The Wonders of Mount Fuji: Poem Number 4

This was something I read recently that I felt like posting:

Japanese	Romanization	Translation
田子の浦に	Tago no ura ni	As I set out on
うち出でて見れば	Uchi idete mireba	the beach of Tago, and look,
白たへえの	Shirotae no	I see the snow constantly falling
富士の高嶺に	Fuji no takane ni	on the high peak of Fuji,
雪は降りつつ	Yuki wa furitsutsu	white as mulberry cloth.

This poem was composed by Yamabe no Akahito (山部赤人, dates unknown ) who according to Mostow was a contemporary of Hitomaro (poem 3). He is also one of the Thirty Six Immortals of Poetry and was a leading poet during the reign of Emperor Shomu and contributed to the Manyoshu. He is revered alongside his contemporary, Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (poem 3) as a “saint of poetry”. Compared to Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, Yamabe is known for a poetry style focused on the beauty of nature such as this poem, rather than clever verse.

Yamabe, for his part, served as a court poet under the pious Emperor Shomu. Unfortunately there is no information about his life before he served in the Court. My new book points out that since he was never mentioned in the historical document the Shoku Nihongi, Yamabe was probably a low-ranking bureaucrat.

Mostow carefully explains that this poem, like many of the earlier poems in the Hyakunin Isshu were written in an old Japanese-Chinese hybrid script called manyōgana and was thus open to many interpretations. In fact, the poem has evolved over time and the version in the Hyakunin Isshu is only one such version. The version above, compiled by Fujiwara no Teika (poem 97), was in an imperial anthology called the Shin-Kokin Wakashu. But the original version, poem 318 in the Manyoshu, read like so:

Japanese	Romanization	Rough Translation1
田子の浦ゆ	Tago no ura yu	As I passed
うち出でて見れば	Uchi idete mireba	the bay of Tago, and looked,
ま白にそ	Mashiro ni so	I saw the white snow
富士の高嶺に	Fuji no takane ni	falling on the high peak
雪は降りける	Yuki wa furitsukeru	of Mount Fuji.

In this version, it sounds like Akahito is describing something more in the past, and the poem doesn’t use a pillow word (see below) to describe the snow. It uses the more mundane description of “very white”, not “white as mulberry cloth”.

The aforementioned vagaries of Manyogana script also matter because there’s much debate about where Akahito actually was when composing this poem. The location of Tago no Ura is now Suruga Bay in Shizuoka Prefecture, but originally may have meant some place much closer to Mount Fuji, under it’s “shadow”, so to speak.

One other interesting note for readers of this blog is the middle line, shirotae no, which as you may recall from poem 2 is one of those special “pillow words” used in Japanese poetry. It is a very idiomatic term which conveys something that is gleaming white, or as Professor Mostow translates, white as mulberry cloth. At some point in history, the third verse changed from a more mundane description of snow to a much more impactful description.

P.S. Featured photo is Mount Fuji as seen from Suruga Bay, photo by Shinichi Morita, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons