Poems

(haiku,
tanaga,
and
tanka)
 Module Title: Poems (Haiku, Tanaga, and Tanka)

I. Motivation (5-10 minutes)

Activity 1: Tell no man the tale
Mechanics & Requirements:
Players compete to create poems (Haiku, Tanaga, and Tanka) based on themes,
challenges, and time limits. Points are awarded for structure, creativity, and
emotional impact. The player with the highest score wins the title of "Poetry
Champion."
1. Each round begins with a player drawing a Theme Card to determine the topic
(e.g., “Spring Rain,” “Lost Love,” or “Midnight Secrets”).
2. Players draw a Challenge Card to add complexity. Examples include:
3. Form Challenge: Write a Haiku (5-7-5), Tanaga (7-7-7-7), or Tanka (5-7-5-7-7).
4. Word Restrictions: Must use specific words like “river” or “moonlight.”
5. Time Limit: Complete within 3–5 minutes.
6. Style Rules: Must rhyme (Tanaga) or include seasonal words (Haiku)
7. Players write their poem based on the chosen theme and challenge within the
time limit.
(This will be the criteria for judging)
Criteria Excellent Good Fair (3points) Poor (2points)
(5points) (4points)
Active Participated Participated Participated Participated
Participation actively actively, somewhat, but minimally or not at
throughout the contributing contributions all.
entire session, some relevant were limited or
contributing ideas. less relevant.
insightful ideas.

Quality of Shared Shared Shared some Shared few or no

Ideas insightful and relevant ideas, but relevant ideas.
original ideas ideas, some many were
relevant to the showing commonplace
topic. originality. or not directly
relevant.
Clarity of Expressed Expressed Expressed Expressed ideas
Expression ideas clearly ideas mostly ideas with unclearly and
and concisely, clearly, with some difficulty, unconcise.
both verbally minor issues impacting
and in writing. in clarity or clarity.
conciseness.
II. Analysis/Lesson Proper/Discussion

Exploring Traditional Japanese Poetry – Haiku, Tanaga, and Tanka

What is Japanese Poetry?

 Overview: Japanese poetry has a long tradition dating back over a millennium,
with different forms that have evolved over time. The poetic tradition often
intertwines with the aesthetic concepts of wabi-sabi (imperfection and
impermanence) and mono no aware (the pathos of things), which reflect the
beauty of nature, the passing of seasons, and the transient nature of life.

 Historical Significance: Poetry in Japan, particularly Haiku, Tanka, and Tanaga,

has been a central part of social and cultural life, from courtly poetry in the Heian
period to its modern evolution in the 20th and 21st centuries. These forms
express deep emotions through simplicity, making them accessible yet profound.

 Nature & Seasons: The cyclical nature of life and the four seasons play a
significant role in Japanese poetry. Each season reflects different emotional
states, which is why many poets use nature as metaphors for human
experiences.

 Japanese Aesthetics and Philosophy: Japanese poetry often reflects the

importance of subtlety, indirectness, and balance, emphasizing the beauty found
in nature’s simplicity and human imperfection.
Chapter 1: Haiku
1.1 Overview of Haiku
 Definition and Origins: Haiku is a traditional Japanese form of poetry consisting
of three lines with a 5-7-5 syllable pattern. It originated as the hokku, the opening
stanza of collaborative linked-verse poetry (renga), before evolving into an
independent form in the 17th century, mainly through the works of Matsuo
Bashō.

 Key Characteristics:
o Three-line structure: 5-7-5 syllables.
o Kigo (seasonal word): This word links the poem to a specific season, such
as "cherry blossom" for spring or "snow" for winter.
o Kireji (cutting word): Used to create a pause or emotional shift, often
separating two contrasting ideas or giving a sense of finality.

 The Art of Simplicity: The power of Haiku lies in its ability to capture a moment,
an image, or an emotion with few words. It invites readers to interpret meaning
beyond what is written, often evoking feelings of solitude, peace, or sadness
through stark simplicity.
1.2 Famous Haiku Poets
 Matsuo Bashō: Known as the father of Haiku, Bashō elevated the form through
his Zen-inspired approach. His haiku often reflect a deep connection to nature,
simplicity, and moments of quiet contemplation.
o Example:
"An old silent pond...
A frog jumps into the pond—
Splash! Silence again."
 This haiku captures a moment of stillness interrupted by a brief,
fleeting event, embodying the Zen notion of impermanence.

 Yosa Buson: A poet and painter, Buson infused his Haiku with vivid imagery and
a more descriptive style compared to Bashō’s minimalist approach.
o Example:
"The light of a candle
 Is transferred to another candle—
Spring twilight."
 This Haiku demonstrates the interconnection between all things
and the fleeting nature of light and life.
 Kobayashi Issa: Known for his compassion and humor, Issa’s Haiku often center
around human vulnerability and the fleeting nature of life.
o Example:
"O snail
Climb Mount Fuji,
But slowly, slowly!"
 Issa’s humor reflects the gentle and gradual movement of life,
showing that even in the face of great challenges, progress can be
slow but sure.

1.3 Structure and Style

 Understanding the Syllabic Structure: Haiku traditionally follows the 5-7-5 syllabic
count, but contemporary Haiku can sometimes deviate slightly in English due to
language differences.
 Role of Imagery: Haiku often contain vivid imagery drawn from nature, yet these
images are meant to evoke deep emotions or reflections beyond their simple
description.
 Kigo (Seasonal Word): Every Haiku traditionally incorporates a seasonal word,
which is a marker of the time of year. These words connect the poem to nature's
cycles, often evoking feelings tied to each season.
 Kireji (Cutting Word): This is a word or punctuation mark that divides the Haiku
into two parts, creating a pause or contrast. This gives the poem a sense of
resolution or a shift in meaning.

1.4 Writing Your Own Haiku

 Exercises:
 Observation: Spend a few minutes observing a piece of nature. Write
down words or phrases that describe what you see, hear, or feel. Use
these observations to form a Haiku.
 Seasonal Focus: Choose a season (spring, summer, autumn, or winter)
and use at least one kigo (seasonal word). Try to convey how that season
makes you feel or a specific event that reflects it.
 Kireji Practice: Try writing a Haiku where the first two lines convey one
idea, and the final line shifts the perspective or emotion, mimicking the
effect of a kireji.
1.5 Haiku in Translation

 Challenges: Haiku often relies on subtle linguistic features that may not translate
well into other languages. The brevity of the form also presents challenges in
conveying full emotional depth across cultures.
 Notable Translations: For example, Bashō’s famous Haiku “An old silent pond...”
is often translated in different ways depending on the translator’s interpretation of
silence and pause.
 The Loss and Gain in Translation: Some purists argue that translating Haiku
loses the unique rhythm and depth inherent in the original Japanese. However,
modern translators and poets have experimented with how to capture the spirit of
Haiku while preserving its simplicity.
Chapter 2: Tanaga
2.1 Overview of Tanaga

 Definition and Historical Context: Tanaga is a traditional Filipino poetic form that
consists of four lines, each with seven syllables. It has been a significant part of
Filipino literature for centuries, often used in oral traditions and folk poetry.
 Structure: Each Tanaga has a fixed rhyme scheme, often AAAA or ABAB, with
seven syllables per line.
 Cultural Context: Tanaga was originally used for storytelling, conveying
messages about morality, love, and life in the Philippines. It is a poetic form that
has survived in contemporary Filipino poetry and spoken word.

2.2 Traditional Themes of Tanaga

 Nature and Environment: Many Tanaga poems depict landscapes, flora, and
fauna. The relationship between humanity and nature is often explored in a
Tanaga.
 Love and Relationships: Tanaga frequently explores themes of romantic love,
familial ties, or the struggle to overcome emotional or social obstacles.
 Philosophical and Moral Lessons: Some Tanaga poems offer philosophical
reflections or ethical teachings, drawing on cultural traditions and values.

2.3 Famous Tanaga Poets

 Traditional and Contemporary Poets: Tanaga poets, such as Francisco Balagtas,

have written poems in the Tanaga form, and modern Filipino poets continue to
embrace and adapt it in their works.
 Impact of Tanaga in Popular Culture: Today, Tanaga is not only found in written
poetry but also in musical forms, especially in Filipino folk songs.

2.4 Writing Your Own Tanaga

 Structure Practice:
o Four-line, seven-syllable structure: Begin by crafting short lines with a
rhythmic seven-syllable count.
o Rhyme Schemes: Experiment with rhyme schemes. Traditional Tanaga
often uses AAAA rhyme, but ABAB or even ABBA can also be used.
 Exercise: Write a Tanaga about something personal—your home, a journey, or
an emotion you’ve been feeling recently.
Chapter 3: Tanka
3.1 Overview of Tanka

 Definition and History: Tanka is one of the oldest forms of Japanese poetry,
originating during the 7th century in Japan. It has a five-line structure, with
syllable counts of 5-7-5-7-7.
 Historical Context: In Japan’s Heian period (794–1185), Tanka was often written
by nobility in courtly settings and was used for expressing deep personal
emotions or descriptions of nature.

3.2 Famous Tanka Poets

 Kakinomoto no Hitomaro: A 7th-century poet who is often considered one of the

greatest early Tanka writers, his poems reflect themes of longing, separation,
and love.
 Ono no Komachi: Known for her passionate and evocative Tanka, she wrote
extensively about love, loss, and beauty, often using metaphors and symbolism
drawn from nature.

3.3 Structure and Style of Tanka

 The Five-Line Structure: Tanka begins with a 5-7-5 syllable pattern, followed by
two additional 7
 A complete overview and additional resources, ideology, literature, and
correlation of poems such as haiku, tanaga, and tanka to the tapestry and Japan
Japanese literature

-the body of written works produced by

Japanese authors in Japanese or, in its earliest
beginnings, at a time when Japan had no written
language, in the Chinese classical language.

Both in quantity and quality, Japanese literature

ranks as one of the major literatures of the
world, comparable in age, richness, and volume
to English literature, though its course of
development has been quite dissimilar. The surviving works comprise a literary tradition
extending from the 7th century CE to the present; during all this time there was never a
“dark age” devoid of literary production. Not only do poetry, the novel, and
the drama have long histories in Japan, but some literary genres not so highly
esteemed in other countries—including diaries, travel accounts, and books of random
thoughts—are also prominent. A considerable body of writing by Japanese in
the Chinese classical language, of much greater bulk and importance than comparable
Latin writings by Englishmen, testifies to the Japanese literary indebtedness to China.
Even the writings entirely in Japanese present an extraordinary variety of styles, which
cannot be explained merely in terms of the natural evolution of the language. Some
styles were patently influenced by the importance of Chinese vocabulary and syntax,
but others developed in response to the internal requirements of the various genres,
whether the terseness of haiku (a poem in 17 syllables) or the bombast of the dramatic
recitation.

The enduring appeal of Japanese literature

The difficulties of reading Japanese literature can

hardly be exaggerated; even a specialist in one
period is likely to have trouble deciphering a work
from another period or genre. Japanese style has
always fav ored ambiguity, and
the particles of speech necessary for easy
comprehension of a statement are often omitted as
unnecessary or as fussily precise. Sometimes the
only clue to the subject or object of a sentence is
the level of politeness in which the words are
couched; for example, the verb mesu (meaning “to
eat,” “to wear,” “to ride in a carriage,” etc.) designates merely an action performed by a
person of quality. In many cases, ready comprehension of a simple sentence depends
on a familiarity with the background of a particular period of history. The verb miru, “to
see,” had overtones of “to have an affair with” or even “to marry” during the Heian
period in the 10th and 11th centuries, when men were generally able to see women only
after they had become intimate. The long period of Japanese isolation in the 17th and
18th centuries also tended to make the literature provincial, or intelligible only to
persons sharing a common background; the phrase “some smoke rose noisily” (kemuri
tachisawagite), for example, was all readers of the late 17th century needed to realize
that an author was referring to the Great Fire of 1682 that ravaged the shogunal capital
of Edo (the modern city of Tokyo).

