mission.japan

Today’s Japanese word is komorebi. If you don’t know what it means, try Googling it.
I’ll wait.

Any ideas for a translation? The best so far seems to be “sunlight through trees”, which is as clumsy and obtuse as it is vapid. (Watch out, I’m pulling a Razor and hitting the dictionary and thesaurus hard today. A few more paragraphs and I might start saying things like mastodonic netminding.) It says a lot about priorities in Japanese culture if the language can express in one word what it takes English to explain in at least three. (Granted, syllable count is equal, but still, to have a dedicated word for “sunlight through trees”—that has to count for something.)

The komorebi at the Imperial Palace grounds today was amazing, by the way. The shifting patterns of the glowing emerald of sunlight and the cool green of shade provided far more entertainment and relaxation than if I had gone to see some exhibit of famous architecture. It’s still early for cicadas, but the crows were out in full force, negotiating treaties to no end as they flew from perch to perch, forming and dissolving committees at random. Often as they flew overhead the leaves below caught their shadows to reveal ghost crows bound to their owners.

There’s an article about high ceilings that recently made the rounds on the major social bookmarking sites. Essentially it postulates that people tend to think more abstractly in places with high ceilings. Cathedrals are one cited example. (I wonder now if stained glass windows in cathedrals were originally an attempt to duplicate or improve upon komorebi.)

Forests might be the same way. Korakuen in Okayama is a nice garden, but it has a very manufactured feel to it. The Imperial Palace grounds in Kyoto, however, feels like walking through an old, natural forest. Many trees deserve such words as “towering”, “massive”, and “colossal”. As such, the canopy reaches impressively skyward and begs one to pause and look up. So I sat next to a pine tree and spent a highly enjoyable half hour beneath the green expanse.