Pan? Patchi? Pop?

Some said it sounded like "pon!" Some believed it was more like "pan!" Others claimed that "pitchi" or "patchi" or even "zuboo" best described the sound, while others were willing to swear it was a whispered "pussu" as dainty as the beat of a butterfly's wings. Whatever the sound, it was certain that it took a sharp ear to hear it. But sharp ears were bent to catch it: last week, as they had each summer for upwards of two centuries, Japan's perceptive poets and philosophers listened more carefully than ever for the soft explosion of opening lotus blossoms.*

There were many in Japan who claimed they had heard the noise or knew a friend who had, but to be really sure a poet had to go by dawn to the side of a Tokyo swamp and sit for three long hours while the pink and white blossoms unfold, waiting tensely for the moment when the bud burst open to the morning light. It took a discerning ear to separate the sound of an opening lotus from the purl of a fish lazily waking to his morning meal or the plip of a dewdrop on a mossy stone.

In 1940, shabby, kindly, skeptical old Ichiro Oga, a onetime Tokyo University professor known as "Professor Lotus," planted microphones by the blossoms in Shinobazu Pond to settle, once & for all, the explosive question. The microphones picked up no sound, and ever since the professor has scoffed at those who claim to have heard the lotus. But last week, like the others, Professor Lotus himself was listening again in the Tokyo swamps. He heard nothing. But there were those who did. Some told him the sound was like "kotsu." Some thought it was more like "quew," very softly spoken.

*Some non-Japanese flower listeners say that the evening primrose (Oenothera) makes a "snapping" sound when it opens. Seed pods, of course, can be much noisier; on warm September days phlox pods explode with a soft pop. The squirting cucumber (Ecballium) of Southern Europe sounds like a cork leaving a champagne bottle, and the tropical sandbox tree (Hura, crepitans) has an orange-sized capsule which "explodes with a loud report."

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