Despite the great difficulties arising from such idiosyncrasies of style, Japanese
literature of all periods is exceptionally appealing to modern readers, whether read in
the original or in translation. Because it is prevailingly subjective and coloured by an
emotional rather than intellectual or moralistic tone, its themes have a universal quality
almost unaffected by time. To read a diary by a court lady of the 10th century is still a
moving experience, because she described with such honesty and intensity her deepest
feelings that the modern-day reader forgets the chasm of history and changed social
customs separating her world from today’s.

The “pure” Japanese language, untainted and unfertilized by Chinese influence,

contained remarkably few words of an abstract nature. Just as English borrowed words
such as morality, honesty, justice, and the like from the Continent, the Japanese
borrowed these terms from China; but if the Japanese language was lacking in the
vocabulary appropriate to a Confucian essay, it could express almost infinite shadings
of emotional content. A Japanese poet who was dissatisfied with the limitations imposed
by his native language or who wished to describe unemotional subjects—whether the
quiet outing of aged gentlemen to a riverside or the poet’s awareness of his
insignificance as compared to the grandeur of the universe—naturally turned to writing
poetry in Chinese. For the most part, however, Japanese writers, far from feeling
dissatisfied with the limitations on expression imposed by their language, were
convinced that virtuoso perfection in phrasing and an acute refinement
of sentiment were more important to poetry than the voicing of intellectually satisfying
concepts.

From the 16th century on, many words that had been excluded from Japanese poetry
because of their foreign origins or their humble meanings, following the dictates of the
“codes” of poetic diction established in the 10th century, were adopted by the
practitioners of the haiku, originally an iconoclastic, popular verse form. These codes of
poetic diction, accompanied by a considerable body of criticism, were the creation of an
acute literary sensibility, fostered especially by the traditions of the court, and were
usually composed by the leading poets or dramatists themselves. These codes exerted
an inhibiting effect on new forms of literary composition, but they also helped to
preserve a distinctively aristocratic tone.
The Japanese language itself also shaped poetic devices and forms. Japanese lacks
a stress accent and meaningful rhymes (all words end in one of five simple vowels), two
traditional features of poetry in the West. By contrast, poetry in Japanese is
distinguished from prose mainly in that it consists of alternating lines of five and
seven syllables; however, if the intensity of emotional expression is low, this distinction
alone cannot save a poem from dropping into prose. The difficulty of maintaining a high
level of poetic intensity may account for the preference for short verse forms that could
be polished with perfectionist care. But however moving a tanka (verse in 31 syllables)
is, it clearly cannot fulfill some of the functions of longer poetic forms, and there are no
Japanese equivalents to the great longer poems of Western literature, such as John
Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Instead, Japanese poets
devoted their efforts to perfecting each syllable of their compositions, expanding the
content of a tanka by suggestion and allusion, and prizing shadings of tone
and diction more than originality or boldness of expression.
The fluid syntax of the prose affected not only style but content as well. Japanese
sentences are sometimes of inordinate length, responding to the subjective turnings and
twisting of the author’s thought, and smooth transitions from one statement to the next,
rather than structural unity, are considered the mark of excellent prose. The longer
works accordingly betray at times a lack of overall structure of the kind associated in the
West with Greek concepts of literary form but consist instead of episodes linked
chronologically or by other associations. The difficulty experienced by Japanese writers
in organizing their impressions and perceptions into sustained works may explain the
development of the diary and travel account, genres in which successive days or the
successive stages of a journey provide a structure for otherwise unrelated descriptions.
Japanese literature contains some of the world’s longest novels and plays, but its
genius is most strikingly displayed in the shorter works, whether the tanka, the haiku,
the Noh plays (also called No, or nō), or the poetic diaries.
Japanese literature absorbed much direct influence from China, but the relationship
between the two literatures is complex. Although the Japanese have been criticized
(even by some Japanese) for their imitations of Chinese examples, the earliest
Japanese novels in fact antedate their Chinese counterparts by centuries, and
Japanese theatre developed quite independently. Because the Chinese and Japanese
languages are unrelated, Japanese poetry naturally took different forms, although
Chinese poetic examples and literary theories were often in the minds of the Japanese
poets. Japanese and Korean may be related languages, but Korean literary influence
was negligible, though Koreans served an important function in transmitting Chinese
literary and philosophical works to Japan. Poetry and prose written in the Korean
language were unknown to the Japanese until relatively modern times.
From the 8th to the 19th century Chinese literature enjoyed greater prestige among
educated Japanese than their own; but a love for the Japanese classics, especially
those composed at the court in the 10th and 11th centuries, gradually spread among
the entire people and influenced literary expression in every form, even the songs and
tales composed by humble people totally removed from the aristocratic world portrayed
in classical literature.
The first writing of literature in Japanese was occasioned by influence from China. The
Japanese were still comparatively primitive and without writing when, in the first four
centuries CE, knowledge of Chinese civilization gradually reached them. They
rapidly assimilated much of this civilization, and the Japanese scribes adopted Chinese
characters as a system of writing, although an alphabet (if one had been available to
them) would have been infinitely better suited to the Japanese language. The
characters, first devised to represent Chinese monosyllables, could be used only with
great ingenuity to represent the agglutinative forms of the Japanese language. The
ultimate results were chaotic, giving rise to one of the most complicated systems of
writing ever invented. The use of Chinese characters enormously influenced modes of
expression and led to an association between literary composition and calligraphy
lasting many centuries.

Early writings
The earliest Japanese texts were written in Chinese because no system of transcribing
the sounds and grammatical forms of Japanese had been invented. The oldest known
inscription, on a sword that dates from about 440 CE, already showed some
modification of normal Chinese usage in order to transcribe Japanese names and
expressions. The most accurate way of writing Japanese words was by using Chinese
characters not for their meanings but for their phonetic values, giving each character a
pronunciation approximating that used by the Chinese themselves. In the
oldest extant works, the Kojiki (712; The Kojiki: Records of Ancient Matters) and Nihon
shoki, or Nihon-gi (720; Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697), more
than 120 songs, some dating back to perhaps the 5th century CE, are given in phonetic
transcription, doubtless because the Japanese attached great importance to the sounds
themselves. In these two works, both officially commissioned “histories” of Japan, many
sections were written entirely in Chinese; but parts of the Kojiki were composed in a
complicated mixture of languages that made use of the Chinese characters sometimes
for their meaning and sometimes for their sound.
Origin of the tanka in the Kojiki
The Kojiki, though revered as the most ancient document concerning the myths and
history of the Japanese people, was not included in collections of literature until well into
the 20th century. The myths in the Kojiki are occasionally beguiling (see Japanese
mythology), but the only truly literary parts of the work are the songs. The early songs
lack a fixed metrical form; the lines, consisting of an indeterminate number of syllables,
were strung out to irregular lengths, showing no conception of poetic form. Some songs,
however, seem to have been reworked—perhaps when the manuscript was transcribed
in the 8th century—into what became the classic Japanese verse form, the tanka (short
poem), consisting of five lines of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables. Various
poetic devices employed in these songs, such as the makura kotoba (“pillow word”), a
kind of fixed epithet, remained a feature of later poetry.
Altogether, some 500 primitive songs have been preserved in various collections. Many
describe travel, and a fascination with place-names, evident in the loving enumeration
of mountains, rivers, and towns with their mantic epithets, was developed to great
lengths in the gazetteers (fudoki) compiled at the beginning of the 8th century. These
works, of only intermittent literary interest, devote considerable attention to the folk
origins of different place-names, as well as to other local legends.
The significance of the Man’yōshū
A magnificent anthology of poetry, the Man’yōshū (compiled after 759; Ten Thousand
Leaves), is the single great literary monument of the Nara period (710–784), although it
includes poetry written in the preceding century, if not earlier. Most of the 4,500 or so
poems are tanka, but the masterpieces of the Man’yōshū are the 260 chōka (“long
poems”), ranging up to 150 lines in length and cast in the form of alternating lines in five
and seven syllables followed by a concluding line in seven syllables. The amplitude of
the chōka permitted the poets to treat themes impossible within the compass of the
tanka—whether the death of a wife or child, the glory of the imperial family, the
discovery of a gold mine in a remote province, or the hardships of military service.
The greatest of the Man’yōshū poets, Kakinomoto Hitomaro, served as a kind of poet
laureate in the late 7th and early 8th centuries, accompanying the sovereigns on their
excursions and composing odes of lamentation for deceased members of the imperial
family. Modern scholars have suggested that the chōka may have originated
as exorcisms of the dead, quieting the ghosts of recently deceased persons by reciting
their deeds and promising that they will never be forgotten. Some of Hitomaro’s
masterpieces so convincingly describe the glories of princes or princesses he may
never have met that they transcend any difference between “public” expressions of grief
and his private feelings. Hitomaro’s chōka are unique in Japanese poetry thanks to their
superb combination of imagery, syntax, and emotional strength. His tanka also display
the evocative qualities often associated with later Japanese poetry.
The chōka often concluded with one or more hanka (“envoys”) that resume central
points of the preceding poem. The hanka written by the 8th-century poet Yamabe
Akahito are so perfectly conceived as to make the chōka they follow at times seem
unnecessary; the concision and evocativeness of these poems, identical in form with
the tanka, are close to the ideals of later Japanese poetry. Nevertheless, the supreme
works of the Man’yōshū are the chōka of Hitomaro, Ōtomo Tabito, Ōtomo
Yakamochi (probably the chief compiler of the anthology), and Yamanoue Okura. The
most striking quality of the Man’yōshū is its powerful sincerity of expression. The poets
were certainly not artless songsmiths exclaiming in wonder over the beauties of nature,
a picture that is often painted of them by sentimental critics, but their emotions were
stronger and more directly expressed than in later poetry. The corpse of an unknown
traveler, rather than the falling of the cherry blossoms, stirred in Hitomaro an awareness
of the uncertainty of human life.
The Man’yōshū is exceptional in the number of poems composed outside the court,
whether by frontier guards or persons of humble occupation. Perhaps some of these
poems were actually written by courtiers in the guise of commoners, but the use
of dialect and familiar imagery contrasts with the strict poetic diction imposed in the 10th
century. The diversity of themes and poetic forms also distinguishes
the Man’yōshū from the more polished but narrower verse of later times. In Okura’s
famous Dialogue on Poverty, for example, two men—one poor and the other destitute—
describe their miserable lots, revealing a concern over social conditions that would be
absent from the classical tanka. Okura’s visit to China early in the 8th century, as the
member of a Japanese embassy, may account for Chinese influence in his poetry. His
poems are also prefaced in many instances by passages in Chinese stating the
circumstances of the poems or citing Buddhist parallels.
The Man’yōshū was transcribed in an almost perversely complicated system that used
Chinese characters arbitrarily, sometimes for meaning and sometimes for sound. The
lack of a suitable script probably inhibited literary production in Japanese during the
Nara period. The growing importance, however, of Chinese poetry as the mark of
literary accomplishment in a courtier may also have interrupted the development of
Japanese literature after its first flowering in the Man’yōshū.
Eighteen Man’yōshū poets are represented in the collection Kaifūsō (751), an anthology
of poetry in Chinese composed by members of the court. These poems are little more
than pastiches of ideas and images borrowed directly from China; the composition of
such poetry reflects the enormous prestige of Chinese civilization at this time.
Classical literature: Heian period (794–1185)

The foundation of the city of Heian-kyō (later known as Kyōto) as the capital
of Japan marked the beginning of a period of great literary brilliance. The earliest
writings of the period, however, were almost all in Chinese because of the continued
desire to emulate the culture of the continent. Three imperially sponsored anthologies of
Chinese poetry appeared between 814 and 827, and it seemed for a time that writing in
Japanese would be relegated to an extremely minor position. The most distinguished
writer of Chinese verse, the 9th-century poet Sugawara Michizane, gave a final lustre to
this period of Chinese learning by his erudition and poetic gifts, but his refusal to go
to China when offered the post of ambassador, on the grounds that China no longer had
anything to teach Japan, marked a turning point in the response to Chinese influence.
Poetry
The invention of the kana phonetic syllabary, traditionally attributed to the celebrated
9th-century Shingon priest and Sanskrit scholar Kūkai, enormously facilitated writing in
Japanese. Private collections of poetry in kana began to be compiled about 880, and in
905 the Kokinshū (A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern), the first major work of
kana literature, was compiled by the poet Ki Tsurayuki and others. This anthology
contains 1,111 poems divided into 20 books arranged by topics, including 6 books of
seasonal poems, 5 books of love poems, and single books devoted to such subjects as
travel, mourning, and congratulations. The two prefaces are clearly indebted to the
theories of poetry described by the compilers of such Chinese anthologies as
the Shijing (“Classic of Poetry”) and Wen xuan (“Selections of Refined Literature”), but
the preferences they express would be shared by most tanka poets for the next 1,000
years. The preface by Tsurayuki, the oldest work of sustained prose in kana,
enumerated the circumstances that move men to write poetry; he believed
that melancholy, whether aroused by a change in the seasons or by a glimpse of white
hairs reflected in a mirror, provided a more congenial mood for writing poetry than the
harsher emotions treated in the earlier, pre-kana anthology Man’yōshū. The best tanka
in the Kokinshū captivate the reader by their perceptivity and tonal beauty, but these
flawlessly turned miniatures lack the variety of the Man’yōshū.
Skill in composing tanka became an asset in gaining preference at court; it was also
essential to a lover, whose messages to his mistress (who presumably could not read
Chinese, still the language employed by men in official documents) often consisted of
poems describing his own emotions or begging her favours. In this period the tanka
almost completely ousted the chōka, the length of which was indefinite, because the
shorter tanka were more suited to the lover’s billet-doux or to competitions on
prescribed themes.
For the poets of the Kokinshū and the later court anthologies, originality was less
desirable than perfection of language and tone. The critics, far from praising novelty of
effects, condemned deviation from the standard poetic diction—which was established
by the Kokinshū and consisted of some 2,000 words—and insisted on
absolute adherence to the poetic codes first formulated in the 10th century. Although
these restrictions saved Japanese poetry from lapses into bad taste or vulgarity, they
froze it for centuries in prescribed modes of expression. Only a skilled critic can
distinguish a typical tanka of the 10th century from one of the 18th centuries.
The Kokinshū set the precedent for later court anthologies, and a knowledge of its
contents was indispensable to all poets as a guide and source of literary allusions.
Love poetry occupies a prominent place in the Kokinshū, but the joys of love are seldom
celebrated; instead, the poets write in the melancholy vein prescribed in the preface,
describing the uncertainties before a meeting with the beloved, the pain of parting, or
the sad realization that an affair has ended. The invariable perfection of diction,
unmarred by any indecorous cry from the heart, may sometimes make one doubt the
poet’s sincerity. This is not true of the great Kokinshū poets of the 9th century—Ono
Komachi, Lady Ise, Ariwara Narihira, and Tsurayuki himself—but even Buddhist priests,
who presumably had renounced carnal love, wrote love poetry at the court competitions,
and it is hard to detect any difference between such poems and those of actual lovers.
The preface of the Kokinshū lists judgments on the principal poets of the collection.
This criticism is unsatisfying to a modern reader because it is so terse and unanalytical,
but it nevertheless marks a beginning of Japanese poetic criticism, an art that
developed impressively during the course of the Heian period.
Prose
Ki Tsurayuki is celebrated also for his Tosa nikki (936; The Tosa Diary), the account of
his homeward journey to Kyōto from the province of Tosa, where he had served as
governor. Tsurayuki wrote this diary in Japanese, though men at the time normally kept
their diaries in Chinese; that may explain why he pretended that a woman in the
governor’s entourage was its author. Events of the journey are interspersed with the
poems composed on various occasions. The work is affecting especially because of the
repeated, though muted, references to the death of Tsurayuki’s daughter in Tosa.
Tosa nikki is the earliest example of a literary diary. Most of the later Heian diarists who
wrote in the Japanese language were court ladies; their writings include some of the
supreme masterpieces of the literature. Kagerō nikki (The Gossamer Years) describes
the life between 954 and 974 of the second wife of Fujiwara Kaneie, a prominent court
official. The first volume, related long after the events, is in the manner of an
autobiographical novel; even the author confesses that her remembrances are probably
tinged with fiction. The next two volumes approach a true diary, with some entries
apparently made on the days indicated. The writer (known only as “the mother of
Michitsuna”) describes, with many touches of self-pity, her unhappy life with her
husband. She evidently assumed that readers would sympathize, and often this is the
case, though her self-centred complaints are not endearing. In one passage, in which
she gloats over the death of a rival’s child, her obsession with her own griefs shows to
worst advantage. Yet her journal is extraordinarily moving precisely because the author
dwells exclusively on universally recognizable emotions and omits the details of court
life that must have absorbed the men.
Other diaries of the period include the anecdotal Murasaki Shikibu nikki (“The Diary of
Murasaki Shikibu”; Eng. trans. Murasaki Shikibu: Her Diary and Poetic Memoirs), at
once an absorbing literary work and a source of information on the court life the author
(Murasaki Shikibu) described more romantically in her masterpiece Genji
monogatari (c. 1010; The Tale of Genji) and in Izumi Shikibu nikki (The Diary of Izumi
Shikibu), which is less a diary than a short story liberally ornamented with poetry.
These “diaries” are closely related in content and form to the uta monogatari (“poem
tales”) that emerged as a literary genre later in the 10th century. Ise
monogatari (c. 980; Tales of Ise) consists of 143 episodes, each containing one or more
poems and an explanation in prose of the circumstances of composition.
The brevity and often the ambiguity of the tanka gave rise to a need for such
explanations, and, when these explanations became extended or (as in the case of Ise
monogatari) were interpreted as biographical information about one poet (Ariwara
Narihira), they approached the realm of fiction.
Along with the poem tales, there were works of religious or fanciful inspiration going
back to Nihon ryōiki (822; Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition), an
account of Buddhist miracles in Japan compiled by the priest Kyōkai. Priests probably
used these stories, written in Chinese, as a source of sermons with the intent of
persuading ordinary Japanese, incapable of reading difficult works of theology, that they
must lead virtuous lives if they were not to suffer in hell for present misdeeds. No
such didactic intent is noticeable in Taketori monogatari (10th century; Tale of the
Bamboo Cutter), a fairy tale about a princess who comes from the Moon to dwell
on Earth in the house of a humble bamboo cutter; the various tests she imposes on her
suitors, fantastic though they are, are described with humour and realism.
The first lengthy work of fiction in Japanese, Utsubo monogatari (“The Tale of the
Hollow Tree”), was apparently written between 970 and 983, although the last chapter
may have been written later. This uneven, ill-digested work is of interest chiefly as
an amalgam of elements in the poem tales and fairy tales; it contains 986 tanka, and its
episodes range from early realism to pure fantasy.
The contrast between this crude work and the sublime Genji monogatari is
overwhelming. The Genji monogatari is the finest work not only of the Heian period but
of all Japanese literature and merits being called the first important novel written
anywhere in the world. Genji monogatari was called a work of mono no aware (“a
sensitivity to things”) by the great 18th-century literary scholar Motoori Norinaga; the
hero, Prince Genji, is not remarkable for his martial prowess or his talents as a
statesman but as an incomparable lover, sensitive to each of the many women he wins.
The story is related in terms of the successive women Genji loves; each of them evokes
a different response from this marvelously complex man. The last third of the novel,
describing the world after Genji’s death, is much darker in tone, and the principal
figures, though still impressive, seem no more than fragmentations of the peerless
Genji.
The success of Genji monogatari was immediate. The author of the touching Sarashina
nikki (mid-11th century; “Sarashina Diary”; Eng. trans. As I Crossed a Bridge of
Dreams) describes how as a girl she longed to visit the capital so that she might read
the entire work (which had been completed some 10 years earlier). Imitations and
derivative works based on Genji monogatari, especially on the last third of it, continued
to be written for centuries, inhibiting the fiction composed by the court society.
Makura no sōshi (c. 1000; The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon) is another masterpiece of
the Heian period that should be mentioned with Genji monogatari. Japanese critics have
often distinguished the aware of Genji monogatari and the okashi of Makura no
sōshi. Aware means sensitivity to the tragic implications of a moment or
gesture, okashi the comic overtones of perhaps the same moment or gesture. The
lover’s departure at dawn evoked many wistful passages in Genji monogatari, but
in Makura no sōshi Sei Shōnagon noted with unsparing exactness the lover’s fumbling,
ineffectual leave-taking and his lady’s irritation. Murasaki Shikibu’s aware can be traced
through later literature—sensitivity always marked the writings of any author in the
aristocratic tradition—but Sei Shōnagon’s wit belonged to the Heian court alone.
The Heian court society passed its prime by the middle of the 11th century, but it did not
collapse for another 100 years. Long after its political power had been usurped by
military men, the court retained its prestige as the fountainhead of culture. But in the
12th century, literary works belonging to a quite different tradition began to
appear. Konjaku monogatari (early 12th century; “Tales of Now and Then”; partially
translated into English as Ages Ago and as Tales of Times Now Past), a massive
collection of religious stories and folktales drawn not only from the Japanese
countryside but also from Indian and Chinese sources, described elements of society
that had never been treated in the court novels. These stories, though crudely written,
provide glimpses of how the common people spoke and behaved in an age marked by
warfare and new religious movements. The collection of folk songs Ryōjin
hishō, compiled in 1179 by the emperor Go-Shirakawa, suggests the vitality of this
burgeoning popular culture even as the aristocratic society was being threatened with
destruction.
Medieval literature: Kamakura, Muromachi, and Azuchi-Momoyama periods (1192–
1600)

Kamakura period (1192–1333)

