False Optics: Keiko’s Haiku Rules (Part One)

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False Optics: Keiko's Haiku Rules (Part One)

In the mid-1990s Keiko Imako wrote an essay that has been influencing haiku written in English since. It is the document that informs the style of haiku that you'll find in any mainstream haiku publication either in print or on-line.Imaoka is a surprising candidate for being the intellectual leader of haiku in the west. She tells us that she had to learn Japanese literature in school, begrudgingly so, to borrow her own phrase, and since traditional Japanese were verse forms seemed boring and irrelevant she could never imagine herself ever writing in them.

 Her interest in haiku started after she came to America where she found that "There was no specialized vocabulary, no archaic grammar to contented with in English haiku; just simple and plain language that even grade-school kids could understand." So, how does someone with minimal training in Japanese haiku become the voice of how it should be written in the English language?

She did it by comparing the abilities of both languages and arguing that Japanese is a much more grammatically flexible than the English language because it's grammatical particles make it possible to for word units to be rearranged in many ways "without altering its core message." This "remarkable malleability and redundancy of the Japanese language…allows for a multiple of options in expressing a single thought. In languages such as English and its relatives whose grammar are heavily dependent on word order, haiku must and will take a much different form from that in Japanese.”

This "remarkable malleability" stands in contrast to the English language which "owes much of its grammatical simplicity to the fact that the word order plays a major role in determining the relationships between words and phrases (subject, object, etc.). In such a language, words and phrases cannot be moved about freely without changing the meaning of a sentence.”

The reason why the Japanese language has this malleability is "because of grammatical particles (joshi) that are suffixed to nouns and mark their syntactic relationships, word units become independent and can be moved about more freely without altering it's core message." 

Ok, but doesn't the English language have things that attach "to nouns and mark their syntactic relationships" too? We call them articles though, and we what we call particles can not only relate to nouns but with verbs as well. And we also have pronouns that mark relationships. These are part and parcel of our grammatical structure, so how does having particles (joshi) make Japanese more malleable than English?

Imaoka gives this statement sentence as an example, "Mother gave it to the kitten" and states that these "words cannot be rearranged without altering the meaning," and follows up by giving six examples of how you can do that with this sentence when it is in Japanese.  But, isn't the idea that in English this sentence can't be rearranged a bit preposterous?

Mother gave it to the kitten.
Mother, to the kitten, gave it.
To the kitten, mother gave it.

The core meaning hasn't been changed at all. We can change things around because the particle, the article and the pronoun in this sentence mark out relationships that make units which can be moved, the exact same thing that Imaoka tells us that the Japanese particles do.

As for the number of ways you can change this sentence, the English language has more articles than the Japanese so if you replace "the" with an "a" in the above you' ve now reached six ways of stating the sentence. "It" is a pronoun that can be changed because the Japanese word of "sore" (it) which Imaoka used can also be translated as the pronoun of "that," so between using the two articles and two pronouns it's now up to at least twelve ways of rearranging and maybe more because using "that" means they are more ways to rearrange the grammar than there is with "it”. 

I came to Japan in late 1990, which is in the same time frame as when Imaoka wrote this article, and it was weird the way the learned class over here saw the English language. They all had studied it from junior high school through university, in same cases still after, and for some reason that gave them the confidence that they understood English as well as they understood their own native language. The general consensus was that English wasn't as sublime as the Japanese language, which is what Imaoka is really telling you when in the article she writes "more flexible", "grammatical simplicity", "more freedom", "further flexibility", and "a multitude of options in expressing a single thought.”

At first, back then I would bristle at some of that inane comments about the English language that were made by some Japanese interested in English, but in time I just started laughing at the farcical nature of it. It is very presumptuous for a speaker of a second language to instruct a native speaker about the grammatical structure of their birth language.

Of course, this was over thirty years ago and Japanese ideas about how their language is more tactful than English have disappeared and the acknowledgment that English is as sublime as their own language is widely accepted now, but this article, which still has relevancy to how haiku is perceived and written, was written back in time when there were certain attitudes that colored Japanese people's minds about the English language. The only way to react to the statement by Imaoka of "the available options in English would be "Mother gave it to the kitten yesterday," and "Yesterday, mother gave it to the kitten," is to understand it as being nothing more than a rudimentary understanding of English grammar.

The Japanese school system spends a lot time drilling formal English grammar into the students because the verb in Japanese is always at the end of the sentence, making English, where the verb is in the middle, a difficult language for the Japanese to learn. Imaoka writing that English is "heavily dependent on word order" is a symptom of this. 

Having a strict "word order" makes it easier for her understand our language but native English speakers don't need as much "ordering" as she does and can and do break the rules to speak intelligently and convey meaning to others. Colloquial language and poetic license are a huge part of the way we converse and create expression with a multiplicity of meanings, things which Imaoka was limited in using. 

Plus, Japanese speakers have a lot of trouble with intonation, which is how a native speaker expresses emotion into words, a thing that is naturally brought out when we invert grammar, which is the "multitude of options in expressing a single thought" that Imaoka states as our language intrinsically lacking in comparison to her own native tongue.

She also told us that "17 English syllables convey a deal more information than 17 Japanese syllables," a statement which will be examined in another essay. But, the point of this first essay should be clear enough: Keiko Imaoka didn't understand English grammar well enough to write authoritatively about it.