Elsewhere in Japan, the custom may be known as a Dondoyaki (どんど焼き). But the Sensei’s hometown prefers (like the Sensei herself) to cleave to the forms of antiquity. According to a post by Monk Kenkō (1283–1350) in his Tsurezuregusa blog (no 180), the mallets used at the Imperial Court’s New Year games were burned in just such a “Sagichō”. And if the term was good enough for Kenkō, then it’s good enough for us.
Nobody would accuse Kenkō of being an outdoor type yet, strange to say, his very next blog post is about snow:
The meaning of the word ‘koyuki’ in the song ‘Fure fure, koyuki, Tamba no koyuki” is ‘powder snow’, used because the snow falls like rice powder after pounding and husking … I wonder if this expression dates back to antiquity. The Emperor Toba, as a boy, used ‘koyuki’ to describe falling snow, as we know from the diary of the court lady Sanuki no Suke. (Donald Keene's translation)
Later in the morning, inspired more probably by our recent visit to the Nakaya Ukichiro Museum of Snow and Ice than by Kenkō, I stop off from emptying the kitchen bin to examine the precipitation that has fallen overnight in the garden.
After all, Nakaya-sensei enjoins us to pay equal attention to all kinds of "letters from the sky". During his snow research on Tokachi-dake in Hokkaidō, he found that six-pointed flower-like crystals, which are commonly accepted as representative, comprise only a small part of natural snowfalls.
Crystals with fewer axes and less regular shapes actually fall in greater quantities than the six-pointed kind, Nakaya found, but previous researchers tended to neglect them because such snowflakes were less photogenic. "I therefore made a general classification of snow crystals, always keeping in mind the necessity of attaching equal importance to every type of crystal observed in nature," he wrote.
Last night's cold front seems to have scattered miniature white pithballs all over the Sensei's backyard. Ironically, though, these offerings are nowhere to be seen in Nakaya's seminal chart of snow crystal types. This is probably because they are just “graupel”, a form of sleet, rather than genuine snow:
But there's every reason to believe that Kenkō's koyuki was the real deal. Winters were surely colder in Emperor Toba's time. And so the lightest, most ethereally refined grades of powder snow could well have fallen as far south as the Imperial capital. Now if only those perfumed courtiers had taken time off from their New Year mallet games to invent a wider kind of ski….
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