Culture

After months of unrelenting control, summer’s horribly clammy fingers are finally beginning to lose their grip on the capital’s climate. Not that it’s currently all that obvious, as the temperatures are still high and the humidity very similar, but the arrival of the late summer/early autumn flowering higanbana (red spider lily), does at least confirm it.

Known as the flower of death, the higanbana is a beautiful, slightly otherworldly sight, that easily lives up to references in its name to, ‘the other shore’.

Poisonous to rodents and other wild animals, they were often planted in and around graveyards during Japan’s pre-cremation days to stop the dead being eaten. Plus their bright colours are said to guide souls into the afterlife, which one would assume explains their use at funerals.

Yet while in many ways representing death, they are nonetheless very resilient to it, as despite being battered by typhoon Man-yi yesterday, this particular flower is still alive, well and just as wondrous.

Japanese festivals are fascinating for many reasons, but especially intriguing are the participants. Men and women who one way or another don’t quite fit with the common image of the average salaried worker.

Something that is very much the case with this fella. A man meticulously turned out, and definitely not to be messed with.

The massive commitment that goes into maintaining a bonsai is sometimes hard to imagine, especially so as it is often passed on over countless generations. Hundreds of years of work and dedication with the sole aim being a perfectly shaped, aesthetically pleasing, tree. Each and every one of its owners or carers unrecorded — their names utterly irrelevant. All of them subservient to the arguably never ending quest for perfection.

Factors that, for me at least, further add to their natural, and also weirdly unnatural, beauty. Yet at the same time, none of the background stuff really matters. Not in the slightest. Only the bonsai does.