渡鴉
Watarigarasu - The Raven
The name of this brand is the Japanese word for the raven. This page is what it means, where the bird comes from, and why everything we make is black and white.
What watarigarasu means
渡鴉 is read watarigarasu. The first character, 渡, means to cross over or to migrate. The second, 鴉, is the crow. Together they name one specific bird: the common raven, Corvus corax, the crow that crosses over. Japanese also calls it ōgarasu, the great crow, which is the plainer name and the more accurate one, since the raven is the largest member of the crow family and the largest of all songbirds.
The kanji 鴉 on its own is a crow of any kind. The 渡 in front of it is what makes it a raven, and it is the part of the name that gave us the brand: a bird that arrives from somewhere else.
The raven in Japan
Ravens are not year-round residents of Japan. They are winter visitors, arriving in eastern Hokkaido from the north when the cold comes down and leaving again in spring. The places to see them are the far corners of the island, Nemuro, Shiretoko, the Kushiro marshes, where they gather near fishing ports and along the coast and are noticeably bigger and quieter than the jungle crows that live in every Japanese city.
That is the whole reason for the word. To most of Japan the raven is a bird that shows up in winter at the edge of the map. To the rest of the world it is the raven of the Tower of London, of Poe, and of the creation stories of the North Pacific, where a raven brings light to the world. Japan’s own mythic crow, the three-legged Yatagarasu that guided the first emperor, belongs to the same family. The raven is the bird every culture noticed and none of them treated as ordinary.
芭蕉の烏
Bashō's crow
In 1680 Matsuo Bashō wrote the most famous crow in Japanese poetry:
枯枝に
烏のとまりけり
秋の暮
On a bare branch a crow has settled. Autumn dusk.
Thirteen characters, three phrases, one image. It is the poem that turned the crow from a nuisance into a subject, and it is the reason our first poem tee carries a crow. The Kareeda Tee runs the full haiku down the spine in a single column, the way it would sit on a tanzaku, the narrow paper strip poems were written on. Every Japanese text we print is quoted from a real source and credited; this one is credited to Bashō, 1680.