Nise-e of Minamoto Kintada, one of the 36 poets, from a handscroll by Fujiwara
Nobuzane, Kamakura period (1192–1333); in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The warfare of the 12th century brought to undisputed power military men (samurai)
whose new regime was based on martial discipline. Though the samurai expressed
respect for the old culture, some of them even studying tanka composition with the
Kyōto masters, the capital of the country moved to Kamakura. The lowered position
of women under this feudalistic government perhaps explains the noticeable diminution
in the importance of writings by court ladies; indeed, there was hardly a woman writer of
distinction between the 13th and 19th centuries. The court poets, ho wever, remained
prolific: 15 imperially sponsored anthologies were completed between 1188 and 1439,
and most of the tanka followed the stereotypes established in earlier literary periods.
The finest of the later anthologies, the Shin
kokinshū (c. 1205), was compiled by Fujiwara Sadaie, or
Teika, among others, and is considered by many as the
supreme accomplishment in tanka composition. The title of
the anthology—“the new Kokinshū”—indicates the
confidence of the compilers that the poets represented
were worthy successors of those in the 905 collection; they
included (besides the great Teika himself) Teika’s
father, Fujiwara Toshinari (Fujiwara Shunzei); the
priest Saigyō; and the former emperor Go-Toba. These
poets looked beyond the visible world for symbolic
meanings. The brilliant colours of landscapes filled with
Okumura
blossoms or reddening leaves gave way
Masanobu: Hanshozuku Bijin
to
SoroiHanshozuku Bijin Soroi,
monochrome paintings; the poet, instead of dwelling on the pleasure or grief of an
experience, sought in it some deeper meaning he could sense if not fully express. The
tastes of Teika especially dominated Japanese poetic sensibility, thanks not only to his
poetry and essays on poetry but to his choices of the works of the past most worthy of
preservation.
Teika is credited also with a novel, Matsura no miya monogatari (“Tale of Matsura
Shrine,” Eng. trans. The Tale of Matsura). Though it is unfinished and awkwardly
constructed, its dreamlike atmosphere lingers in the mind with the overtones of
Teika’s poetry; dreams of the past were indeed the refuge of the medieval romancers,
who modeled their language on the Genji monogatari, though it was now archaic, and
borrowed their themes and characters from the Heian masterpieces. Stories about
wicked stepmothers are fairly common; perhaps the writers, contrasting their neglect
with the fabled lives of the Heian courtiers, identified themselves with the maltreated
stepdaughters, and the typical happy ending of such stories—the stepdaughter
in Sumiyoshi monogatari is married to a powerful statesman and her wicked stepmother
humiliated—may have been the dream fulfillment of their own hopes.
Various diaries describe travels between Kyōto and the shogun’s capital in Kamakura.
Courtiers often made this long journey in order to press claims in lawsuits, and they
recorded their impressions along the way in the typical mixture of prose and
poetry. Izayoi nikki (“Diary of the Waning Moon”; Eng. trans. in Translations from Early
Japanese Literature) tells of a journey made in 1277 by the nun Abutsu. A later
autobiographical work that also contains extensive descriptions of travel is the
superb Towazu-gatari (c. 1307; “A Story Nobody Asked For”; Eng. trans. The
Confessions of Lady Nijō) by Lady Nijō, a work (discovered only in 1940) that provides a
final moment of glory to the long tradition of introspective writing by women at court.
Although these writings in the aristocratic manner preserved much of the manner
of Heian literature, works of different character became even more prominent in the
medieval period. There are many collections of Buddhist and popular tales, of which the
most enjoyable is the Uji shūi monogatari (A Collection of Tales from Uji),
a compilation made over a period of years of some 197 brief stories. Although the
incidents described in these tales are often similar to those found in Konjaku
monogatari, they are told with considerably greater literary skill.
An even more distinctive literary genre of the period is the gunki monogatari, or war tale.
The most famous, Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike), was apparently first
written at the court about 1220, probably by a nobleman who drew his materials from
the accounts recited by priests of the warfare between the Taira (Heike) and the
Minamoto (Genji) families in the preceding century. The celebrated opening lines of the
work, a declaration of the impermanence of all things, also states the main subject, the
rise and fall of the Taira family. The text, apparently at first in 3 books, was expanded to
12 in the course of time, as the result of being recited with improvisations by priest-
entertainers. This oral transmission may account not only for the unusually large
number of textual variants but also for the exceptionally musical and dramatic style of
the work. Unlike the Heian novelists, who rarely admitted words of Chinese origin into
their works, the reciters of the Heike monogatari employed the contrasting sounds of the
imported words to produce what has been acclaimed as the great classic of Japanese
style. Although the work is curiously uneven, effective scenes being followed by dull
passages in which the narrator seems to be stressing the factual accuracy of his
materials, it is at least intermittently superb, and it provided many later novelists and
dramatists with characters and incidents for their works.
Heike monogatari was by no means the earliest literary work describing warfare, and
other writings, mainly historical in content, were graced by literary flourishes uncommon
in similar Western works. Ōkagami (c. 1120? “The Great Mirror”; Eng. trans. Ōkagami),
the most famous of the “mirrors” of Japanese history, undoubtedly influenced the
composition of Heike monogatari, especially in its moralistic tone. Hōgen
monogatari (Eng. trans. Hōgen monogatari) and Heiji monogatari (partial Eng. trans.
in Translations from Early Japanese Literature) chronicle warfare that antedates the
events described in Heike monogatari but were probably written somewhat later.
War tales continued to be composed throughout the medieval period.
The Taiheiki (“Chronicle of the Great Peace”; Eng. trans. Taiheiki), for example, covers
about 50 years, beginning in 1318, when the emperor Go-Daigo ascended the throne.
Though revered as a classic by generations of Japanese, it possesses comparatively
little appeal for Western readers, no doubt because so few of the figures come alive.
Characters are more vividly described in two historical romances of the mid- to late 14th
century: Soga monogatari, an account of the vendetta carried out by the Soga brothers,
and Gikeiki (“Chronicle of Gikei”; Eng. trans. Yoshitsune), describing the life of the
warrior Minamoto Yoshitsune. Though inartistically composed, these portraits of
resourceful and daring heroes caught the imaginations of the Japanese, and their
exploits are still prominent on the Kabuki stage.
Another important variety of medieval literature was the reflective essays of Buddhist
priests. Hōjō-ki (1212; The Ten Foot Square Hut) by Kamo Chōmei is a hermit’s
description of his disenchantment with the world and his discovery of peace in a lonely
retreat. The elegiac beauty of its language gives this work, brief though it is, the dignity
of a classic. Chōmei was also a distinguished poet, and his essay Mumyōshō (c. 1210–
12; “Nameless Notes”) is perhaps the finest example of traditional Japanese
poetic criticism.
A later priest, Yoshida Kenkō, writing during the days of warfare and unrest that brought
an end to the Kamakura shogunate in 1333, the brief restoration of imperial authority
under the emperor Go-Daigo from 1333 to 1335, and the institution of the Ashikaga
shogunate in 1338, barely hints at the turmoil of the times in his
masterpiece Tsurezuregusa (c. 1330; Essays in Idleness); instead, he looks back
nostalgically to the happier days of the past. Kenkō’s aesthetic judgments, often based
on a this-worldly awareness rather surprising in a Buddhist priest, gained wide currency,
especially after the 17th century, when Tsurezuregusa was widely read.
The Muromachi (1338–1573) and Azuchi-Momoyama (1574–1600) periods
In the 15th century a poetic form of multiple authorship displaced the tanka as the
preferred medium of the leading poets. Renga (linked verse) had begun as the
composition of a single tanka by two people and was a popular pastime even in remote
rural areas. One person would compose the first three lines of a tanka, often giving
obscure or even contradictory details in order to make it harder for the second person to
complete the poem intelligibly. Gradually, renga spread to the court poets, who saw the
artistic possibilities of this diversion and drew up “codes” intended to establish renga as
an art. These codes made possible the masterpieces of the 15th century, but their
insistence on formalities (e.g., how often a “link” about the Moon might appear in 100
links and which links must end with a noun and which with a verb) inevitably diluted the
vigour and freshness of the early renga, itself a reaction against the excessively formal
tanka. Nevertheless, the renga of the great 15th-century master Sōgi and his associates
are unique in their shifting lyrical impulses, their moves from link to link like successive
moments of a landscape seen from a boat, avoiding any illusion that the whole was
conceived in one person’s mind.
While of considerable historical interest, the short stories of the 15th and 16th centuries,
commonly known as otogi-zōshi, cannot be said to possess high literary value. Some
look back to the world of the Heian court; others contain folk materials or elements of
the miraculous that may have been included to interest barely literate readers.
Promising stories are sometimes ruined by absurdities before their course is run, but
even the less successful stories provide valuable glimpses of a society that, though
afflicted by warfare, enjoyed the possibility of welcome change. The stories are
anonymous, but the authors seem to have been both courtiers and Buddhist priests.
Unquestionably the finest literary works of the 15th century are the Noh dramas,
especially those by Zeami. They were written in magnificent poetry (often compared to
“brocade” because of the rich pattern created by many allusions to poetry of the past)
and were provided with a structure that is at once extremely economical and free. Many
are concerned with the Buddhist sin of attachment: an inability to forget his life in this
world prevents a dead man from gaining release but forces him to return again and
again as a ghost to relive the violence or passion of his former existence. Only prayer
and renunciation can bring about deliverance. Zeami’s treatises on the art of Noh
display extraordinary perceptivity. His stated aims were dramatic conviction and reality,
but these ideals meant ultimates to him and not superficial realism. Some Noh plays, it
is true, have little symbolic or supernatural content. But, in a typical program of five Noh
plays, the central elements are the highly poetic and elusive masterpieces that suggest
a world which is invisible to the eye but can be evoked by the actors through the beauty
of movements and speech. Unhappiness over a world torn by disorder may have led
writers to suggest in their works truths that lie too deep for words. This seems to have
been the meaning of yūgen (“mystery and depth”), the ideal of the Noh plays. Parallel
developments occurred in the tea ceremony, the landscape garden, and monochrome
painting, all arts that suggest or symbolize rather than state.
Literature during the Tokugawa period (1603–1867)

