Red Bricks and Emily Dickinson. At the Akarenga, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan
In Japan, Emily Dickinson's (1830-1886) poetry is higly regarded. A clear indication is the large grant of money that the chemical giant, the Kaneka Corporartion (Osaka) furnished the Emily Dickinson Museum (Amherst, Mass.) in 2005 for its restoration projects. Her poetry is often compared to Japanese traditional haiku, although, of course, it is quite different. Regardless, this photo brings to mind her 'In the Garden':
A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.
And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.
He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad,
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head
Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home
Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, splashless, as they swim.
There's more of a general connection between Dickinson and Japan, though. The anonymous Master to whom she wrote three highly personal letters is thought to be William Smith Clark (1826-1886), a Massachusetts educationalist who made a great impression on the Japanese during his relatively brief stay at Sapporo.
He was the founder of what is today Hokkaido University, then called the Agricultural College of Sapporo. A great statue of him stand atop Hitsujigaoka observation hill. His right arm is stretched out as if he is saying "Boys, be ambitious". That motto is fondly remembered in Sapporo even today, and I am said - though I can't check it - that it in Japanese is inscribed on educational buildings in Sapporo.
Clark came here hard on the heels of Horace Capron (1804-1885), former commissioner of Agriculture under US presidents Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant. Capron had been hired by the Kaitakushi - the development commission for Hokkaido - to modernize that island to stem the expansion of the Russians from Vladivostok. (He actually needed the high remuneration that almost caused scandal to care for his blind son.)
The garden in the photo is that of the Akarenga - The Red Brick Building - that served as the seat of the Kaitakushi. It was planned by Capron on the model of the Massachusetts Sate House. Unusually for Japan made of red brick, two villages nearbij - Toyohira and Shiroishi - were conscripted into making those bricks. In 1873 it was one of the largest buildings of Japan. It burnt down in 1879 but was restored again in 1886. Today it sits as somthing of a smallish anomaly in this pretty park in the shadow of the skyscrapers around and the enormous new central railroad station of Sapporo.
Red Bricks and Emily Dickinson. At the Akarenga, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan
In Japan, Emily Dickinson's (1830-1886) poetry is higly regarded. A clear indication is the large grant of money that the chemical giant, the Kaneka Corporartion (Osaka) furnished the Emily Dickinson Museum (Amherst, Mass.) in 2005 for its restoration projects. Her poetry is often compared to Japanese traditional haiku, although, of course, it is quite different. Regardless, this photo brings to mind her 'In the Garden':
A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.
And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.
He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad,
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head
Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home
Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, splashless, as they swim.
There's more of a general connection between Dickinson and Japan, though. The anonymous Master to whom she wrote three highly personal letters is thought to be William Smith Clark (1826-1886), a Massachusetts educationalist who made a great impression on the Japanese during his relatively brief stay at Sapporo.
He was the founder of what is today Hokkaido University, then called the Agricultural College of Sapporo. A great statue of him stand atop Hitsujigaoka observation hill. His right arm is stretched out as if he is saying "Boys, be ambitious". That motto is fondly remembered in Sapporo even today, and I am said - though I can't check it - that it in Japanese is inscribed on educational buildings in Sapporo.
Clark came here hard on the heels of Horace Capron (1804-1885), former commissioner of Agriculture under US presidents Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant. Capron had been hired by the Kaitakushi - the development commission for Hokkaido - to modernize that island to stem the expansion of the Russians from Vladivostok. (He actually needed the high remuneration that almost caused scandal to care for his blind son.)
The garden in the photo is that of the Akarenga - The Red Brick Building - that served as the seat of the Kaitakushi. It was planned by Capron on the model of the Massachusetts Sate House. Unusually for Japan made of red brick, two villages nearbij - Toyohira and Shiroishi - were conscripted into making those bricks. In 1873 it was one of the largest buildings of Japan. It burnt down in 1879 but was restored again in 1886. Today it sits as somthing of a smallish anomaly in this pretty park in the shadow of the skyscrapers around and the enormous new central railroad station of Sapporo.