A Report on the 2005 WHA Meeting in Japan


Keiji MINATO
WHA Member
　
The first annual meeting of the members in Japan of the World Haiku Association (WHA) was held at Caf　Renoir in Shinjuku, Tokyo on April 30, 2005. More than a half of its members in Japan attended to celebrate the occasion, marking an important step forward in promoting haiku as a world-important poetic form. The gathering prompted the participants to share their ideas about haiku and the direction world haiku should take. Those in attendance were Bin Akio, Mariko Ichi'i, Togen Ui, Yoshiko Umezu, Hiro Omote, Izumi Kaneko, Sayumi Kamakura, Toshie Kawaguchi, Tatsunori Koizumi, Toshiko Kobayashi, Kihakuso Sato, Fumiko Sato, Kuniharu Shimizu, Akie Suehiro, Chi　Takamiya, Emi Takeuchi, Toshihiko Tarutani, Yuko Tange, Ritsuko Nakao, Takeo Nakamura, Ban'ya Natsuishi, Shinji Noya, Yuyaka Hasegawa, Keiji Minato, Mutsuko Miyake, Wakou Miyake, Rumiko Morofuji, Masako Yasuda, Fumiko Yamazaki, Mika Watanabe and David Burleigh.
　

The meeting began with WHA founding member and its current director Ban'ya Natsuishi's welcoming the members attending. He then explained how the association originated, commenting on some twists and turns it had undergone to reach its position today. Natsuishi emphasized that WHA aimed at close international exchanges of opinions about haiku, which would benefit both the haiku world in Japan and those abroad by opening up the often self-imposed closure in each country. He also discussed the history of how haiku had been introduced outside Japan and remarked that most work in that field had been done by non-Japanese intellectuals like Lafcadio Hearn and R. H. Blyth and Japanese haiku poets had not been active enough to disseminate their art worldwide. The director regarded it as importunate to translate the best part of contemporary Japanese haiku into other languages in order to help the non-Japanese haijin appreciate the great range available in the recent development of the genre in Japan.
Obviously, the Internet technologies are most helpful in such exchanges today, and that was one of the topics discussed in the meeting. Kuniharu Shimizu talked about his experience of creating his famous haiga website See Haiku Here (URL: http://www.mahoroba.ne.jp/~kuni_san/haiga_gallery/) and expanding it by contacts with his friends, both inside Japan and overseas, through e-mail. His comment on how he took up haiku was also thought-provoking. Shimizu started writing haiku in English after he had drawn many haiga in joint works with both Japanese and other countrymen. That attests that ways a person becomes involved in haiku today are varied even among Japanese. Shimizu also noted that there were different tendencies in haiku in various countries, such as the strong descriptions of nature in U.S. haiku and the European penchant for philosophical speculations.
Shimizu's talk was followed by Bin Akio's, who is the current main editor of the WHA website World Haiku Association (http://www.worldhaiku.net/). Introducing another issue, that of translation, Akio admitted that there remained, and would remain, difficulties in haiku translation and how various languages should appear on the screen. WHA currently adopts English as its common language and the Internet as a central tool for communication, but it is crucial for a truly international association to respect other languages and not to put too much trust in the high-tech medium. Akio said that we should always try new ways of communication to find voices fallen out of today's U.S. led globalization. World Haiku 2005 (published in 2004), the first annual book of world haiku, and the WHA website, both including various languages, is the first bold step to meet the challenge.

The talks of Shimizu and Akio on differences in world haiku led to more comments, many of which were centered on the difficult issue of evaluation. Natsuishi observed that there were a lot of local haiku societies in the United States, and they held a big national conference each year, whereas European haiku poets, including leading poets in each country, tend to work independently. East Europeans' participation was also noted. In such a diversified condition, he added, there was a lot of confusion about opinions on what haiku was and would be. Yutaka Hasegawa remarked that U.S. haiku societies were likely to define too rigid rules, whereas Japanese haijin had failed to subject their creative methods to strong critical consideration. Like judo, which Akio took up as an example of　Japanese art that was exported and had undergone change in international negotiations, haiku will unavoidably go through trials and errors to reach its shared understanding in the international haiku world. As haiku communities in other countries and areas are moving forward, it is inevitable for Japanese haijin to modify their critical expressions in view of haiku, the poetic form they now share with those with different cultural backgrounds.
Sayumi Inui (Kamakura) reported the current financial status of WHA, which showed that WHA had the same kinds of obstacle as other international organizations must have. One is the great differences between the economic statuses of the countries and areas involved. The association has coped with the problem by setting different membership fees, but that led to another difficulty: Postage costs of WHA's annual publication World Haiku exceeded the income from membership fees in some countries. For the present, the deficits are going to be met with donations and subsidies. It is clear that these are among the subjects WHA members will have to discuss at the WHA Conference in Sophia, Bulgaria in July, 2005.
After the meeting, joined by another member Ryuji Yamagishi and Norimichi Hidaka of Nishida Shuppan, the publisher that published World Haiku 2005, the members went together to dine at a nearby bar-restaurant, where every participant introduced him/herself with reading his/her own haiku. Each reading met with warm and sometimes enthusiastic applause that might surprise other parties around.
As director Natsuishi said in the meeting, this was just the first step ahead, and how big a step it will be depends on the future efforts of the members all over the world. That means that the association will welcome active exchanges of ideas and opinions from widely different perspectives, of course urging its members to write haiku of a high standard and helping share them effectively beyond the borders of countries and languages. WHA will hopefully do so to reach a new horizon of possibilities for haiku literature. (All names are presented without title in this article.)
* I thank David Burleigh and Jack Galmitz to revise this English version.