NEW YORK — This month I was judge of the Japanese division of the haiku contest sponsored by the United Nations International School (UNIS). John Stevenson, editor of Frogpond, the magazine of the Haiku Society of America, judged the haiku written in English.
I don't know how many decades ago Japan-related entities began to sponsor haiku contests outside Japan, but when I became aware of such things, Japan Airlines was the lead player in that endeavor. More than a dozen years ago, though, Japan's economic difficulties and toughening global competition forced the airline to abandon its haiku sponsorship overseas. Here, in New York, luckily, the Japan Society picked up the slack by sponsoring a contest for high school students in this city, but it, too, gave up several years ago. So, the UNIS stepped in.
The U.N.-affiliated school sponsoring a haiku contest necessarily reminded me of Dag Hammarskjold and Raphael Salas. Having observed haiku since I accidentally served as president of the Haiku Society of America three decades ago, I have known that U.N. Secretary General Hammarskjold wrote haiku. Also, I was asked, in the mid-1980s, to write a foreword when U.N. Under Secretary General Salas, who established the Population Fund in 1969, decided to publish a collection of haiku to mark his 56th year. The book, published in 1985, was appropriately titled "Fifty-Six Stones."