Telescope

One of the best-known writers of haiku is Kobayashi Issa, generally known as "Issa", which is actually his adopted pen-name, meaning something like "one cup of tea". His stance of resigned irony, relaxed attitude towards life and literary conventions, and his constant one-sided poetic conversation with insects and other disregarded life-forms may endear him to many secular western readers even more than the more rigorously formal and Zen-inflected work of, say, Basho. I'm certainly a fan. They were writing in different centuries, of course – Basho in the second half of the seventeenth century, and Issa in the early nineteenth – so it's rather like comparing the work of Dryden and Keats, although I'd be surprised if the contrast were quite so pronounced as that in such a convention-bound society as Japan.

One of my favourite Issa poems (there is debate as to whether it is a haiku or a senryu) is this (in my slightly revised British version, suitably adjusted for decimalisation and inflation):

Telescope:
Nothing but mist
For twenty pence

In Japanese: 三文が霞見にけり遠眼鏡
Transliterated: san mon ga kasumi minikeri toomegane
Literal: Three mon / but / mist / see (in a past tense form with an exclamation) / telescope
(No, I don't speak Japanese: information from The Haiku Experiment)

"Mon" were apparently low value coins, although I'm reminded that "mon" are also the red "grade" stripes that we were awarded in junior Judo to be sewn onto our white belts– first mon, second mon, and so on – as opposed to the coloured belts for adults; the word literally means something like "badge" or "emblem".

So the basic scenario, as I imagine it, is not that someone has bought a very cheap telescope, but that on a dreary day they have put a few coins into one of those coin-operated telescopes situated at viewpoints, and found that it is misted up with condensation. Nothing to see here... Typical! Think I'll pop into the caff and have a nice hot refreshing beverage instead.

Issa K.
On a foggy day
Finding nothing to see
Had just one cup of tea

As far as I know, the clerihew has never caught on in Japan, but it seems to me one obvious equivalent to a short, often wryly humorous Japanese form like the senryu, especially in such an incorrigibly facetious culture as ours. Just my, um, three mon's worth.