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One more use of plants that should not be overlooked is as decoration.
While the seven herbs of spring are used basically as food—sustenance for the body—the aki no nana kusa, the “seven herbs of autumn,” are primarily ornamental—sustenance for the soul. Featuring prominently as symbols of autumn in the Manyoshu, an anthology of about 4,500 tanka (traditional thirty-one syllable poems) compiled in the seventh and eighth centuries, the seven plants are bush clover, Japanese pampas grass, kudzu (arrowroot), pink, ominaeshi (a variety of patrinia), fujibakama (thoroughwort), and bellflower. None of these are particularly eye-catching plants, but they nevertheless possess a charm that seems the perfect match for the cool autumn air.
Of them all, bush clover gets the most exposure in the Manyoshu, appearing in a full 137 poems. The way the plant’s slender stems hang downwards in gentle curves is suggestive of feminine elegance, but its propensity for producing young shoots from even the oldest stocks makes it also a symbol of vigor. The delicate beauty of the bush clover, and the vitality concealed beneath its weeping braids seem to have held a powerful attraction for the people of old.
Like the poets of the Manyoshu, Sen-no-Rikyu (1522–1591), the merchant who raised sado, the tea ceremony, to an art form, also felt a deep fondness for wild plants, and he considered them to be the most appropriate flora to use as an accessory to the tea ceremony.
Providing one’s guests with a sense of the season is one of the most important aspects of the tea ceremony, as demonstrated by the conspicuous seasonal accents in the color, shape and names of the sweets offered by the host. Rikyu advocated the use of wild flowers placed without artifice, as if in the wild, and such reproduction of the beauty of nature for the enjoyment of one’s guests is symbolic of the philosophy underlying the tea ceremony. The aesthetic sense that Rikyu sought to articulate through the tea ceremony could be regarded as the distillation of an already uniquely Japanese appreciation of nature.
Even if it has changed in form over the past decades, the tradition in Japan of utilization and enjoyment of wild plants is still very much alive. It represents one way, in a society that offers increasingly fewer opportunities for communion with nature, in which the Japanese continue to maintain their links with the natural world in everyday life.
The editors would like to express their special gratitude to Kokushokankohkai Corporation Ltd., Tankosha Co. Ltd., Mr. Kunihiro Shikata, and Ms. Haruko Yamamoto for their assistance in the preparation of this article.
Bibliography
Sugiura, Mimpei. Nihon no Meizuihitsu: Kusa (Notable essays of Japan: Grasses), Tokyo: Sakuhin-sha, 1990.
Tanaka, Akimitsu. No no Hana wo Ikeru—Chabana Junikagetsu (Arranging wildflowers—Tea ceremony flowers for each month of the year), Tokyo: Bunkashuppankyoku, 1984.
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| Even some public bath houses have a tub of “medicated” water—water to which medicinal herbs have been added. The blackish-looking water contains plenty of extract from thirty or so different herbaceous plants. Many people come specifically to bath here for the water’s therapeutic value as well as for relaxation. Photo by Yukio Okada, Courtesy of Tenjin-Yu in Niigata City |
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| A depiction of autumn grasses for viewing, also from the Edo Fuzoku Gaho. People during the Edo Period would decorate their picnic boxes with bush clover, eulalia, balloonflower, or one of the other “seven autumn herbs” and take them along to their moon-viewing parties in the early fall. Illustration by Yamamoto Shokoku. |
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