Mitsuaki Kojima

　This week our haikuists submitted haiku about the whiteness of flowering plums and magnolia. A few more love poems for Valentine's also trickled in. Valentine's Day in Japan is celebrated by women giving gifts-often chocolate-only to men. One month later, on White Day, men return the favor and give gifts to women.

　Kyoko Kondo and Haruko Okura are two of approximately 20 members who compose haiku as an activity of the international exchange committee for the Seikyo Gakuen PTA in Osaka. Red and white are traditional competing colors in Japan, and school teams sometimes align themselves to one or the other shade. Kondo seems attracted to red and Okura to white. Nandin (nanten) are an ornament for coming of age ceremonies. The white stars are starfish.

Northern wind　　　　　　　　Cairns winter
red nandin berries　　　　　scooping white stars
roll away　　　　　　　　　　from sea bottom

　In the next haiku by fellow committee member Ikuko Yamamoto, there is no mention of whether the magnolia are pure white or of the deep red variety.

Late spring
magnolia buds
swell

　During her lifetime, Masajo Suzuki loved the deep purple magnolia. She wrote about them in her Dakotsu prizewinning book ``Shimokuren"(Purple magnolia, published in 1998 by Kadokawa Shoten). Lee Gurga and Emiko Miyashita translated 150 of her poems into English in ``Love Haiku: Masajo Suzuki's Lifetime of Love'' released in 2000 by Brooks Books. In ``A Wave of Moonlight," a World Haiku Review article on the Internet, Eiko Yachimoto translated 30 of Hisajo Sugita's poems, including these two about flowers in springtime.

naga ame ya taisanboku no hana ochizu

....ling'ring rain...yet magnolia
hasn't dropped...its great white blooms
tsubaki koshi kamiyo no haru no on-sugata

rich camellia_
on her figure, springtime
of the mythical past

　Ken Saito and Masako Sasayama are members of MIFA haiku salon who meet regularly at the Meguro International Friendship Association. The club's leader, Yasuomi Koganei, kindly submitted over 40 haiku that were penned at their meeting on Valentine's Day.

　Similar in meaning to the poem penned by Kanematsu in our column today, Saito seems to enjoy forgetting about the world for a while by sunbathing with his cat.

　It is my guess that Sasayama is a schoolteacher whose students are looking forward to taking a spring break until classes resume again this coming April.

Basking in the sun　　　　　Swollen cherry buds
with my confidante　　　　　from the windows
the senile cat　　　　　　　Friday classroombr>

Want to try composing haiku ?

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Readers are invited to send haiku for the season to David McMurray at the Asahi Haikuist Network, International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun, 5-3-2 Tsukiji, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-8011.