The Molten Notebook

I would like to introduce you to my fellow blogger, Midori-san. She lives in a cafe near Tokyo. Her name means “green.”

This is what she looks like:

Yes, Midori-san is a blogging plant.

I know, we’re stretching the “Classics” part of the Asian Classics Project a bit, but bear with me here.

Bio-sensors attached to Midori-san’s leaves take note of changes in light and temperature. Cranked through a computer algorithm, the data emerges as blog posts.

“Today was a sunny day and I was able to sunbathe a lot,” she wrote on October 16, according to a story in the Telegraph. “I had quite a bit of fun today.”

Some days she’s less chipper: “It was cloudy today. It was a cold day.”

This marvel of modern engineering comes courtesy of a team at Keio University. The Telegraph quotes one Satoshi Kuribayashi: “We were initially interested in what plants are feeling and what they are reacting to where we can’t see.”

Since this is the Asian Classics Project, I feel compelled to set this soundbite in its, er, literary context. The diary (nikki) has a distinguished place in Japanese letters. Some of its greatest practitioners were women of the Heian era (794-1192 CE) and shortly thereafter. Among better-known works are the Sarashina Diary, the Mayfly or Gossamer Diary, and the diary of Murasaki Shikibu, author of the Tale of Genji.

Inspired by the daily logs of court activities, literary diaries were often personal meditations on poetry, the passing of time, and everyday life. They were written, not in Chinese characters, which women weren’t allowed to learn, but in Japanese script (kana). Modern Japanese is written in both Chinese characters and Japanese scripts, but perhaps it’s fitting that a journalling plant with a female name uses more Japanese script, which was once known as onnade or “woman’s hand.” Today, more blogs are written in Japanese than in English or Chinese, according to the Telegraph article.

There. That’s all the mock-intellectualism I can muster tonight. If you want to know what a plant in Kamakura is feeling and can read Japanese, visit Midori-san’s blog.