Haiku the colloquialism of the language and is closest to natural conversational rhythm, necessary to carry the weight of the hokku A haiku traditionally contains a "kigo", a word or phrase that symbolizes or implies the season of the poem and which is drawn from a "saijiki", an extensive but prescriptive list of such words. Kigo are often in the form of metonyms and can be difficult for those who lack Japanese cultural references to spot. The Bashō examples below include "kawazu", "frog" implying spring, and "shigure", a rain shower in late autumn or early winter. Kigo are not always included
Japanese pitch accent that of Kōchi in Shikoku. Japanese pitch accent also varies in how it interacts with syllables and morae. Kagoshima is a purely syllabic dialect, while Osaka is moraic. For example, the low-tone unaccented noun "shimbun" 'newspaper' is in Kagoshima, with the high tone spread across the entire final syllable "bun," but in Osaka it is , with the high tone restricted to the final mora "n". In Tokyo, accent placement is constrained by the syllable, though the downstep occurs between the morae of that syllable. That is, a stressed syllable in Tokyo dialect, as in "kai" 'shell' or "san" 'divining