Remember the white plum flower of the Yushima Island/Carlos Pueblo

 Remember the white plum flower of the Yushima Island/Carlos Pueblo

Recently an old photo of our college time in the late 60's has brought back some good memory. Roger Huang of Miaoli, Taiwan likes my writings and gives me some encouragement on my blog. He is a well learned scholar of the nuclear chemistry with a Ph.D. degree from Tokyo University, the old distinguished Tokyo Imperial University. I am writing another fond memory of my visiting of its campus to him as a gift. Yushima Island is the district which the University is seated in the capital city of Japan. There is a famous song called the white plum flower of the Yushima Island , Yushima no shila wumei, published in 1942 that is one of my early favorite of Japanese Enka song music. I have translated the lyric into Chinese based on my Japanese teacher, the late professor Daniel Watanabe's English translation on the class. I was determined to find the temple with the flower, the jade white wall on the boundary of the temple, as well as the Ginkgo grove on the campus. 

I like Japanese Enka very much because the lyric is basically a current style of the poem. We can read this kind of classic literature as a personal hobby. Japanese poets have merged such writings in the Enka and expressed by the performing artist and the musician. It has attracted my attention and I have since learned the language. The character in the song describes how lost he or she is about their ending of love and the separation. Watanabe said it might be a man and not necessary be a woman's sorrow as I guessed. Perhaps it is just a simple separation of a couple after the college graduation and facing the separation. I couldn't find a Buddhist temple with the plum trees and a small jade white wall around it. I did find several shrines with the seasonal chrysanthemum contest shows.

One year in the 80's, Roger came to Houston for his training of the measurement technology. He pointed it out the Ginkgo golden foliage of Auburn campus with the same excitement of Tokyo University campus. I was not at the right time to visit Tokyo and I knew that would take two visits at the proper times to see the plum blossom and the changing color of the tree.

My Japanese neighbor Keoshi Otani became the vice president of Tokyo Tech University until his recent second retirement after his first one with the Nippon Economic News. I always take subway to visit his office at the Ookayama station of the University's Meguro campus. There is a river passing through the township with cherry blossom on both banks. I don't miss the charming sakura each time of my visit.