I found an interesting entry in Maeda Isamu's Edogo no jiten (江戸語の辞典, "Dictionary of Edo-period language"): kana de iu, literally "say it in kana". This could mean either "say it in simple language" or "say it without beating around the bush", according to Maeda.

His example sentence is from the 1779 Ekisha san'yū: "Iya nara iya to kana de iinanshi, iya tomo ō tomo iikirinanshi",　"If you won't, just say so in kana; yes or no, out with it." I suppose this matches English expressions like "in plain English" quite closely, but with an extra twist in the blurring of the boundary between written and spoken language. (What the expression kana de iu calls to mind, for me, isall those Edo-period illustrated stories for reg'lar folks, where the dialogue is — indeed! — all or nearly all in kana, with kanji reserved for the kanbun preface and so on, although of course you can trace a similar split back all the way to the early all-kana monogatari vs the all-kanji documents of administration and so on.)

It's hard to blame all those mutton-chopped orientalists for having concluded that East Asians think in "ideograms" and so on, when you run into things like this.

Did you know that Everybody Poops was first known in English as Everybody Eats And......? It's true! You see, the original publisher, Fukuinkan Shoten 福音館書店 (literally "Gospel House Publishers"—they were originally founded to distribute Christian materials) includes in the colophon of every children's book they publish an English translation of the book's title, but apparently the literal translation of minna unchi (viz, "everybody poops") was deemed a bit too shocking for colophonic insertion, so they bowdlerized it, no doubt inspired by the final two pages summarizing the book's thesis: ikimono wa taberu kara, minna unchi o suru n' da ne, "Animals [all] eat, so they all poop [too].")

The English titles in Fukuinkan's colophons are a sort of mini-treasury of translation techniques, as it happens. Some of them have a sort of brutal simplicity, like "Pretty Box" for Sena Keiko's Kirei na Hako: the meaning is fine, but it would be more idiomatic in English to include at least a definite article. Some struggle valiantly to preserve the feel of the original in relatively staid English, like "Kid Hops and Jumps" for Tashima Seizō's Koyagi ga Pyon-Pyon ("[Goat] kid goes boing-boing!"). Others add peculiar embellishments: Anno Mitsuaki's A-I-U-E-O Omise becomes "Anno's A-I-U-E-O Shops." Anno is amazing, but is he really that well-known outside Japan that this treatment makes sense?

Some use the jargon + explanation technique to handle Japan-specific cultural stuff: the English title for Kabayama Sachikazu's Kakigōri is "Kakigori - Japanese Shaved Ice". And then there are some where you want to give the translator a pat on the back: Masuda Junko's Osakana ippai ("Lots of fish") is dubbed "Red Fish, Blue Fish, Yellow Fish". Meanwhile, Hayashi Akiko's Otete ga deta yo ("My hand popped out" — it's about a small child putting on a smock, poking their limbs out of the expected holes one by one") is "Where's My Hand?" (actually closer to a line on the previous page).

Today, I offer a link to "The Meaning of Hakuin's Fuji Daimyō Gyōretsu Painting", by Yoshizawa Katsuhiro.

Paintings of Mount Fuji are common in Japanese art, but Hakuin's painting Fuji daimyō gyōretsu 富士大名行列 (A daimyo procession under Mount Fuji) is unusual in its multidimensional manifestation of the master's thought, achieved through his use of a variety of artistic techniques. It is no exaggeration to say that this piece is the most comprehensive pictorial expression of Hakuin's views on Zen, and is thus the most representative example of his Zen art.

You can see the full painting here.

In The Religious Art of Zen Master Hakuin (Yoshizawa 2009, trans. Norman Waddell), the translation of the classical Chinese poem is a bit different:

Original:
写得老胡真面目
杳寄自性堂上人
不信旧臘端午時
鞭起芻羊問木人

"The Meaning of..." translation:
I have portrayed the True Face of the Old Barbarian
And present it to the priest of Jisho-ji, so far away
If you don’t understand this painting for the festival of December, May 5th
Flog a straw sheep and interrogate a wooden man.

"The Religious Art of..." version:
Having successfully captured the old Persian's true face,
I can now send it along to the priest at far-off Jishō-ji;
If you have doubts about a December Boy's Festival,
Whip the straw sheep forward and ask the wooden man.

