.jp/~saga/buson.html. This site has three major areas: articles on Buson, bibliographic resources on Buson, and pictorial catalogue of haiku and painting works of Buson and his group. Pages are hyper-linked within the site and some pages contain links to other related web sites. Most pages are written in both Japanese and English to attract the learners internationally. The first area contains the author's original papers and essays such as "Poetry as an open space for lightening of Being". To quote only a few paragraphs from there;

In the light of Heidegger's thinking, Buson's poems emerge as 'poems of being' more than anything else. Of course Buson lived far earlier than Heidegger, and clearly there was no direct correspondence between them. However, beyond this distance what weighs on my mind is, for example, such a Hokku poem of peony as below. This poem is usually viewed as staged on a peony garden, but I look at it as an event inside a room.

Within the quietness of a lull in visitors' absence, appears the peony flower!
(seki to shite kyaku no taema no botan kana)

Possibly after a Haiku meeting, or it seems it could have been any person(s), the poet saw the visitor(s) off and returned to the room. He then looked at the corner, and saw the peony, which has been there for some time, as appearing again, floating in a lull, as though it were transformed to that peony as itself. While residual scents of the visitors in the room are silently disappearing, it is calm, not too light nor dark, and the peony is there lighted on its face by that surrounding air. The poet stands there, veiled in ennui, where he feels both bliss and lament, with that time perceived as a long instant. Even if it is an instant, a time of 'unworldliness' is disclosed there, as a poet himself or for a man as a Heideggerian Da-sein, to be almost continual to eternity.

Access and Evaluation
Two years after starting its creation, this site now receives more and more accesses from both Japan and abroad. In May 2000, for example, there were, in average, about 350 hits for the site per day, 45 different individual accesses to the English top page, and 17 different accesses to the Japanese top page. Some people leave notes in the guest book, and some other people prefer to send e-mails to the site author. These notes and mails are analyzed in terms of contents, interests, and gratification. Formative evaluation of the site is now conducted with college students. This site, when it is fully developed, is to be converted into a CD-ROM with upgraded still and moving images.

作者：Background