The restoration of peace and the unification of Japan were achieved in the early 17th
century, and for approximately 250 years the Japanese enjoyed almost uninterrupted
peace. During the first half of the Tokugawa period, the cities
of Kyōto and Ōsaka dominated cultural activity, but from about 1770 Edo (the modern
Tokyo) became paramount. From the mid-1630s to the early 1850s Japan was closed,
by government decree, to contact with the outside world. Initially, this isolation
encouraged the development of indigenous forms of literature, but, eventually, in the
virtual absence of fertilizing influence from abroad, it resulted in provincial writing. The
adoption of printing in the early 17th century made a popular literature possible. The
Japanese had known the art of printing since at least the 8th century, but they had
reserved it exclusively for reproducing Buddhist writings. The Japanese classics existed
only in manuscript form. It is possible that the demand for copies of literary works was
so small that it could be satisfied with manuscripts, costly though they were; or
perhaps aesthetic considerations made the Japanese prefer manuscripts in beautiful
calligraphy, sometimes embellished with illustrations. Whatever the case, not until 1591
was a nonreligious work printed. About the same time, Portuguese missionaries in
Nagasaki were printing books in the Roman alphabet. In 1593, in the wake of the
Japanese invasion of Korea, a printing press with movable type was sent as a present
to the emperor Go-Yōzei. Printing soon developed into the hobby or extravagance of
the rich, and many examples of Japanese literature began to appear in small editions.
Commercial publication began in 1609; by the 1620s even works of slight literary value
were being printed for a public eager for new books.
Early Tokugawa period (1603–c. 1770)
Poetry underwent many changes during the early part of the Tokugawa period. At first
the court poets jealously maintained their monopoly over the tanka, but gradually other
men, many of them kokugakusha (“scholars of national learning”), changed the course
of tanka composition by attempting to restore to the form the simple strength
of Man’yōshū. The best of the waka poets in the courtly tradition was Kagawa Kageki, a
poet of exceptional skill, though he is less likely to leave an impression on modern
readers than the unconventional Ōkuma Kotomichi or Tachibana Akemi, both of whom
died in 1868, during the first year of the Meiji era.
The chief development in poetry during the Tokugawa shogunate was the emergence of
the haiku as an important genre. This exceedingly brief form (17 syllables arranged in
lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables) had originated in the hokku, or opening verse of
a renga sequence, which had to contain in its three lines mention of the season, the
time of day, the dominant features of the landscape, and so on, making it almost an
independent poem. The hokku became known as the haiku late in the 19th century,
when it was entirely divested of its original function of opening a sequence of verse, but
today even the 17th-century hokku are usually called haiku.
As early as the 16th century haikai no renga, or comic renga, had been composed by
way of diversion after an evening of serious renga composition, reverting to the original
social, rather than literary, purpose of making linked verse. As so often happened
in Japan, however, a new art, born as a reaction to the stultifying practices of an older
art, was “discovered,” codified, and made respectable by practitioners of the older art,
generally at the cost of its freshness and vitality. Matsunaga Teitoku, a conventional
17th-century poet of tanka and renga who revered the old traditions, became almost in
spite of himself the mentor of the new movement in comic verse, largely as the result of
pressure from his eager disciples. Teitoku brought dignity to the comic renga and made
it a demanding medium, rather than the quip of a moment. His haikai were
distinguishable from serious renga not by their comic conception but by the presence of
a haigon—a word of Chinese or recent origin that was normally not tolerated in classical
verse.
Inevitably, a reaction arose against Teitoku’s formalism. The poets of the Danrin school,
headed by Nishiyama Sōin and Saikaku, insisted that it was pointless to waste months if
not years perfecting a sequence of 100 verses. Their ideal was rapid
and impromptu composition, and their verses, generally colloquial in diction, were
intended to amuse for a moment rather than to last for all time. Saikaku especially
excelled at one-man composition of extended sequences; in 1684 he composed the
incredible total of 23,500 verses in a single day and night, too fast for the scribes to do
more than tally.
The haiku was perfected into a form capable of conveying poetry of the highest quality
by Bashō. After passing through an apprenticeship in both Teitoku and Danrin schools,
Bashō founded a school of his own and insisted that a haiku must contain both a
perception of some eternal truth and an element of contemporaneity, combining the
characteristic features of the two earlier schools. Despite their brief compass, Bashō’s
haiku often suggest, by means of the few essential elements he presents, the whole
world from which they have been extracted; the reader must participate in the creation
of the poem. Bashō’s best-known works are travel accounts interspersed with his
verses; of these, Oku no hosomichi (1694; The Narrow Road Through the Deep North)
is perhaps the most popular and revered work of Tokugawa literature.
The general name for the prose composed between 1600 and 1682 is kana-zōshi, or
“kana books,” the name originally having been used to distinguish popular writings in
the Japanese syllabary from more-learned works in Chinese. The genre embraced not
only fiction but also works of a near-historical nature, pious tracts, books of practical
information, guidebooks, evaluations of courtesans and actors, and miscellaneous
essays. Only one writer of any distinction is associated with the kana-zōshi—Asai Ryōi,
a samurai who became the first popular and professional writer in Japanese history.
Thanks to the development of relatively cheap methods of printing and a marked
increase in the reading public, Ryōi was able to make a living as a writer. Although
some of his works are Buddhist, he wrote in a simple style, mainly in kana. His most
famous novel, Ukiyo monogatari (c. 1661; “Tales of the Floating World”), is primitive
both in technique and in plot, but under his mask of frivolity Ryōi attempted to treat the
hardships of a society where the officially proclaimed Confucian philosophy concealed
gross inequalities.
The first important novelist of the new era was Saikaku. Some Japanese critics rank him
second only to Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji, in all Japanese literature,
and his works have been edited with the care accorded only to great classics. Such
attention would surely have surprised Saikaku, whose fiction was dashed off almost as
rapidly as his legendary performances of comic renga, with little concern for the
judgments of posterity. His first novel, Kōshoku ichidai otoko (1682; The Life of an
Amorous Man), changed the course of Japanese fiction. The title itself had strong erotic
overtones, and the plot describes the adventures of one man, from
his precocious essays at lovemaking as a child of seven to his decision at age 60 to sail
to an island populated only by women. The licensed quarters of prostitution established
in various Japanese cities by the Tokugawa government (despite its professions of
Confucian morality), in order to help control unruly samurai by dissipating their energies,
became a centre of the new culture. Expertise in the customs of the brothels was
judged the mark of the man of the world. The old term ukiyo, which had formerly meant
the “sad world” of Buddhist stories, now came to designate its homonym, the “floating
world” of pleasure; this was the chosen world of Saikaku’s hero, Yonosuke, who
became the emblematic figure of the era.
Saikaku’s masterpiece, Kōshoku gonin onna (1686; Five Women Who Loved Love),
described the loves of women of the merchant class, rather than prostitutes; this was
the first time that women of this class were given such attention. In other works he
described, sometimes with humour but sometimes with bitterness, the struggles of
merchants to make fortunes. His combination of a glittering style and warm sympathy
for the characters lifted his tales from the borders of pornography to high art.
Saikaku was a central figure in the renaissance of literature of the late 17th century. The
name Genroku (an era name designating the period 1688–1704) is often used of the
characteristic artistic products: paintings and prints of the ukiyo-e (“pictures of the
floating world”) style; ukiyo-zōshi (“tales of the floating world”); Kabuki; jōruri, or puppet
theatre; and haiku poetry. Unlike its antecedents, this culture prized modernity above
conformity to the ancient traditions; to be abreast of the floating world was to be up-to-
date, sharing in the latest fashions and slang, delighting in the moment rather than in
the eternal truths of Noh plays or medieval poetry.
Another, darker side to Genroku culture is depicted in Saikaku’s late works, with their
descriptions of the desperate expedients to which people turned in order to pay their
bills. Saikaku seldom showed much sympathy for the prostitutes he described, but the
chief dramatist of the time, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, wrote his best plays about
unhappy women, driven by poverty into their lives as prostitutes, whose only release
from the sordid world in which they were condemned to dwell came when they joined
their lovers in double suicides. In the world of merchants treated by Chikamatsu, a lack
of money, rather than the cosmic griefs of the Noh plays, drove men to death with the
prostitutes they loved but could not afford to buy.
Chikamatsu wrote most of his plays for the puppet theatre, which, in the 18th century,
enjoyed even greater popularity than Kabuki. His plays fell into two main categories:
those based, however loosely, on historical facts or legends, and those dealing with
contemporary life. The domestic plays are rated much higher critically because they
avoid the bombast and fantastic displays of heroism that mark the historical dramas, but
the latter, adapted for the Kabuki theatre, are superb acting vehicles.
The mainstays of the puppet theatre were written not by Chikamatsu but by his
successors; his plays, despite their literary superiority, failed to satisfy audiences’
craving for displays of puppet techniques and for extreme representations of loyalty,
self-sacrifice, and other virtues of the society. The most popular puppet play (later also
adapted for Kabuki actors) was Chūshingura (1748; “The Treasury of Loyal Retainers”;
Eng. trans. Chūshingura) by Takeda Izumo and his collaborators; the same men were
responsible for half a dozen other perennial favourites of the Japanese stage. The last
great 18th-century writer of puppet plays, Chikamatsu Hanji, was a master of highly
dramatic, if implausible, plots.
Late Tokugawa period (c. 1770–1867)
The literature of the late Tokugawa period is generally inferior to earlier achievements,
especially those of the Genroku masters. Authentic new voices, however, were heard in
traditional poetic forms. Later neo-Man’yōshū poets such as Ryōkan, Ōkuma Kotomichi,
and Tachibana Akemi proved that the tanka was not limited to descriptions of the sights
of nature or disappointed love but could express joy over fish for dinner or wrath at
political events. Some poets who felt that the tanka did not provide ample scope for the
display of such emotions turned, as in the past, to writing poetry in Chinese. The early
19th-century poet Rai Sanyō probably wrote verse in Chinese more skillfully than any
previous Japanese.
Later Tokugawa poets also added distinctive notes of their own to the haiku. Buson, for
example, introduced a romantic and narrative element, and Issa employed the accents
of the common people.
A great variety of fiction was produced during the last century of the
Tokugawa shogunate, but it is commonly lumped together under the
somewhat derogatory heading of gesaku (“playful composition”). The word playful did
not necessarily refer to the subject matter but to the professed attitude of the authors,
educated men who disclaimed responsibility for their compositions. Ueda Akinari, the
last master of fiction of the 18th century, won a high place in literary history mainly
through his brilliant style, displayed to best advantage in Ugetsu
monogatari (1776; Tales of Moonlight and Rain), a collection of supernatural tales.
The gesaku writers, however, did not follow Akinari in his perfectionist attention to style
and construction; instead, many of them produced books of almost formless gossip,
substituting the raciness of daily speech for the elegance of the classical language and
relying heavily on the copious illustrations for success with the public.
The gesaku writers were professionals who made their living by sale of their books.
They aimed at as wide a public as possible, and, when a book was successful, it was
usually followed by as many sequels as the public would accept. The most popular of
the comic variety of gesaku fiction was Tōkai dōchū hizakurige (1802–22; “Travels on
Foot on the Tōkaidō”; Eng. trans. Shank’s Mare), by Jippensha Ikku, an account of the
travels and comic misfortunes of two irrepressible men from Edo along the Tōkaidō, the
great highway between Kyōto and Edo. Shunshoku umegoyomi (1832–33; “Spring
Colours: The Plum Calendar”), by Tamenaga Shunsui, is the story of Tanjirō, a
peerlessly handsome but ineffectual young man for whose affections various women
fight. The author at one point defended himself against charges of immorality: “Even
though the women I portray may seem immoral, they are all imbued with
deep sentiments of chastity and fidelity.” It was the standard practice of gesaku writers,
no matter how frivolous their compositions might be, to pretend that their intent
was didactic.
The yomihon (“books for reading”—so called to distinguish them from works enjoyed
mainly for their illustrations) were much more openly moralistic. Although they were
considered to be gesaku, no less than the most trivial books of gossip, their plots were
burdened with historical materials culled from Chinese and Japanese sources, and the
authors frequently underlined their didactic purpose. Despite the serious intent of
the yomihon, they were romances rather than novels, and their characters, highly
schematized, include witches and fairy princesses as well as impeccably noble
gentlemen. Where they succeeded, as in a few works by Takizawa Bakin, they are
absorbing as examples of storytelling rather than as embodiments of the principle
of kanzen chōaku (“the encouragement of virtue and the chastisement of vice”), Bakin’s
professed aim in writing fiction.
Japanese literature in general was at one of its lowest levels at the end of
the Tokugawa period. A few tanka poets and the Kabuki dramatist Kawatake
Mokuami are the only writers of the period whose works are still read today. It was an
exhausted literature that could be revived only by the introduction of fresh influences
from abroad.
Modern literature