The "old barbarian" vs "old Persian" difference has to do with the interpretation of the character 胡. The general meaning is indeed "barbarian," but since it's used here to describe Bodhidharma, who is specifically identified as a Persian in some traditions, it seems fair to narrow it down. See also suiko 酔胡, "Drunken Persians",

What interest me is "the festival of December, May 5th" vs "a December Boy's Festival" for 旧臘端午. Here's how you get the first translation: 旧臘 means "(last year's) twelfth/final-month-in-the-lunar-calendar," and 端午 is the original name for what is today generally called "children's day" (kodomo no hi), a festival held on the fifth day of the fifth month (originally the fifth lunar month, now just May). So "the festival of December, May 5th" is a kind of hyperlocalization of "the festival-held-on-the-fifth-day-of-the-fifth-lunar-month of the final-lunar-month-of-last-year." Waddell's version is a bit better, but that "December" is still quite misleading. Not that there's an elegant solution—English just doesn't have handy names for lunar months. Maybe "a winter boy's festival" would be an acceptable fudge.

What's that? You want to hear more of Yoshizawa's thoughts on Hakuin? Good news! His "Towards a Hakuin Studies" is online too.

Here is Buson's most metrically irregular (奇なる) haiku, according to Shiki:

をちこちをちこちと打つ砧かな
ochi-kochi/ ochi-kochi to/ utsu kinuta kana
"Here and there/ There and here/ Beating the fulling-blocks" (trans R. H. Blyth)

This one often turns up in discussions of onomatopoeia in haiku, probably because early Western haikologist Blyth used it as his first example of "[t]he direct representation of the sounds of the outside world by the sound of the voice". But I think that what Buson is doing is much more clever than simple bang-crash onomatopoeia.

You see, the thing about ochi-kochi is that although it looks a bit mimetic, etymologically it isn't; it derives from two OJ morphemes woti and koti which meant simply "far place" and "near place". And Buson uses it in this non-onomatopoeic way elsewhere, e.g. to describe waterfalls that are near and far. So the key to its use in this poem, the thing that makes it interesting, is the repetition.

The beating of the fulling-blocks is a notoriously rhythmic sound. There's a whole genre of shamisen/koto music called "fulling-block pieces", kinuta-mono, and their special rhythmic patterns are what set them apart. Skillfully played, they can induce an almost trance-like state. And that's what we see in this haiku, too: although it's broken up 4-7-5 by convention, there's no way to see the first "line" break on your first read-through. You just have to keep going: ochi-kochi ochi-kochi... until the to utsu snaps you out of it. The only overt sign of structure is the final five-mora closer (ending with kana, natch).

In other words, Buson uses the repetition of ochi-kochi to create a regular rhythm that is completely unlike what we expect to see in a haiku. The reference is not to the timbre or tone of a beaten fulling block, but to the rhythm, the strucure, of the beating itself. This might count as onomatopoeia in a broad sense, but it is certainly nothing like the poku-poku of Blyth's second example.

Diego Pellechia has a blog called 外国人と能 ("A Foreigner and Noh", or perhaps "Foreigners and Noh") about his "journey into Noh theatre". Sample post: Polish – Japanese Noh diplomacy: Chopin and ‘The Piano Tuner’.

Matt W. Shores has a blog called Kamigata Rakugo and Me, which is about "comic storytelling [rakugo] in Osaka [kamigata]". Sample post: Artistic Family Crests 一門の定紋.

Also, I can't remember if I plugged this one before because it's been going for a while, but Will Eells has a great (English-language) Japanese literary news blog called Junbungaku. Sample post: Unpublished Kawabata Manuscript Based on Hungarian Play.

The broad division of Noh plays into the two categories of mugen nō 夢幻能 "Phantasm Noh" and genzai nō 現在能 "Reality Noh" is a useful one, not least because "inventor of mugen nō, and therefore perfecter of the Classical form" is a handy nutshell summary of who Zeami was.

But Zeami and his contemporaries didn't actually use that terminology. In fact, according to Umehara Takeshi's Umehara Takeshi no jugyō: Nō o miru (梅原猛の授業 能を観る "An Umehara Takeshi course in watching nō"), the phrase mugen nō was coined in 1909 1926 by Sanari Kentarō 佐成謙太郎. Umehara claims that in a "Radio lecture on national literature" (国文学ラヂオ講座), Sanari said the following of the Noh play "Yorimasa" 頼政:

私はこのように、劇の主人公がワキの夢に現れてくるものを夢幻能と名づけ、従って『頼政』の如き脚色を複式夢幻能と申せばどうであろうかと思うのでございます

In this way I suppose that one might call those [plays] where the protagonist appears in the waki's dreams mugen nō, and therefore to refer to plays with a structure like "Yorimasa" as fukushiki mugen nō ["two-part phantasm Noh"]

... "Two-part phantasm Noh" being the classic, even stereotypical Noh structure: a first act where the waki encounters a rustic local who obligingly explains the details of some historical tragedy that took place nearby, and a second act where the rustic local returns in his true form: the ghost of said tragedy's principal figure. The name of this structure was also the inspiration for the John Lennon/Yoko Ono album title Double Fantasy. (Sadly, that last sentence may not be entirely true.)