Post 155.
Each Springtime, I introduce my 5th and 6th graders to the Japanese folksong, Sakura, and a haiku by Hokushi. I found the pairing of this song and haiku in one of the many general music method books I keep at work. Like much of my teaching, this lesson emerges from a mixture of sources including music education and ecomusicology articles, conferences and workshops, and songs I have discovered or developed over time, including lessons in my 2025 book, Music Lessons for a Living Planet. However, because I am a philosopher, this mix is never eclectic. Rather, diverse activities are to be held together within a stable grammar of essence meaning, moral meaning, and growth meaning; with one pedagogical emerging in my life as a teacher, creative meaning.
Cherry trees flower each Spring, delightfully present for a day or maybe a week, and then drop as the tree puts on its yearly leaves. Sakura presents cherry blossoms as they are—momentary, rich, but already vanishing the moment that they appear. Spend the wrong week indoors and you might miss them. The song dwells in the fleeting abundance, lingering inside their appearance. Essence meaning emerges as we—teacher and students—dwell in an unfamiliar timbre and curious melody, singing in imperfectly pronounced Japanese. Moral meaning develops as song forms restraint. The limits of one tree’s profuse beauty cultivate in us a recognition of the rhythm of seasons, years, growing and dwindling. The message: Accept beauty without owning it. This is fit. Encountering Sakura each year, its growth meaning, forms patience and comfort with incompletion. Attentiveness even when recompence is short-lived.
Hokushi’s haiku reads:
Ashes my burnt hut
But wonderful the cherry
Blooming on the hill.
The essence meaning we uncover is that this author’s home has burned down, and all that remains is ash. Children are already aware of disaster; many adults mistakenly attempt to shield them from it. However, hiding tragedy does not protect children from it. It leaves them unformed to truth, and ill-equipped to endure it. How does Hokushi respond to tragedy? There’s no explicit lesson. He notices the abundant cherry blooms. As noncompetitive truth-telling, the blossoms do not override or correct the ashes. Both are here, now. Both float on the wind and are temporarily profuse.
Hokushi’s “But wonderful” leads us to the moral meaning—how must we reply? Of course, there are many ways Hokushi might reply. He might close his eyes and inhabit loss. He might grow irate and chop down the cherry tree. He might pretend to not be distressed. Hokushi teaches us to be honest about suffering, refuse despair’s domination, and admit gratuitous beauty where it materializes. Moral meaning restrains verdicts and awaits truth.
What sort of person is formed by this haiku accompanying Sakura? Its growth meaning is a kind of enduring without hardening. Remaining sensitive to pain but not allowing it to dominate us. To allow catastrophe to be temporarily unresolved without acting too quickly or falling into the void and not acting. We must be faithful to perception when it hurts, because endurance needs resilience and presence.
Suffering is not explained to the children. It is presented. Only after this grammar is well-known is creative meaning possible. Students compose their own haiku, including three lines (I refuse pushing syllable counts as the American haiku tradition ignores syllable counting) about nature, and a turn (the kire) that expresses an unexpected reality of the poem. We sing these haiku with percussion accompaniment and then create a cherry tree on the classroom wall, sharing the various haiku.
Daniel J. Shevock
Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cherry_blossom_festival_2018_-_Yoyogi_Park_-_Tokyo,_Japan_-_DSC05549.jpg
Link to the video: https://youtu.be/eZJ3TOKIy-Y?si=3hAxLYfQ5d8Egqc1
Each Springtime, I introduce my 5th and 6th graders to the Japanese folksong, Sakura, and a haiku by Hokushi. I found the pairing of this song and haiku in one of the many general music method books I keep at work. Like much of my teaching, this lesson emerges from a mixture of sources including music education and ecomusicology articles, conferences and workshops, and songs I have discovered or developed over time, including lessons in my 2025 book, Music Lessons for a Living Planet. However, because I am a philosopher, this mix is never eclectic. Rather, diverse activities are to be held together within a stable grammar of essence meaning, moral meaning, and growth meaning; with one pedagogical emerging in my life as a teacher, creative meaning.
Cherry trees flower each Spring, delightfully present for a day or maybe a week, and then drop as the tree puts on its yearly leaves. Sakura presents cherry blossoms as they are—momentary, rich, but already vanishing the moment that they appear. Spend the wrong week indoors and you might miss them. The song dwells in the fleeting abundance, lingering inside their appearance. Essence meaning emerges as we—teacher and students—dwell in an unfamiliar timbre and curious melody, singing in imperfectly pronounced Japanese. Moral meaning develops as song forms restraint. The limits of one tree’s profuse beauty cultivate in us a recognition of the rhythm of seasons, years, growing and dwindling. The message: Accept beauty without owning it. This is fit. Encountering Sakura each year, its growth meaning, forms patience and comfort with incompletion. Attentiveness even when recompence is short-lived.
Hokushi’s haiku reads:
Ashes my burnt hut
But wonderful the cherry
Blooming on the hill.
The essence meaning we uncover is that this author’s home has burned down, and all that remains is ash. Children are already aware of disaster; many adults mistakenly attempt to shield them from it. However, hiding tragedy does not protect children from it. It leaves them unformed to truth, and ill-equipped to endure it. How does Hokushi respond to tragedy? There’s no explicit lesson. He notices the abundant cherry blooms. As noncompetitive truth-telling, the blossoms do not override or correct the ashes. Both are here, now. Both float on the wind and are temporarily profuse.
Hokushi’s “But wonderful” leads us to the moral meaning—how must we reply? Of course, there are many ways Hokushi might reply. He might close his eyes and inhabit loss. He might grow irate and chop down the cherry tree. He might pretend to not be distressed. Hokushi teaches us to be honest about suffering, refuse despair’s domination, and admit gratuitous beauty where it materializes. Moral meaning restrains verdicts and awaits truth.
What sort of person is formed by this haiku accompanying Sakura? Its growth meaning is a kind of enduring without hardening. Remaining sensitive to pain but not allowing it to dominate us. To allow catastrophe to be temporarily unresolved without acting too quickly or falling into the void and not acting. We must be faithful to perception when it hurts, because endurance needs resilience and presence.
Suffering is not explained to the children. It is presented. Only after this grammar is well-known is creative meaning possible. Students compose their own haiku, including three lines (I refuse pushing syllable counts as the American haiku tradition ignores syllable counting) about nature, and a turn (the kire) that expresses an unexpected reality of the poem. We sing these haiku with percussion accompaniment and then create a cherry tree on the classroom wall, sharing the various haiku.
Daniel J. Shevock
Link to the image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cherry_blossom_festival_2018_-_Yoyogi_Park_-_Tokyo,_Japan_-_DSC05549.jpg
Link to the video: https://youtu.be/eZJ3TOKIy-Y?si=3hAxLYfQ5d8Egqc1
RSS Feed
