年とらぬつもりなりしが鐘の鳴る
toshi toranu tsumori narishi ga kane no naru

I intended
never to grow old…
the temple bell tolls
—Jokun
(trans. David LaSpina^[1])

_{(“Cherry Blossoms in the Morning” by Ogata Gekko)}

Today is the 31st and tonight is the bell ringing, making this a fitting haiku. This is the one I promised the other day when I was talking about New Years customs in Japan. First let's talk about the haiku, then the custom of the bell ringing.

Blyth put it best when he wrote about this haiku:

What a universal emotion is expressed in the first two lines! Making our peace with age is part of our acceptance of death.

The bell Jokun refers to is the New Years bell. On New Years in Japan, temple bells ring 108 times, one time for each of our desires. Called joya no kane (除夜の鐘), it is a purifying ritual of sorts, a way to start the year fresh. We'll come back to this in a second and I'll explain why 108 rings.

In pre-modern Japan, your age didn’t go up on the anniversary of your birth, it went up at the beginning of the year. So, basically everyone’s birthday was the same day. They didn’t celebrate it as we do today, it was just more of a fact of life: ah, I’m older today, as are all of us.

In this haiku, Jokun hears the temple bells toll for the New Year and he is reminded that he has now gotten old, something he—like everyone—never really thought would actually happen.

Now, about those 108 rings...

They start ringing the bell around 11pm so that it can strike the last one at or shortly after midnight. Why 108? Good question, grasshopper!

Various reasons are given depending on where you look. The number pops up a few times in other places. For example, Zen Buddhist priests often use prayer beads that consist of 108 beads. Some say the Buddha himself highlighted it as a special number. (On the other hand, the Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki thought that the Buddha using 108 beads was in fact a mistranslation from Sanskrit.)

There is another a theory that says it is a kind of numerology, based on the phrase shiku hakku (“8 unavoidable difficulties”). In Japanese this phrase looks like this: 四苦八苦. Let's break down the double meanings...

四, shi, means 4, and 苦 is pronounced ku which sounds like 九 which means 9, and 八, hachi, means 8. This gives us (4×9)+(8×9)=108. So, according to this idea, the 108 bell rings is to get rid of these 8 difficulties.

But whatever the reason, it is a nice custom

Again, Blyth:

The bell speeding the old year comes sounding across the fields. We are a year older whether we will it or not.

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.

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1. That is, me! If you like this translation, feel free to use it. Just credit me. Also link here if you can. ↩