Even after the arrival of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s U.S. Navy fleet in 1853 and the
gradual opening of the country to the West and its influence, there was at first little
noticeable effect on Japanese literature. The long closure of the country and the general
sameness of Tokugawa society for decades at a time seemed to have atrophied the
imaginations of the gesaku writers. Even the presence of curiously garbed foreigners,
which should have provoked some sort of reaction from authors searching for new
material, initially produced little effect. The gesaku writers were oblivious to the changes
in Japanese society, and they continued to grind out minor variants on the same
hackneyed themes of the preceding 200 years.
It was only after the removal in 1868 of the capital to Edo (renamed Tokyo) and the
declaration by the emperor Meiji that he would seek knowledge from the entire world
that the gesaku writers realized their days of influence were numbered. They soon fell
under attack from their old enemies, the Confucian denouncers of immoral books, and
also from advocates of the new Western learning. Although the gesaku writers
responded with satirical pieces and traditional Japanese fiction deriding the new
learning, they were helpless to resist the changes transforming the entire society.
Introduction of Western literature
Translations from European languages of nonliterary works began to appear soon after
the Meiji Restoration. The most famous example was the translation (1870) of Samuel
Smiles’s Self-Help; it became a kind of bible for ambitious young Japanese eager to
emulate Western examples of success. The first important translation of a
European novel was Ernest Maltravers, by the British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
which appeared in 1879 under the title Karyū shunwa (“A Spring Tale of Blossoms and
Willows”). The early translations were inaccurate, and the translators unceremoniously
deleted any passages that they could not understand readily or that they feared might
be unintelligible to Japanese readers. They also felt obliged to reassure readers that,
despite the foreign names of the characters, the emotions they felt were exactly the
same as those of a Japanese.
It did not take long, however, for the translators to discover that European literature
possessed qualities never found in the Japanese writings of the past. The literary
scholar Tsubouchi Shōyō was led by his readings in European fiction and criticism to
reject didacticism as a legitimate purpose of fiction; he insisted instead on its artistic
values. His critical essay Shōsetsu shinzui (1885–86; The Essence of the Novel) greatly
influenced the writing of subsequent fiction not only because of its emphasis
on realism as opposed to didacticism but because Shōyō, a member of the samurai
class, expressed the conviction that novels, hitherto despised by the intellectuals as
mere entertainments for women and children, were worthy of even a scholar’s attention.
The first modern Japanese novel was Ukigumo (1887–89; “Drifting Cloud”; Eng.
trans. Japan’s First Modern Novel), by Futabatei Shimei, who was familiar with Russian
literature and contemporary Western literary criticism. Futabatei wrote Ukigumo in
the colloquial, apparently because his readings in Russian literature had convinced him
that only the colloquial could suitably be used when describing the writer’s own society.
Despite Futabatei’s success with this experiment, most Japanese writers continued to
employ the literary language until the end of the century. This was due, no doubt, to
their reluctance to give up the rich heritage of traditional expression in favour of the
unadorned modern tongue.
Western influences on poetry
Translations of Western poetry led to the creation of new Japanese literary forms. The
pioneer collection Shintaishi-shō (1882; “Selection of Poems in the New Style”)
contained not only translations from English but also five original poems by the
translators in the poetic genres of the foreign examples. The translators declared that
although European poetry had greater variety than Japanese poetry—some poems are
rhymed, others unrhymed, some are extremely long, others abrupt—it was invariably
written in the language of ordinary speech. An insistence on modern language and the
availability of many different poetic forms were not the only lessons offered by European
poetry. The translators also made the Japanese public aware of how much of human
experience had never been treated in the tanka or haiku forms.
Innumerable Western critics have sarcastically commented on the
Japanese proclivity for imitating foreign literary models and on their alleged indifference
to their own traditions. It is true that without Russian examples Futabatei could not have
written Ukigumo, and without English examples such poets as Shimazaki Tōson could
not have created modern Japanese poetry. But far from recklessly abandoning their
literary heritage, most writers were at great pains to acquaint themselves with their
traditional literature. The outstanding novelists of the 1890s—Ozaki Kōyō, Kōda
Rohan, Higuchi Ichiyō, and Izumi Kyōka—all read Saikaku and were noticeably
influenced by him. Ichiyō’s short novel Takekurabe (1895; Growing Up) described the
children of the Yoshiwara quarter of Edo in a realistic manner quite unlike that of the
usual stories about prostitutes and their customers, but she used the language of
Saikaku for her narration. Kyōka, though educated partly at a Western mission school,
wrote superbly in the vein of late Tokugawa fiction; something of the distant Japanese
literary past pervaded even his writings of the 1930s, the final years of his life.
In poetry, too, the first products of Western influence were comically inept experiments
with rhyme and with such unpromising subjects as the principles of sociology. Tōson’s
“Akikaze no uta” (1896; “Song of the Autumn Wind”), however, is not merely a skillful
echo of Percy Bysshe Shelley but a true picture of a Japanese landscape; the irregular
lines of his poem tend to fall into the traditional pattern of five and seven syllables.
A decade after the works of English Romantic poets such as Shelley and William
Wordsworth had influenced Japanese poetry, the translations made by Ueda Bin of the
French Parnassian and Symbolist poets made an even more powerful impression. Ueda
wrote, “The function of symbols is to help create in the reader an emotional state similar
to that in the poet’s mind; symbols do not necessarily communicate the
same conception to everyone.” This view was borrowed from the West, but it accorded
perfectly with the qualities of the tanka.
Because of the ambiguities of traditional Japanese poetic expression, it was natural for
a given poem to produce different effects on different readers; the important thing, as in
Symbolist poetry, was to communicate the poet’s mood. If the Japanese poets of the
early 1900s had been urged to avoid contamination by foreign ideas, they would have
declared that this was contrary to the spirit of an enlightened age. But when informed
that eminent foreign poets preferred ambiguity to clarity, the Japanese responded with
double enthusiasm.
Revitalization of the tanka and haiku

Even the traditional forms, tanka and haiku, though moribund in 1868, took on new life,
thanks largely to the efforts of Masaoka Shiki, a distinguished late 19th-century poet in
both forms but of even greater importance as a critic. Yosano Akiko, Ishikawa
Takuboku, and Saitō Mokichi were probably the most successful practitioners of the
new tanka. Akiko’s collection Midaregami (1901; Tangled Hair) stirred female readers
especially, not only because of its lyrical beauty but because Akiko herself seemed to
be proclaiming a new age of romantic love. Takuboku emerged in the course of his
short life (he died in 1912 at age 26) as perhaps the most popular tanka poet of all time.
His verses are filled with strikingly individual expressions of his intransigent personality.
Saitō Mokichi combined an absorption with Man’yōshū stylistics and a professional
competence in psychiatry. Despite the austere nature of his poetry, he was recognized
for many years as the leading tanka poet. In haiku, Takahama Kyoshi built up a
following of poets strong enough to withstand the attacks of critics who declared that the
form was inadequate to deal with the problems of modern life. Kyoshi himself eventually
decided that the function of haiku was the traditional one of an intuitive apprehension of
the beauties of nature, but other haiku poets employed the medium to express entirely
unconventional themes.
Most tanka and haiku poets continued to use the classical language, probably because
its relative concision permitted them to impart greater content to their verses than
modern Japanese permits. Poets of the “new style,” therefore, were readier to employ
the colloquial. Hagiwara Sakutarō, generally considered the finest Japanese poet of the
20th century, brilliantly exploited the musical and expressive possibilities of the modern
tongue. Other poets, such as Horiguchi Daigaku, devoted themselves to translations of
European poetry, achieving results so compelling in Japanese that these translations
are considered to form an important part of the modern poetry of Japan.
The novel between 1905 and 1941
The dominant stream in Japanese fiction since the publication of Hakai (1906; The
Broken Commandment), by Shimazaki Tōson, and Futon (1907; The Quilt), by Tayama
Katai, has been naturalism. Although the movement was originally inspired by the works
of the 19th-century French novelist Émile Zola and other European naturalists, it quickly
took on a distinctively Japanese colouring, rejecting (as a Confucian scholar might have
rejected gesaku fiction) carefully developed plots or stylistic beauty in favour of
absolute verisimilitude in the author’s confessions or in the author’s minute descriptions
of the lives of unimportant people hemmed in by circumstances beyond their control.
By general consent, however, the two outstanding novelists of the early 20th century
were men who stood outside the naturalist movement, Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki.
Ōgai began as a writer of partly autobiographical fiction with strong overtones of
German Romantic writings. Midway in his career he shifted to historical novels that are
virtually devoid of fictional elements but are given literary distinction by their concise
style. Sōseki gained fame with humorous novels such as Botchan (1906; “The Young
Master”; Eng. trans. Botchan), a fictionalized account of his experiences as a teacher in
a provincial town. Botchan enjoyed phenomenal popularity after it first appeared. It is
the most approachable of Sōseki’s novels, and the Japanese found pleasure in
identifying themselves with the impetuous, reckless, yet basically decent hero. The
coloration of Sōseki’s subsequent novels became progressively darker, but even the
gloomiest have maintained their reputation among Japanese readers, who take it for
granted that Sōseki is the greatest of the modern Japanese novelists and who find
echoes in their own lives of the mental suffering he described. Sōseki wrote mainly
about intellectuals living in a Japan that had been brutally thrust into the 20th century.
His best-known novel, Kokoro (1914; “The Heart”; Eng. trans. Kokoro), revolves around
another familiar situation in his novels, two men in love with the same woman. His last
novel, Meian (1916; Light and Darkness), though unfinished, has been acclaimed by
some as his masterpiece.
An amazing burst of creative activity occurred in the
decade following the end of the Russo-Japanese
War in 1905. Probably never before in the history of
Japanese literature were so many important writers
working at once. Three novelists who first emerged
into prominence at this time were Nagai
Kafū, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke. Nagai Kafū was infatuated with
French culture and described with contempt the
meretricious surface of modern Japan. In later
years, however, though still alienated from the Japanese present, he
showed nostalgia for the Japan of his youth, and his most appealing works contain
evocations of the traces of an old and genuine Japan that survived in the parody of
Western culture that was Tokyo.
Tanizaki’s novels, notably Tade kuu mushi (1929; Some Prefer Nettles), often
presented a conflict between traditional Japanese and Western-inspired ways. In his
early works he also proclaimed a preference for the West. Tanizaki’s views changed
after he moved to the Kansai region in the wake of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923,
and his subsequent writings traced his gradual accommodation with the old culture of
Japan that he had previously rejected. Between 1939 and 1941 Tanizaki published the
first of his three modern-language versions of Genji monogatari. He willingly sacrificed
years of his career to this task because of his unbounded admiration for the supreme
work of Japanese literature.
Tanizaki’s longest novel, Sasameyuki (1943–48; The
Makioka Sisters), evoked with evident nostalgia the
Japan of the 1930s, when people were preoccupied not with the prosecution of a war
but with marriage arrangements, visits to sites famous for their cherry blossoms, or the
cultural differences between Tokyo and Ōsaka. Two postwar novels by Tanizaki
enjoyed great popularity, Kagi (1956; The Key), the account of a professor’s
determination to have his fill of sex with his wife before impotence overtakes him,
and Fūten rōjin nikki (1961–62; Diary of a Mad Old Man), a work in a comic vein that
describes a very old man’s infatuation with his daughter-in-law. No reader would turn to
Tanizaki for wisdom as to how to lead his life, nor for a penetrating analysis of society,
but his works not only provide the pleasures of well-told stories but also convey the
special phenomenon of adulation and rejection of the West that played so prominent a
part in the Japanese culture of the 20th century.
Akutagawa established his reputation as a brilliant storyteller who transformed materials
found in old Japanese collections by infusing them with modern psychology. No writer
enjoyed a greater following in his time, but Akutagawa found less and less satisfaction
in his reworkings of existing tales and turned eventually to writing about himself in a
sometimes-harrowing manner. His suicide in 1927 shocked the entire Japanese literary
world. The exact cause is unknown—he wrote of a “vague malaise”—but perhaps
Akutagawa felt incapable either of sublimating his personal experiences into fiction or
else of giving them the accents of the proletarian literature movement, then at its height.
The proletarian literature movement in Japan, as in various other countries, attempted
to use literature as a weapon to effect reform and even revolution in response to social
injustices. Although the movement gained virtual control of the Japanese literary world
in the late 1920s, governmental repression beginning in 1928 eventually destroyed it.
The chief proletarian writer, Kobayashi Takiji, was tortured to death by the police in
1933. Few of the writings produced by the movement are of literary worth, but the
concern for classes of people who had formerly been neglected by Japanese writers
gave these works their special significance.
Other writers of the period, convinced that the essential function of literature was artistic
and not propagandistic, formed schools such as the “Neosensualists” led by Yokomitsu
Riichi and Kawabata Yasunari. Yokomitsu’s politics eventually moved far to the right,
and the promulgation of these views, rather than his efforts to achieve modernism,
coloured his later writings. But Kawabata’s works (for which he won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1968) are still admired for their lyricism and intuitive construction. Though
Kawabata began as a modernist and experimented with modernist techniques to the
end of his career, he is better known for his portraits of women, whether
the geisha of Yukiguni (1948; Snow Country) or the different women whose lives are
concerned with the tea ceremony in Sembazuru (1952; Thousand Cranes).
Japanese critics have divided the fiction of the prewar period into schools, each usually
consisting of one leading writer and his disciples. Probably the most influential author
was Shiga Naoya. His characteristic literary form was the “I novel” (watakushi
shōsetsu), a work that treats autobiographical materials with stylistic beauty and great
intelligence but is not remarkable for invention. Shiga’s commanding presence caused
the I novel to be more respected by most critics than outright works of fiction, but the
writings of his disciples are sometimes hardly more than pages torn from a diary, of
interest only if the reader is already devoted to the author.
The postwar novel

