Chōka: Another Old Kind of Waka

I have a list-type post where I talk about different meters, but I feel that this one possesses a greater level of completeness at the moment (though it's possible that's a wrong assumption). 


So, to begin. Chōka is spelled with the kanji for long, which is 長, and the kanji for poem/song, which is 歌. Therefore the chōka means long poem/song, see? This makes sense, as you'll see further on, in the "The Pattern" section, but first imma tell you somethings about its history. 

History Facts 
The chōka  is an outmoded/uncommon kind of meter that got kinda left at the wayside, along with the sedōka.

It was popular during the first part of the 700s (that's during the Nara period, if you're interested), though I've read people kept using it in the Heian period -- for a bit. But, though people used it longer than the sedōka,  the end of the 700s was the end of the chōka  as well, pretty much. Why?  Well, why bustles, pre-ripped jeans, neon-colored icing, glue-on fingernails and Roombas? Exactly.

However. There's something you might wanna know about the chōka -- a little something from the land of 'hey -- wait a minute!'. 

It is this: while I've seen that the chōka became totally unused, there's also words out there that say it's just not a meter people commonly use. Or commonly used... History, right? *Sighs*, moving on.


The Pattern
The chōka's syllable pattern is thus: 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables, etc.... until you're ready to write the last two lines, both of which are 7 syllables. Except, there was one  book that seemed to imply the end two lines didn't have to be 7 syllables.

Writers of chōka, so far as it's been seen, tended to stop after a couple dozen lines. But there were times when a poet wrote a longer chōka. In the Nara period poetry anthology, the Man'yōshū (compiled, I think, in 759 AD), the longest chōka goes for 150 lines.

Hanka 
It was a thing to put a tanka (or several) after your chōka in order to develop it's theme(s) more or explain your chōka better. The explanatory tanka was called the hanka, whose kanji is thus: 

反歌 

This is either translated as 'repeat poem' or 'envoy'. Dunno how that works out linguistically. I get the feeling one isn't exactly a totally truthful translation.

References
As always, for your perusal, my references are below. Enjoy! Also, if you want some old chōka, look no further than the aforementioned Man'yōshū. There's 260 chōka in there.

"Murmured Conversations: A Treatise on Poetry and Buddhism by the Poet-Monk Shinkei"; 心敬, Esperanza U. Ramirez-Christensen; 2008 

"The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse";Anthony Thwaite ; 2009


"Història del Japó"; Oriol Junqueras i Vies, Dani Madrid i Morales, Guillermo Martínez Taberner, Pau Pitarch Fernández; 2011

"The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics"; Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul F. Rouzer, Harris Feinsod, David Marno, Alexandra Slessarev; 2012

"Literary Creations on the Road: Women's Travel Diaries in Early Modern Japan"; Keiko Shiba, Motoko Ezaki; 2012

Encyclopedia Britannica: Hanka Japanese Poetry

Encyclopedia Britannica: The Significance of the Man'yōshū

Ramune

Ra, mu and ne spell ramune.

Associated with the festival O-bon, and with a history stretching on back to the 1800s, it's ramune -- the fizzy drink with the marble for a seal! No really. Let me try and describe it for you.

For those of you interested in all the nitty gritty (well sort of) facts, there's different companies that make ramune (wonder how that worked out). Ones I've seen (in videos and on websites) include Kimura, Ramune, Hata, Shirakiku and Sangaria. More than one company makes more than one kind of the same flavor -- I mean, there's even more than one company making "original" ramune.

Convoluted description time! Okay, the bottle has a plastic safety seal wrapper around its top that holds a "cap" on top of the bottle's mouth, which itself has a tall plastic blue ring thingy stuck down solid on it, sunken inside the middle of which is the marble. The wrapper has a perforated strip that you peel off. The "cap"  is a squat, hollow cylinder with one solid end that's perforated -- the perforated end has a smaller cylinder coming out of its middle, making it like an umbrella. The gist is to punch out the the umbrella (I've seen it called a plunger) and use its "handle" (the smaller cylinder) to push the marble down, into the bottle's neck.

