Akemi Ito — Pine Cone Kōgō

Pine cones naturally suggest autumn through winter, so that would be the most straightforward season in which to use this piece.

There is, however, an old poem from the Heian period, recorded in the Kyōgoku Miyasudokoro Yoshiko Uta-awase, a poetry contest dating to the Engi era:

With our horses drawn up,
on the fields of Kasugano
where you come to see me,
pine cones lie thick—
wet with the rain.

This is, in fact, a spring poem.

Turning to the West, the pine cone also appears in connection with the thyrsus, the staff carried by Dionysus.

In Book 6, poem 165 of the Greek Anthology, we find the following:

Euanthe dedicated to Bacchus
the whirling noisemaker that drives on the Bacchic band,
the dappled fawnskin,
the ringing instruments of bronze,
the green, cone-bearing thyrsus,
the light yet deep-thundering drum,
and the winnowing basket she had so often raised
above her ribbon-bound hair.

There appears to be some debate over whether the object at the tip of the thyrsus should specifically be identified as a pine cone. At the very least, however, the following can be said.

The original Greek word is κωνοφόρος (kōnophoros), a compound of κῶνος (kōnos)—a cone, or the conical fruit of a tree such as a pine—and φόρος (phoros), meaning “bearing” or “carrying.” Literally, therefore, the word means “cone-bearing.”

Moreover, the medieval Byzantine lexicon known as the Suda quotes Greek Anthology 6.165 and explains κῶνος as the cone of a pine tree. We can therefore say that later Greek readers clearly understood this passage as referring to a thyrsus bearing a pine cone.

Pine cones are also commonly used as Christmas decorations, so this kōgō would be entirely at home in that season as well.