The aggressive wars waged by the Japanese militarists in the 1930s inhibited literary
production. Censorship became increasingly stringent, and writers were expected to
promote the war effort. In 1941–45, as World War II was being fought in the Pacific, little
worthwhile literature appeared. Tanizaki began serial publication of The Makioka
Sisters in 1943, but publication was halted by official order, and the completed work
appeared only after the war. The immediate postwar years signaled an extraordinary
period of activity, both by the older generation and by new writers. The period is vividly
described in the writings of Dazai Osamu, notably in Shayō (1947; The Setting Sun).
Other writers described the horrors of the war years; perhaps the most powerful
was Nobi (1951; Fires on the Plain) by Ōoka Shōhei, which described defeated
Japanese soldiers in the Philippine jungles. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki in 1945 also inspired much poetry and prose, though it was often too
close to the events to achieve artistic integrity. A few works, especially Kuroi
ame (1966; Black Rain) by Ibuse Masuji, succeeded in suggesting the ultimately
indescribable horror of the disaster.
The Japan of the immediate postwar period and the prosperous Japan of the 1950s and
1960s provided the background for most of the works of Mishima Yukio, an
exceptionally brilliant and versatile novelist and playwright who became the first
Japanese writer generally known abroad. Mishima’s best-known works include Kinkaku-
ji (1956; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), a psychological study, based on an actual
incident, of a young monk who burned a famous architectural masterpiece; and Hōjō no
umi (1965–70; The Sea of Fertility), a tetralogy, set in Japan, that covers the period
from about 1912 to the 1960s. Abe Kōbō was notable among modern writers in that he
managed, sometimes by resorting to avant-garde techniques, to transcend the
particular condition of being Japanese and to create universal myths of suffering
humanity in such a work as Suna no onna (1962; The Woman in the Dunes). The
unique nature of traditional Japanese culture, which made it infertile ground
for Christianity in the 16th century, was treated in several moving novels by Endō
Shūsaku, notably Chimmoku (1966; Silence). The novels of Kita Morio were
characterized by an attractive streak of humour that provided a welcome contrast to the
prevailingly dark tonality of other contemporary Japanese novels. His Nire-ke no
hitobito (1963–64; The House of Nire), though based on the careers of his grandfather
and his father (the poet Saitō Mokichi), was saved by its humour from becoming no
more than an I novel.
Modern poetry
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was predicted that the traditional forms of
Japanese poetry would be abandoned by poets who craved freedom in their choice of
subjects and vocabulary and who did not wish their poems to be squeezed into 31 or 17
syllables. Masaoka Shiki conjectured, drawing on mathematics, that sooner or later it
would become impossible to compose a new poem in the traditional forms. But the
Japanese continued to find the short poem congenial: a momentary perception that
would be diluted if expanded into several stanzas can be captured perfectly in a haiku,
and, if the traditional forms are too short to narrate the poet’s emotions in detail,
overtones can hint at depths beyond the words, just as traditional paintings suggest
rather than state.
By no means did all poets “return” to traditional forms. Hagiwara Sakutarō wrote
only free verse, and this was true of most other modern poets. Some poets were
strongly affected by modern European and American poetry; during the postwar period
a school of poetry that took its name from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land echoed
Eliot at his gloomiest. Some poets used poetry for patriotic purposes during the Pacific
campaigns of World War II or to express political views during the turbulent days
following the defeat in 1945. But most Japanese who wrote modern poetry in the
second half of the 20th century were closer to their counterparts in other countries than
ever before, sharing their anxiety over the same crises and feeling the same intense
need for love.

Haiku

Japanese literature
haiku, unrhymed poetic form consisting of 17 syllables arranged in three lines of 5, 7,
and 5 syllables respectively. The haiku first emerged in Japanese literature during the
17th century, as a terse reaction to elaborate poetic traditions, though it did not become
known by the name haiku until the 19th century.
The term haiku is derived from the first element of the word haikai (a humorous form
of renga, or linked-verse poem) and the second element of the word hokku (the initial
stanza of a renga). The hokku, which set the tone of a renga, had to mention in its three
lines such subjects as the season, time of day, and the dominant features of the
landscape, making it almost an independent poem. The hokku (often interchangeably
called haikai) became known as the haiku late in the 19th century, when it was
entirely divested of its original function of opening a sequence of verse. Today the
term haiku is used to describe all poems that use the three-line 17-syllable structure,
even the earlier hokku.
Originally, the haiku form was restricted in subject matter to an objective description of
nature suggestive of one of the seasons, evoking a definite, though unstated, emotional
response. The form gained distinction early in the Tokugawa period (1603–1867) when
the great master Bashō elevated the hokku to a highly refined and conscious art. He
began writing what was considered this “new style” of poetry in the 1670s, while he was
in Edo (now Tokyo). Among his earliest haiku is Bashō subsequently traveled
throughout Japan, and his experiences became the subject of his verse. His haiku were
accessible to a wide cross section of Japanese society, and these poems’ broad appeal
helped to establish the form as the most popular form in Japanese poetry.
After Bashō, and particularly after the haiku’s revitalization in the 19th century, its range
of subjects expanded beyond nature. But the haiku remained an art of expressing much
and suggesting more in the fewest possible words. Other outstanding haiku masters
were Buson in the 18th century, Issa in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Masaoka
Shiki in the later 19th century, and Takahama Kyoshi and Kawahigashi Hekigotō in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the turn of the 21st century there were said to be a
million Japanese who composed haiku under the guidance of a teacher.
A poem written in the haiku form or a modification of it in a language other than
Japanese is also called a haiku. In English the haiku composed by the Imagists were
especially influential during the early 20th century. The form’s popularity beyond Japan
expanded significantly after World War II, and today haiku are written in a wide range of
languages.

Japanese mythology

Japanese mythology, body of stories compiled from oral traditions concerning

the legends, gods, ceremonies, customs, practices, and historical accounts of the
Japanese people.

Most of the surviving Japanese myths are recorded in the Kojiki (compiled 712;
“Records of Ancient Matters”) and the Nihon shoki (compiled in 720; “Chronicles of
Japan”). These works tell of the origin of the ruling class and were apparently aimed at
strengthening its authority. Therefore, they are not pure myths but have much political
colouring. They are based on two main traditions: the Yamato Cycle, centred around
the sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami, and the Izumo Cycle, in which the principal
character is Susanoo (or Susanowo) no Mikoto, the brother of Amaterasu.

Genealogies and mythological records were kept in Japan, at least from the 6th
century AD and probably long before that. By the time of the emperor Temmu (7th
century), it became necessary to know the genealogy of all important families in order to
establish the position of each in the eight levels of rank and title modeled after the
Chinese court system. For this reason, Temmu ordered the compilation of myths and
genealogies that finally resulted in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. The compilers of these
and other early documents had at their disposal not only oral tradition but also
documentary sources. A greater variety of sources was available to the compiler of
the Nihon shoki. While the Kojiki is richer in genealogy and myth, the Nihon shoki adds
a great deal to scholarly understanding of both the history and the myth of early Japan.
Its purpose was to give the newly Sinicized court a history that could be compared with
the annals of the Chinese.

The purpose of the cosmologies of the Kojiki and Nihon shoki is to trace the imperial
genealogy back to the foundation of the world. The myths of the Yamato Cycle figure
prominently in these cosmologies. In the beginning, the world was a chaotic mass, an
ill-defined egg, full of seeds. Gradually, the finer parts became heaven (yang), the
heavier parts earth (yin). Deities were produced between the two: first, three single
deities, and then a series of divine couples. According to the Nihon shoki, one of the
first three “pure male” gods appeared in the form of a reed that connected heaven and
earth. A central foundation was now laid down for the drifting cosmos, and mud and
sand accumulated upon it. A stake was driven in, and an inhabitable place was created.
Finally, the god Izanagi (He Who Invites) and the goddess Izanami (She Who Invites)
appeared. Ordered by their heavenly superiors, they stood on a floating bridge in
heaven and stirred the ocean with a spear. When the spear was pulled up, the brine
dripping from the tip formed Onogoro, an island that became solid
spontaneously. Izanagi and Izanami then descended to this island, met each other by
circling around the celestial pillar, discovered each other’s sexuality, and began to
procreate. After initial failures, they produced the eight islands that now make up Japan.
Izanami finally gave birth to the god of fire and died of burns. Raging with anger, Izanagi
attacked his son, from whose blood such deities as the god of thunder were born. Other
gods were born of Izanami on her deathbed. They presided over metal, earth, and
agriculture. In grief, Izanagi pursued Izanami to Yomi (analogous to Hades) and asked
her to come back to the land of the living. The goddess replied that she had already
eaten food cooked on a stove in Yomi and could not return. In spite of her warning,
Izanagi looked at his wife and discovered that her body was infested with maggots. The
angry and humiliated goddess then chased Izanagi from the underworld. When he
finally reached the upper world, Izanagi blocked the entrance to the underworld with an
enormous stone. The goddess then threatened Izanagi, saying that she would kill a
thousand people every day. He replied that he would father one thousand and five
hundred children for every thousand she killed. After this, Izanagi pronounced the
formula of divorce.

Izanagi then returned to this world and purified himself from the miasma of Yomi no
Kuni. From the lustral water falling from his left eye was born the sun
goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami, ancestress of the imperial family. From his right eye was
born the moon god Tsukiyomi no Mikoto and from his nose, the trickster god Susanoo.
Izanagi gave the sun goddess a jewel from a necklace and told her to govern heaven.
He entrusted the dominion of night to the moon god. Susanoo was told to govern the
sea. According to the Kojiki, Susanoo became dissatisfied with his share and ascended
to heaven to see his older sister. Amaterasu, fearing his wild behaviour, met him and
suggested that they prove their faithfulness to each other by bringing forth children.
They agreed to receive a seed from each other, chew it, and spit it away. If gods rather
than goddesses were born, it would be taken as a sign of the good faith of the one
toward the other. When Susanoo brought forth gods, his faithfulness was recognized,
and he was permitted to live in heaven.
Susanoo, becoming conceited over his success, began to play the role of a trickster. He
scattered excrement over the dining room of Amaterasu, where she was celebrating the
ceremony of the first fruits. His worst offense was to fling into Amaterasu’s chamber a
piebald horse he had “flayed with a backward flaying” (a ritual offense).

Enraged at the pranks of her brother, the sun goddess hid herself in a celestial cave,
and darkness filled the heavens and the earth. The gods were at a loss. Finally, they
gathered in front of the cave, built a fire, and made cocks crow. They erected a
sacred evergreen tree, and from its branches they hung curved beads, mirrors, and
cloth offerings. A goddess named Amenouzume no Mikoto then danced half-nude.
Amaterasu, hearing the multitudes of gods laughing and applauding, became curious
and opened the door of the cave. Seizing the opportunity, a strong-armed god dragged
her out of the cave.

The myths of the Izumo Cycle then begin to appear in the narration. Having angered the
heavenly gods and having been banished from heaven, Susanoo descended to Izumo,
where he rescued Princess Marvellous Rice Field (Kushiinada Hime) from an eight-
headed serpent. He then married the Princess and became the progenitor of the ruling
family of Izumo. The most important member of the family of Susanoo was the
god Ōkuninushi no Mikoto, the great earth chief, who assumed control of this region
before the descent to earth of the descendants of the sun goddess.

