The first collection of poetry in Japan was published around 759 A.D. The work, called Man'yoshu (万葉集) or "Collection of 10,000 Leaves", contains 4,516 poems of various types dating from around A.D. 457 to A.D. 759.
Japan at this time was in the historical era known as the Nara period (A.D. 710 - 790). Buddhism at this point had been in Japan for over two hundred years. The great reform known as the Taika Reform (大化の改新), which had reoriented Japan both in its land control and its cultural orientation towards China (at that time the Tang dynasty) has occurred over a century earlier. The capital of Heijo-kyo (now Nara) was built, larger modeled on the Tang Dynasty capital of Chang'an.
The poems of the Man'yoshu fall into several types: long poems (chōka), short poems (tanka), one an-renga (a short connecting poem), one bussokusekika (a poem in the meter of 5-7-5-7-7-7) and several Chinese poems or quotes from Chinese literature.
"Why does any of this matter, TB?" A couple of reasons, beyond the great benefit of having more trivial knowledge. The first is that, like many cultures, Japan has a long history of recorded poetry. The second is that even very early on, there were a variety of poems and their lengths (including a version of 5-7-5, which we will come to soon enough).
By the 9th Century A.D., Japan had entered a new historical period (the Heian period, A.D. 794 - 1185), had a new capital (Heian-kyo, or modern Kyoto) and Japanese poetry had a formal name - waka (和歌), which literally meant "Japanese poetry" (Wa being a very old name for Japan).
Practiced largely by the aristocracy, who were the only ones that knew and could write in the rather formal Chinese literature, it had reached the limits of the Chinese characters versus the Japanese language - until the Buddhist monk Kukai (at least legendarily) created the Hiragana syllabary after returning from studying in China sometime in the mid-9th Century. (New language word: technically the hiragana is really a syllabet, as it is not truly a syllable nor an alphabet but rather the syllables of the Japanese language (we read them as k, g, t, d, s, z, n, h, b, p, m, r, and y, combined with the short vowel sounds a,e,i,o, and u).
Within forty years or so of this radical change in writing, the poetry collection Kokinshu (古今集) would be published with around 1,100 versus dealing with seasons, love, a sort of "Human experiences" section (congratulations, partings, travel), acrostics, and a miscellany including songs from "The Bureau of Song".
This update in the Japanese Alphabet drastically changed the language and culture and, in many ways, established the syllabary that we study today. The next great change could come not in what characters were used, but in the poems written.
Works consulted:
Wilson, William Scott. A Beginner's Guide to Japanese Haiku: Tuttle Publishing, New York: 2022.
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