The Lobster Dance

Wisteria (fuji, 藤）

Over Golden Week, I headed out to Iwakuni in Yamaguchi-ken. Kintaikyô (錦帯橋), the famous bridge, is nice, but the real star of the show was the flowers in and around Kikkô Kouen (吉香公園) .

I’m trying to learn many kanji and names of flowers–beautiful kanji for beautiful things.

Iris (airisu, アイリス; hanashôbu, 花菖蒲)

The colors were so vivid it was surreal.

Azaleas (satsuki, サツキ, 皐) at the pond

The old name for May (gogatsu, 五月) is 皐月 (satsuki), or azalea-month, and is pronounced the same way as the word for azalea.

Kikkô Park is home to a little garden of big peonies.

Peony (botan, ボタン, 牡丹)

The kanji for peony is composed of 牡 (osu), which means male (of animals) and 丹 (ni), red (of earth, cinnabar). (My guess is that this kanji combination is a Chinese import.)　Wikipedia tells me that other names for peony include 「富貴花」 (fortune-precious-flower), 「百花王」(hundred-flower-king) and 「花王」(flower-king).

Apparently, botan is also used as a seasonal word in Japanese poetry to invoke early summer.

Peonies are a motif in Chinese and Japanese art, although I’m not an expert on Asian art or botany.

錦雲閣 (Kinunkaku)

Edit: Toshogu asked if this were a temple or a tea house. I researched it, and the answer is neither! According to the Iwakuni Tourism website, when the garden of the former daimyô’s residence was opened to the public in 1885, Kinunkaku was built to resemble a watch tower, although it’s actually a shrine for votive tablets (emadô, 絵馬堂). なるほど。。。

According to the map, the gardens around Kikkô Park also have names.  Below is the Japanese Garden, Nihon Teien.

日本庭園 (Nihon Teien, Japanese Park)

If you cross the bridge of Kintaikyô, you’ll have a short walk past all the ice cream shops to the garden. You can’t miss it! It was a lovely way to spend a cloudy May afternoon.