stands alone

[amanda]

I was going to put this in the random thread, but I think this deserves to have a forum all it's own.

I just read this in the book, Discover Japan...

...there is a common incidence of the fart in Japanese literature and the arts. While we in the West had had to content ourselves with but one celebrated fart (that of the frivoulous seducer in Chaucer) the Japanese have long had the widest choice.

From the celebrated farting-contest scroll and the early illustrated He Gassen (the Fart Battle), up to the recent representations as the delightful farting games in Ozu Yasujiro's Ohayo, Japan's culture is filled with vivid examples.

...Farting is certainly included in the nature of man and there are a number of moments that capture this very human vision:

And what may you all
be laughing at, may I ask?
the retired master's fart.

---------------------------------

Four or five people
Inconvienced
By the horse farting
On the ferryboat

both are senryu- a kind of Japanese styled poem

...In both cultures the fart is funny, but only in Japan is its humanity acknowledged. This entails a full acceptence of the human state.... Ningen-kusai, the "smelling of humanity", where the fart takes an honorable place.