In December when I announced that 'play' would be the theme for the June Contemporary Haiga challenge, I was thinking more of the games that children play at recess as the weather warms and the school year draws to a close. At some point, perhaps as I was preparing my ideas for the flash banner on the entry page, the art took over and the Spaulding ball became a trail of soap bubbles.

The science of bubbles is in their surface tension. As you know from running water into a washbasin, the addition of stabilizes the bubbles in the water, making them larger and longer lasting. Their iridescent colors are caused by interfering light waves, determined by the thickness of the film—like the refraction of light in an oil slick. From ancient Roman times, bubbles symbolized the fragile transience of life (from the Latin, homo bullas='man is a bubble'). In the 17th century, paintings of children with bubble pipes became popular, though it was with the development of skin-sensitive soaps in the late 18th century that bubbles became a true children's toy.

Similarly in Japan, where the word for soap derives from Portuguese and bubble blowing became popular in the 18th century. In Japanese art, soap and bubble pipes have their own vibrant imagery and meaning—young women with bubble pipes carry a whiff of sexual innuendo (Screech, 1999)—though there too bubble blowing was a children's game. At the World Kigo project, Gabi Greve has collected a delightful page of resources, images and haiku, where she writes of the itinerant peddlers with their distinctive headgear who would appear each spring selling bubble makers to children.

Traditionally, shabondama, soap bubbles, have been a kigo for spring, though the modern saijiki has reclassified them into a cross-seasonal category (Gilbert, 2006). Be that as it may, for me, bubble blowing is inextricably linked to warmer weather and to memories of childhood. Bubble-blowers, it is said, remain the largest selling toy, worldwide.

We hope you enjoy our Bubble Wand issue. Our Traditional Haiga section returns with a lovely multilingual collection by members of the Yahoo WHCworkshop group. In the Experimental Haiga section we have haiga in a variety of poetic forms by Naia, and metaphysical haiga by Jan Turner. In our Editor's Choice section, we have haiga by the inimitable an'ya, and our Featured Artist is Jim Swift. For the Haiga Workshop will take you on a playful tour through a number the interactive online sites where you can make your own images. And last but not least, there is our Contemporary Haiga section, where the whole issue began with a challenge to our readers to create haiga on the theme of 'play'. Many thanks once again to our team of resident artists, Hiromi, Shisen, Mary and Choshi, as well as to all our readers and participants.

Happy Solstice!

Linda Papanicolaou
Editor

FOR YOUR FURTHER INTEREST:

•	石鹸玉 しゃぼんだま shabondama, soap bubbles, World Kigo Database, (worldkigo2005.blogspot.com/2006/07/soap-bubbles-shabondama.htm)
•	Professor Bubbles' Bubblesphere (online at bubbles.org)
•	The Bubble Blower Museum (online at bubbleblowers.com)
•	Bubble Pix/Art, SoapBubbler.com, the Science of Trapped Gas (online at homepage.mac.com/keithmjohnson/soapbubblerphotos/page14/page14.html)
•	Richard Gilbert, "A New Haiku Era: Non-season kigo in the Gendai Haiku saijiki", Modern Haiku, Summer 2006 (online at www.modernhaiku.org/essays/GilbertSaijiki.html
•	Timon Screech, Sex and the floating world: erotic images in Japan, 1700-1820, Honolulu: Univ. Hawaii, 1999 (at books.google.com/books?id=cs_S-YwgGP8C)