So. In order to drink/pour your ramune with maximum efficiency, look for the two circle-shaped hollow spaces in the neck area of the bottle (they're hard to miss, as they make it look like your drink has eyes) and aim for getting the marble behind the both of them.

Of  course, instead of attempting to understand all that, you could always buy a bottle and read the directions on the safety seal. Or look at this video.

And there are two sizes, so far as the internet has revealed to me: 13.8 ish ounce bottles and 6.76 ounce bottles (I've actually seen the smaller bottles so I know the exact amount in ounces). While we're  on bottles: it's possible to find ramune in bottles (metal I think) without the marble bit, and in can form too -- at least, Sangaria, and possibly Hata, offers them. .

Now onto flavors.... The original flavor of ramune falls within the classification of lemon-lime (or at least, it's supposed to) -- in fact, "ramune" comes from "lemonade". These days, if you take a look around, there's a whole world of flavors.

Flavors range from traditional soda flavors such as orange, grape, strawberry and green apple into peach, lemon, raspberry, blueberry, pineapple, banana, plum, melon, yuzu (a Japanese citrus fruit), mango, kiwi, hassaku (a low acid kind of citrus fruit), lychee (or litchi), yūbari melon (a kind of cantalope) and coconut.

Then there are various high-classier sounding flavors such as momiji, which is actually the word for fall foliage viewing, especially maple leaves. And green tea, shu cream (pastry filling, looks like) ramune, and sparkling red champagne. (Could you even sell "flat" champagne?)

There's also some really out there flavors, such as teriyaki, curry, salted watermelon, corn pottage, wasabi, takoyaki (think fried squid), squid ink (apparently it's edible)... fig vinegar and chili oil. Yes, fig vinegar soda and chili oil soda. They are real.

For public opinion on the flavors, there are videos of people doing a taste-test review such as the one I use as a reference by kanadajin3. (It's funny in places but also got some language in it, so be forewarned).

Other than the surprisingly diverse flavor options, you can find themed bottles as well, like strawberry ramune with Hello Kitty on the label, and original ramune labels with anime stuff like Naruto or One Piece. And Pretty Cure, which I'd never heard of  before. And these are just the ones that I saw the last time I was looking for stuff on ramune.

Ramune has even expanded into the world of candy. From what I've seen, the candy makers might be using the original flavor. Interestingly, if you paste the katakana for ramune into Google Translate, one of the options that drop down is ラムネ菓子, which it translates as ramune confectionary. Paste that into Google and you'll get different Japanese results, plus pictures of blue-green bottles that have what I assume is candy in them. If you let it, the internet can take you to many varied and interesting places.

Update June 2016
A friend of mine and I have at last tried ramune -- two from an Asian market (Shirokiku original and Kimura melon) and one from a Kroger (Kimura original). They were sort of hard to open, probably because three bottles isn't enough to develop the ramune-opening skill (But only one (the melon one I think) fizzed over, so yay!) You need to press down pretty hard, that's for sure.

As for flavor, let me start by saying that neither of the originals tasted anything like lemon-lime. The Kimura ones, both the original and the melon, have a definite Sweet-Tart taste to them, but the melon one also reminded me of  cleaners that I've smelled in fast-food places' bathrooms sometimes. The Shirokiku one tasted like papaya to me -- a flavor which I cannot say is a personal favorite.

References:
Ramune references, for ramune researchers around our round world!

"The Divvies Bakery Cookbook"; Lori Sandler; 2010

"Introduction to Japanese Culture"; Daniel Sosnoski; 2013

"Japanese Culture in the Meiji Era, Volume 5"; Kaikoku Hyakunen Kinen Bunka Jigyōkai (Japan); 1969

Takasago International Corporation: "Japanese Citrus - Aiming to Develop More Genuine Flavors -"; Ken'ichi Tomiyama; 2008

YouTube: "CRAZY JAPANESE RAMUNE FLAVORS ★ ラムネ１０本の味"; kanadajin3

The above video has some language, y'know? But in some places it's funny.

"English loanwords in Japanese: a selection"; Akira Miura; 1979

Also,  places I looked for different flavors include eBay, Asian Food Grocer, YUMMI Co and Amazon.