Before long, Amaterasu, the leader of the celestial gods—the gods of Izumo were
known as earthly gods—asked Ōkuninushi to turn over the land of Izumo, saying that
“the land of the plentiful reed-covered plains and fresh rice ears” was to be governed by
the descendants of the heavenly gods. After the submission of Izumo, Amaterasu made
her grandson Ninigi no Mikoto (ninigi is said to represent rice in its maturity) descend to
earth. According to the Nihon shoki, Amaterasu handed Ninigi some ears of rice from a
sacred rice field and told him to raise rice on earth and to worship the celestial gods.
The grandson of the sun goddess then descended to the peak of Takachiho (meaning
“high thousand ears”) in Miyazaki, Kyushu. There he married a daughter of the god of
the mountain, named Konohana-sakuya Hime (Princess Blossoms of the Trees).

When Ninigi’s wife became pregnant and was about to give birth, all in a single night, he
demanded proof that the child was his. She accordingly set fire to her room, then safely
produced three sons. One of them, in turn, became the father of the legendary first
emperor, Jimmu, who is considered to mark the watershed between the “age of the
gods” and the historical age; but Jimmu’s eastern expedition and conquest of the
Japanese heartland was also a myth.

Amaterasu

Shintō deity
Amaterasu, (Japanese: “Great Divinity Illuminating Heaven”), the celestial sun
goddess from whom the Japanese imperial family claims descent, and an
important Shintō deity. She was born from the left eye of her father, Izanagi, who
bestowed upon her a necklace of jewels and placed her in charge
of Takamagahara (“High Celestial Plain”), the abode of all the kami. One of her
brothers, the storm god Susanoo, was sent to rule the sea plane. Before going,
Susanoo went to take leave of his sister. As an act of good faith, they produced children
together, she by chewing and spitting out pieces of the sword he gave her, and he by
doing the same with her jewels. Susanoo then began to behave very rudely—he broke
down the divisions in the rice fields, defiled his sister’s dwelling place, and finally threw
a flayed horse into her weaving hall. Indignant, Amaterasu withdrew in protest into a
cave, and darkness fell upon the world.

The other 800 myriads of gods conferred on how to lure the sun goddess out. They
collected cocks, whose crowing precedes the dawn, and hung a mirror and jewels on
a sakaki tree in front of the cave. The goddess Amenouzume (q.v.) began a dance on
an upturned tub, partially disrobing herself, which so delighted the assembled gods that
they roared with laughter. Amaterasu became curious how the gods could make merry
while the world was plunged into darkness and was told that outside the cave there was
a deity more illustrious than she. She peeped out, saw her reflection in the mirror, heard
the cocks crow, and was thus drawn out from the cave. The kami then quickly threw
a shimenawa, or sacred rope of rice straw, before the entrance to prevent her return to
hiding.

Amaterasu’s chief place of worship is the Grand Shrine of Ise, the foremost Shintō
shrine in Japan. She is manifested there in a mirror that is one of the three Imperial
Treasures of Japan (the other two being a jeweled necklace and a sword). The genders
of Amaterasu and her brother the moon god Tsukiyomi no Mikato are remarkable
exceptions in worldwide mythology of the sun and the moon. See also Ukemochi no
Kami.

sakoku

Japanese isolation policy

sakoku, a Japanese policy consisting of a series of directives implemented over several
years during the Edo period (also known as the Tokugawa period; 1603–1867) that
enforced self-isolation from foreign powers in the early 17th century. The directives
included banning the religion of Christianity and prohibiting Japanese people from
making or returning from trips overseas. There were also directives that
restricted foreign trade with various countries. The concept of sakoku largely stemmed
from Japan’s mistrust of foreigners. Foreign powers were almost entirely banned from
any diplomatic and trade relations with Japan in the early years of the Edo period, with
the exception of the Dutch and the Chinese, and they were kept out until the mid-1800s,
when Japan was forcibly reopened.

The Tokugawa period is often remembered as a time of lasting internal peace for
Japan. However, Christianity had been propagated throughout Japan since
the Jesuit Francis Xavier’s visit to Japan in 1549, and the Tokugawa shogunate viewed
this as a threat to the stability of its rule. Japan’s persecution of Christians started in the
late 1500s, and the religion was ultimately banned in 1614, though some Japanese
Christians continued to practice their religion in secret. In efforts to further stamp out
Christian and foreign influence, in 1635 Tokugawa Iemitsu banned Japanese people
from making overseas voyages or returning to Japan from overseas. This religious
persecution resulted in the Shimabara Rebellion (1637–38), an uprising of Japanese
Roman Catholics that deepened the shogunate’s distrust of foreign influence. When the
rebellion was put down by the shogunate, all Japanese people were required to register
with a Buddhist temple, a measure intended to completely eradicate Christianity in
Japan. The final sakoku order was completed in 1639, when Portuguese ships were
forbidden to trade with or visit Japan—Spain had been expelled in 1624—adding to the
list of Western countries that had been expelled.

Despite the sakoku policy that was in place, Japan remained in limited contact with
foreign powers. For instance, the Dutch were allowed to remain in Japan, although after
the Christian rebellion their presence was limited to a small artificial island in
the Nagasaki harbour called Dejima (also known as Deshima). In addition, Dejima was
walled and guarded at night. As a result, the number of Dutch ships sailing to Japan
annually vastly decreased. Regardless, Japan was still influenced by the Western
country, as “Dutch studies” (known as rangaku; the study of Western medicine and
military science) became an important field of scholarship after the study of Western
books resumed in 1716 under Tokugawa Yoshimune. The field was so important that
the Tokugawa shogunate itself created an agency to translate Dutch works in order
to facilitate learning of Western technology, medicine, and military science, though
Japanese traditionalists continued to criticize Western studies.

In addition to maintaining some contact with the West, Japan was heavily influenced
by China. Students in higher education were expected to achieve mastery of the
Chinese language and have an understanding of classic literature. Confucianism gained
influence in Japan, and Tokugawa Ieyasu himself founded a Confucian school. Seeking
to set an example for the people, the samurai developed the Bushidō code, which was
heavily influenced by Confucian values. At the same time, there was a reaction against
the growing Chinese influence in the form nationalist thought. The school of National
Learning was founded to help students gain a better understanding of Japanese history
and to promote a purely Japanese culture.

The policy of sakoku started to be threatened in the 18th century as other countries,
most notably Russia, attempted to establish contact with Japan. The foreign powers
were often driven away by force, and in 1825 the shogunate implemented the Edict to
Repel Foreign Vessels, which increased the armed defense of the Japanese coastline.
It was China’s defeat in the first Opium War in 1842 and the subsequent massive
Western presence in China that made the Western threat more immediate for Japan.
China’s opening up to the West also signified the beginning of the end of
the sakoku policy.

In the mid-19th century, the United States became interested in Japan as a trading
partner and as a docking point for American ships en route to China. A mission under
the command of Commodore James Biddle arrived in Japan in 1846 but was
unsuccessful in achieving its goal of establishing relations. The United States returned
with a show of force in 1853, when Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived in Japan with
four U.S. warships. Perry presented a list of demands to Japan—such as opening
Japanese ports to U.S. ships to provide supplies and protecting wrecked and stranded
U.S. ships—and returned to Japan the next year with an even larger military force. At
first many of Japan’s daimyo (feudal lords) under the shogun were against accepting
foreign demands. However, the shogunate was financially constrained, and it could not
build a strong defense against the United States. When Perry returned in 1854 with nine
ships, the Tokugawa shogunate signed the Treaty of Kanagawa (also known as the
Perry Convention) with the United States. Other Western countries would soon sign
similar treaties with Japan. Ports were opened, Western countries were
granted extraterritoriality, and low tax rates on foreign imports were established. Japan
fully opened to the West, and the shogun’s position was severely weakened as a result.
These events contributed to the collapse of the shogunate in 1867.

History to 1900
Much remains unknown about religion in Japan during
the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages. It is unlikely, however, that the religion of these ages
has any direct connection with Shintō. Yayoi culture, which originated in the northern
area of the island of Kyushu in about the 3rd or 2nd century BCE, is directly related to
later Japanese culture and hence to Shintō. Among the primary Yayoi religious
phenomena were agricultural rites and shamanism.
Early clan religion and ceremonies
In ancient times small states were gradually formed at various places. By the middle of
the 4th century CE, a nation with an ancestor of the present Imperial Household as its
head had probably been established. The constituent unit of society at that time was
the uji (clan or family), and the head of each uji was in charge of worshiping the
clan’s ujigami—its particular tutelary or guardian deity. The prayer for good harvest in
spring and the harvest ceremony in autumn were two major festivals honouring
the ujigami. Divination, water purification, and lustration (ceremonial purification), which
are all mentioned in the Japanese classics, became popular, and people started to build
shrines for their kami.

Ancient Shintō was polytheistic. People found kami in nature, which ruled seas or
mountains, as well as in outstanding men. They also believed in kami of ideas such as
growth, creation, and judgment. Though each clan made the tutelary kami the core of
its unity, such kami were not necessarily the ancestral deities of the clan.
Sometimes kami of nature and kami of ideas were regarded as their tutelary kami.

Two different views of the world were present in ancient Shintō. One was the three-
dimensional view in which the Plain of High Heaven (Takama no Hara, the kami’s
world), Middle Land (Nakatsukuni, the present world), and the Hades (Yomi no Kuni, the
world after death) were arranged in vertical order. The other view was a two-
dimensional one in which this world and the Perpetual Country (Tokoyo, a utopian place
far beyond the sea) existed in horizontal order. Though the three-dimensional view of
the world (which is also characteristic of North Siberian and Mongolian shamanistic
culture) became the representative view observed in Japanese myths, the two-
dimensional view of the world (which is also present in Southeast Asian culture) was
dominant among the populace.

Later works
Kaze tachinu (2013; The Wind Rises) was an impressionistic take on the life of engineer
Horikoshi Jiro, who designed fighter planes used by the Japanese during World War II.
The film was based on Miyazaki’s manga of the same name, and it was nominated for
an Academy Award in 2014. Miyazaki declared that Kaze tachinu would be his last
feature-length film, and he began work on Kemushi no Boro (Boro the Caterpillar), a
short film for the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka. Miyazaki’s retirement appeared to be
temporary, however; in 2016 he announced that Kemushi no Boro would be expanded
to a feature-length release. The film marked Miyazaki’s first project to be done entirely
in computer animation. In 2015 he received an honorary Oscar from the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In 2023 Miyazaki again came out of retirement to release Kimitachi wa dō ikiru ka (The
Boy and the Heron). The story follows a 12-year-old Tokyo boy who relocates to the
country after his mother is killed in a bombing raid during World War II. There he
encounters a grey heron, who goads him into entering a locked tower that leads to a
world shared by both the living and the dead.
Group Activity:

Title: Poetry Mix-Up Challenge

Objective: Match the poems to their correct type - Haiku, Tanaga, or Tanka.

How to play:

1. Prepare a set of cards with different poems written on them - some are Haiku, some
are Tanaga, and some are Tanka.
2. Mix up the cards and lay them out in front of the players.
3. Players take turns picking up a card and reading the poem aloud.
4. The player must then correctly identify the type of poem it is - Haiku, Tanaga, or
Tanka.
5. If the player guesses correctly, they get a point. If they guess incorrectly, they lose a
point.
6. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins!

Example Poems:

Haiku: CRITERIA POINTS

- Autumn leaves
ACCURACY 40% falling,

TIME MANAGEMENT 30% Whispering

COOPERATION 15%

PRESENTATION 15%

TOTAL 100%
secrets softly,
Nature's lullaby.

Tanaga:
- Sa batis ng buhay, tayong dalawa'y nagtagpo,
Pagsasamang wagas, hanggang sa paglubog ng araw,
Sa piling mo, ligaya't pagmamahal, tuloy-tuloy,
Walang kasing tamis, ginhawa sa aking puso.

Tanka:
- Moonlight dances on,
Glistening waves embrace shore,
Love's reflection glows,
In your eyes, I find solace,
Together, in nature's grace.

IV. Evaluation

Instructions: