An introduction to The Manyoshu: One Thousand Poems
[In the following excerpt, the Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai (the Japanese Classics Translation Committee) present an overview of the Manyoshu, including discussions of the political, social, and philosophical background to the collection.]
PART I
GENERAL REMARKS
The Manyōshū is the oldest of the early Japanese anthologies, and by far the greatest both in quantity and quality. It consists of 20 books and contains more than 4,000 poems, written for the most part by the poets who flourished in the Fujiwara and Nara Periods, which coincide with the Golden Age of Chinese poetry—the eras of Kaiyuan and Tienpao under the T'ang dynasty, when Li Po and Tu Fu lived and sang. In England it was the Anglo-Saxon period of Beowulf, Cædmon and Cynewulf. The Anthology reflects Japanese life and civilization of the 7th and 8th centuries, and not only does it record the indigenous thoughts and beliefs, but also touches, even if only casually, upon Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism imported from the continent.
The Manyōshū, unlike the Kokin Wakashū (generally known as Kokinshū), and other ‘imperial’ anthologies later compiled by the sovereign's command, is rich in the poems of the people as well as in those of the court. It embraces and harmonizes both patrician and plebeian elements, and reveals the brilliance of city life side by side with the charm of the country-side. It forms a happy contrast that many sovereigns and members of the imperial family are represented in the Anthology, together with a great number of excellent works by humble and nameless poets. That no less than 300 poems in the rude dialect of eastern Japan should be grouped together at two different places, is an unparalleled phenomenon in the ancient anthologies of the Orient. These provincial poems consist not only of occasional and extempore pieces, but of what appear to be the then current folk-songs, altered or recast in the course of transmission from place to place; and there may also well be a few by city poets who composed them in imitation of the rustic style. It is to be noted that the strain of folk-song is also frequently encountered in the works, especially in the amatory verse, of some urban singers. In addition there are some ballad-like poems dealing with legendary stories, and a small number of humorous pieces, which will not escape the reader's notice. It should be added that the Manyōshū boasts a number of women poets representing various strata of society from the highest to the humblest.
Genuineness of thought and feeling pervades all the Manyō poems, with scarcely any trace of vanity or frivolity. The prevailing atmosphere is happy, bright and peaceful. Frontier-guards departing for distant shores pledge their loyalty to the Throne and frankly record their personal loves and the sorrows of separation, but never a murmur of grudge or resentment. A sanguinary and martial spirit is conspicuous by its absence: not a single war-song is to be found in the whole collection, there being only one poem which contains a passage describing a battle. Those who compare the Manyōshū with the Shi King (‘Book of Songs’), supposed to have been compiled by Confucius, generally begin with the first poems of the respective anthologies—the one by the Emperor Yūryaku and the other regarding the consort of a Chinese king of the Chou dynasty. No matter what may be the alleged allegorical virtue of the Chinese poem, no one will fail to discover in the Japanese piece an artistic masterpiece, combining sincerity with dignity, and elegance with pastoral simplicity—a charming revelation of the close intimacy and friendliness that characterized the relationship between sovereign and subject in ancient Japan. It is scarcely necessary to say that the pervading spirit of the Manyōshū is the Japanese spirit of genuine simplicity and sincerity.
The Manyōshū with its infinite variety and the intrinsic value of its superb poetry occupies a foremost place in the history of Oriental literature. In quality it stands inferior to none of the numerous Chinese collections of verse. In quantity it can compare with the Greek Anthology, surpassing the latter in pure lyricism, and in its ardour and vigour of spirit, probably due to the fact that the Greek epigrams are the products of a decadent civilization, while the Manyō poems are the flower of a culture at its zenith. Thus the importance of the Manyōshū in world literature cannot be gainsaid.
The name ‘Man-yō-shū,’ though often translated as ‘Collection of a Myriad Leaves,’ is authoritatively interpreted to mean ‘Collection for a Myriad Ages.’ No name more fitting could have been chosen to indicate the faith and the blessing with which the Anthology was bequeathed to posterity and to the world.
The fact that the Manyōshū consists of 20 books has set a precedent for the majority of later imperial anthologies. In its manner of classification and arrangement also it has provided, to a certain extent, a model for later collections which followed the method used in some books of the Manyōshū. In the number of its poems, however, the Manyōshū exceeds all the imperial anthologies of later periods. According to the Kokka Taikan (1st edition, 1901-2), the popular reprint of all the old anthologies, in which the poems are numbered in the order they appear in each oridinal collection, the Manyōshū contains 4,516 poems. This figure can be reduced slightly if the duplications and variants are subtracted, so that 4,500 is commonly given as the actual number of the poems in the Manyōshū, while the poets whose names are either mentioned or ascertainable, are about 450 in all.
COMPILATION
It is impossible to ascertain how and when the compilation of the Manyōshū was completed in the form in which it has been handed down to this day. It may, however, be safely said that the collection came into being some time during the late Nara Period—the latter half of the 8th century. Of course the entire 20 books were not compiled systematically, nor at the same time. Most likely a few of them were compiled early in the century, which served as a nucleus to which were added later—at least on two different occasions—the remaining books, while the entire collection was subjected to revision at frequent intervals before the Anthology assumed its present form. That is to say, it required a rather complicated process extending over half a century to compile the Manyōshū in 20 books as we now have it.
There existed no definite principle of compilation. The standard of selection varied according to individual compilers; nor was the manner of classification and arrangement uniform. The great poet Yakamochi, of the illustrious clan of Ōtomo, is generally regarded as the last man who had a hand in the compilation of the entire collection. Yakamochi, who was involved in various political incidents after reaching middle age, died in 785 in adverse circumstances, and his clan itself declined steadily down to the end of the 9th century. In the meantime, the vogue for Chinese prose and poetry took possession of court circles for over 100 years from the late Nara Period to the early Heian Period, during which Japanese poetry was more or less neglected. It is probably owing to these circumstances that the Manyōshū, still lacking the intended final touch, was handed down in an unfinished form.
Of the sources of the Manyōshū, historical works such as the Kojiki and the Nihonshoki are mentioned in the book itself. In addition, collections of the works of individual poets, miscellaneous papers, memoirs and diaries were drawn upon, as well as poems preserved only through oral transmission. Evidence is scattered throughout the Anthology of the efforts of the compilers to gather material from books and fragmentary documents, and other available sources, both public and private, old and new. In some cases the compiler gives, together with a poem, its original source, reference matter, or even his personal opinion of the poem itself. Because the task of compilation was not completed, the Anthology contains here and there indications of the process of selection and the traces of the conscientious labours of the compilers, which constitute a unique and interesting feature not found in the later anthologies. Repetition of the same poems and inclusion of slightly varied versions in different parts of the book are also another characteristic quality of the Manyōshū.
One of the most important source books is the Ruiju-Karin (Forest of Classified Verses), mentioned elsewhere, which was compiled by Yamanoé Okura—a pioneer of Manyō poetry as well as a profound student of Chinese literature. This book having long since been lost, nothing is known as to its form or the number of books into which it was divided, but from its title we may suppose the poems to have had some sort of classification. There are reasons to conjecture that this anthology may have served as a model for at least the first two books of the Manyōshū. The name ‘Karin’ (Forest of Verses) appears in an Imperial Household document dated 751, a quarter of a century after the death of Okura, though it remains a question whether or not the book is to be identified with the Ruiju-Karin. Another anthology on which the Manyōshū draws heavily is Kokashū (Collection of Ancient Poems), which was in all likelihood an anthology of a general character. Besides these, the Manyōshū mentions four individual anthologies, known respectively as the Hitomaro, Kanamura, Mushimaro and Sakimaro Collection, but it is impossible to ascertain whether each was the collected work of the poet whose name it bears, or included poems by others; or whether it was simply a collection of poems compiled by the poet.
As a general rule, an individual poem or a group of poems in the Manyōshū is preceded by the name of the author and a preface, and is frequently followed by a note. In these prefaces and notes are given the occasion, the date and place of composition, the source book or the manner of transmission, or anecdotes or legends concerning the authors or the poems. Occasionally in the notes the compilers' comments and criticisms are given. All the prefaces and notes and dates are written in Chinese. In some of the books the letters and introductions in Chinese prose, sometimes quite lengthy, which were sent together with the poems, are included. Even Chinese poems, though this is rare, find their way into these pages.
The texts of the poems are transcribed in Chinese characters. The syllabaries called kana which came into being a century or so later, were still at an incipient stage in their development. Accordingly, in writing Japanese poems, Chinese characters were borrowed for their phonetic values, or they were used ideographically in their original sense. Sometimes the first method was employed exclusively in copying a poem, but more often the two methods were used simultaneously. The so-called ‘Manyō-gana’ are the Chinese characters which were commonly used as phonograms in the Manyōshū, from which the present system of kana was evolved. Besides the above two methods, Chinese characters were frequently used in playful and fantastic combinations like puzzles, to denote syllables or words. The problems arising from the difficulty of deciphering them in the last-mentioned instances, and more often from uncertainty as to the exact reading of the characters used ideographically, have been gradually solved in subsequent ages, but there remain certain words and passages of which the reading is still disputed among specialists.
In this connection it may be pointed out that while the Manyōshū had necessarily to be clothed in a Chinese garb, so to speak, in the absence of any other system of writing, the very idea of making such a collection of poems was in all probability inspired by the examples imported from China, where the work of compiling anthologies had early developed, and where in later ages it grew to be almost a national industry of unparalleled magnitude. The Shi King of Confucian canon, already mentioned, and the famous Chu Tsu, a collection of metrical compositions, compiled toward the end of the first century b. c., had long been known in Japan by the time the first two books of the Manyōshū are conjectured to have been completed. Later works, especially anthologies made in the 6th century, were widely read by Japanese. Of these the most important was the Wên Hsuan in 30 books, containing both prose and poetry, which was popular in and around the court of Nara, and which came to be the standard text-book of Chinese literature in Japan after the 8th century. The Yütai Sinyung, another collection of elegant and somewhat voluptuous lyrics, which appears to have been privately cherished, may also be mentioned. It is significant that of the Manyō poets, more than twenty are known as accomplished versifiers in Chinese, and that a small collection of Chinese poems composed by Japanese was published in 751 under the title of Kaifūsō, preceding by several years the supposed date of the completion of the Manyōshū. The wonder is that at a time when Japan had yet to possess a writing system of her own, and when the literature of the continent, as well as its arts and crafts, were being bodily transplanted and assiduously cultivated, there should have emerged the Manyōshū—a monumental collection of native verse in the purest Yamato speech. For an explanation of this point, the reader is referred to Part II, in which the political and social background of the Manyō age and the life and the spirit of the nation are dealt with at length.
VERSIFICATION AND RHETORICAL DEVICES
Manyō versification consists in combining in varied ways several or more lines, which as a rule are made up of five or seven syllables. The most prevalent form in the Manyōshū, which accounts for more than ninety per cent of the total number of its poems and which still flourishes to-day as the form par excellence of the national poetry of Japan, is the tanka—a verse of five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. On the other hand, the so-called ‘long poem’ or chōka consists of alternate lines of 5 and 7 syllables, finishing with an extra 7-syllable line. Though called ‘long,’ the longest chōka in the Manyōshū does not exceed 150 lines. The Anthology contains some 260 chōka, including many masterpieces by Kakinomoto Hitomaro, the ‘Saint of Poetry.’ The presence of these poems, unsurpassed in number as well as in quality by later anthologies, constitutes an outstanding feature of the Manyōshū. Generally speaking, the chōka is accompanied by one or two, or even several, short poems called hanka, somewhat in the manner of an ‘envoy,’ summarizing, or supplementing, or elaborating on, the contents of the main poem. The word hanka meaning ‘verse that repeats,’ was derived from Chinese classical poetry, in which the term is applied to a similar auxiliary verse. Though such repetition was not unknown in ancient Japanese poetry, its development and standardization in the Manyō age may have been due to Chinese influence. A third verse-form is called sedōka—a name presumably of Japanese invention—which repeats twice a tercet of 5-7-7. This form fell into desuetude in later ages, the Manyōshū itself containing only about 60 examples. There is yet another curious form called ‘Buddha's Foot Stone Poem’ by virtue of the fact that there are extant 21 poems of this type commemorating a stone monument bearing Buddha's foot-mark, which was erected in 752 in the precincts of the Yakushi-ji temple near Nara. The poem consists of 6 lines of 5-7-5-7-7-7 syllables, and only a few specimens are found in the Manyōshū. Finally it may be mentioned that there is in Book VIII (Orig. No. 1635) a brief form of renga (‘poems-in-series’) which became extremely popular in the 14th century and after, and in the composition of which a number of persons participated.
Japanese verse is generally based on the combination of syllables in fives and sevens. It takes no account of the question of stress, pitch, or length of syllable; nor is rhyme employed for poetic effect. This is an inevitable consequence of the phonetic system of the Japanese language, in which, as far as concerns its standard form, known since the beginning of history as the Yamato language, all syllables end in vowels, and there is no clear distinction between accented and unaccented, or long and short syllables, thus rendering impossible a metrical system based upon rhyme or accent. Thus, the number of syllables, which serves usually as only one of the bases of metrical structure in other languages, has become the sole principle of Japanese prosody.
Of the different rhetorical devices, alliteration, which is so conspicuous in old Germanic poetry, is employed consciously or unconsciously, and frequently with considerable effect in the Manyōshū, as it is also in all forms of Japanese poetry, both ancient and modern. On the other hand, parallelism, as it is found in Shinto litanies and more commonly in Chinese verse, is used invariably in chōka, often with consummate skill.
Among the other devices in Japanese poetry, what are known as kake kotoba (pivot-words), makura kotoba (pillow-words) and joshi (introductory verses) are the most peculiar, the effect of which depends upon a subtle association produced by similarity or identity of words in sound or sense. Of the three, the kake kotoba is the simplest, being a form of word-play which, however, occupies in Japanese poetry a legitimate and important place.
The ‘pillow-word’ modifies the word that follows it in various ways, either through sound or sense association. As a poetic technique the use of pillow-words had been practised from the earliest times so that by the Manyō age many of them had become conventionalized, while others were obscure and unintelligible. There are pillow-words which may be construed in more than one way, and there are some which invoke images extraneous and incongruous, confusing to the uninitiated reader. But where they are used properly, and in a proper place, the effect is extremely felicitous. The nearest counterpart in Occidental poetry is the ‘permanent epithet’ in Homer. But the pillow-word is far more free, daring and imaginative. It is not necessarily an adjective, but may be an attributive form of a verb, a noun in the possessive or objective case, and so on, and considerable freedom and ingenuity is shown in its application. Thus, ‘grass for pillow’ is natural and appropriate as a pillow-word for ‘journey,’ reminding one of the hardships of a traveller in primitive ages, but where the word azusa yumi (birchwood bow) is applied to the noun haru (spring time), the connection cannot be established except through another word haru, a verb meaning ‘to string.’ The phrase akane sasu (madder-root coloured) for the ‘morning sun’ may be applied by gradual transference of association to ‘sunlight,’ ‘day,’ ‘purple’ and finally even to ‘rosy-cheeked youth.’ Taku tsunu (fibre rope) is made to serve as a pillow-word for Shiragi, because the taku fibre is white, and the Japanese word ‘white,’ shiro or shira, is partly homophonous with the name of the Korean state. These are just a few examples. While many of these pillow-words had been, as has already been stated, partly conventionalized by the 8th century and handed down to poets as stock phrases, their vitality had by no means been exhausted. In fact, it appears that there was still room for the invention of new pillow-words, for the Manyōshū contains a number of epithets not found in poems of earlier date.
The joshi or ‘introductory verse’ is based on somewhat similar principles, but it is longer and admits of greater freedom in application than the pillow-word. More than 5 syllables in length, the introductory verse modifies the contents of the succeeding verse, usually by way of metaphor. For instance, in Poem No. 205, the lines describing a warrior standing with his bow, etc., constitute an introductory verse to the Bay of Matokata, the target (mato) he is aiming at being partly homophonous with the name of the bay. Here between the introductory verse and the main part of the poem there is no connection whatever, either actual or logical, and their juxtaposition may appear unnatural and perplexing; but such abrupt transition from one image to another, without destroying the latent association, is one of the characteristics of Japanese poetry, in which lies also the secret of the technique of modern haiku. Without investigation of such points it is perhaps not possible to elucidate the psychological foundation and historical development of Japanese poetry.
The characteristic rôle of the introductory verse is to invoke images lying outside the mental vista of the reader. After having carried him aloft into an unsuspected realm, it suddenly but gently sets him down in another world (Nos. 205, 316, etc.). The very absence of actual connection or co-relation between the modifier and the word modified is what makes this form of oblique comparison so effective. Since it is the way of the Japanese language to introduce a comparison with no connective term corresponding to ‘as’ or ‘like,’ the blending of different ideas and images is achieved in a most direct manner and examples of the felicitous employment of the introductory verse abound throughout the Manyōshū.
INDIVIDUAL BOOKS
In order to indicate the general appearance and composition of the Manyōshū as a whole, it may be useful to give here a brief account of the individual books, their characteristics, and the periods with which they are concerned.
The first two books are sometimes regarded as collections compiled by imperial order, so carefully are they edited as to matter and form. Book I contains poems written between the reign of the Emperor Yūryaku (456-79) and the early Nara Period (circa 712), whereas Book II covers a more extended period, with poems believed to have been written in the reign of the Emperor Nintoku (313-99) and those dated as late as 715. 16 chōka are found in the former and 19 in the latter. In both books the poems generally are arranged in chronological order, and Hitomaro is the poet most copiously represented, while imperial progresses constitute the favourite theme of Book I. Though small in size as compared with others, these two books are of great importance for their poetry of the so-called ‘Early Palace Style.’ Book III covers the long interval between the reign of the Empress Suiko (592-628) and the 16th year of Tempyō (744), including the brilliant periods of Fujiwara and Nara. In contrast to its predecessors, which contain large numbers of poems by sovereigns, princes and princesses of the blood, this book includes more works by courtiers. Here we encounter for the first time the poems of Akahito. Tabito and Yakamochi and the illustrious company of poets centreing about the Ōtomo clan also make their appearance. Book IV, with the exception of a few earlier works, consists largely of poems of the Nara Period, especially those of Tabito and his group and those exchanged between young Yakamochi and his lady-loves; while Book V consists of poems exchanged between Tabito and his friends, to which are added the works of Okura, covering the years between 728 and 733, and containing a number of important chōka, besides verse and prose in Chinese. Book VI, covering the years between 723 and 744, is more or less identical with Books IV and VIII as regards period and poets. It contains as many as 27 chōka, and is distinguished by the inclusion of a large number of poems of travel, of imperial progresses and poems composed on the occasion of banquets. Book VII, like Books X, XI and XII, contains anonymous poems which may be ascribed roughly to a period extending from the reign of the Empress Jitō (686-96) to that of the Empress Gemmyō (715-23). Many poems from the ‘Hitomaro Collection’ are included, while the inclusion of 26 sedōka forms a notable feature of this book. Book VIII, as stated above, resembles Book IV, the earliest poem in the collection being a tanka by the Emperor Jomei (629-41), while the latest are dated 743-45. The poems are divided into ‘miscellaneous poems’ and ‘epistolary poems’ (largely amatory), and each kind is subdivided under the heads of the four seasons—a form of classification which served as a model for later imperial anthologies. Book IX, except for a single tanka by the Emperor Yūryaku, contains poems written between the reign of the Emperor Jomei and 744, which are drawn largely from the Hitomaro and Mushimaro Collections; it also includes 22 chōka and many on legendary subjects. Book X, while consisting of anonymous poems, as does Book VII, appears to include more of later work—many pieces being delicately and beautifully finished. Its nature poems reveal a new tendency, as in the case of those dealing with gardens. Poems in Books XI and XII, which are also anonymous, may be ascribed to the Fujiwara and the early Nara Periods, and many of them are in the style of folk-songs. Book XIII is a unique repository of 67 chōka of unknown authorship. Although many of these may be traced to the transitional period between the age of the Kojiki and the Nihonshoki and the Manyō age, there are included poems of unmistakably later origin, so that it is difficult to ascribe the book as a whole to any definite period.
Book XIV is a collection of the so-called ‘Eastland poems,’ of which neither the authors nor the date of compilation can be ascertained, but which stand apart as provincial poetry, unique in language and style. Book XV contains among others a group of sea poems written by the members of the embassy despatched to Korea in 736 and a series of 63 impassioned love poems exchanged about the year 740 between the courtier Nakatomi Yakamori and his sweetheart Sanu Chigami. Book XVI is distinguished by its inclusion of legendary poems and humorous verse, covering a period from the reign of the Emperor Mommu (697-706) to the Tempyō era. It is generally conjectured that these first 16 books were put more or less into their present shape by Yakamochi. Some scholars believe that certain books, especially Book XIV, were completed some time after the year 771. Though no final conclusion has yet been reached in this matter, it is evident that there is a gap between the first 16 books and the 4 following.
Books XVII-XX appear to be personal compilations made by Yakamochi of his own poems and those of others about him. All the poems are of the Tempyō era—the glorious years of the Nara Period: Book XVII covers the years from 730 to 748; Book XVIII, from 748 to the early part of 750; and Book XIX, thence to the beginning of 753. These 3 books contain altogether 47 chōka, some of which are of great literary and historical value. It should be noted that the works of Yakamochi constitute the principal contents of these books—especially Book XIX, of which fully two-thirds of the poems are his; and while there are numerous exchange and banquet poems in the conventional vein, there are also found many born of pure creative impulse. It is this book which contains the majority of Yakamochi's masterpieces, and provides the richest source for the study of his poetic genius. Book XX covers the years from 753 to 759, and contains many banquet poems. There are also poems composed by the frontier-guards—brave Eastlanders who went to defend the coast of Kyūshū—and their parents and wives, expressing their patriotism and genuine personal emotions. The name, native province and district, status and rank of each soldier are carefully set down, together with his verse. In conjunction with the other group of Eastland poems by anonymous singers in Book XIV, these poems are of exceptional interest to the reader. The year 759 is the latest date mentioned in the Manyōshū, and is attached to the last poem in Book XX, written by Yakamochi, at that time Governor of Inaba Province. It is a date that provides a clue to fixing the time when the whole Manyōshū was finally completed.
PART II
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL BACKGROUND
Behind the Manyōshū there looms the epochal Reform of Taika (646), which brought in its train, in rapid succession, a series of political and social changes, progressive and reactionary. Some acquaintance, therefore, with the significance and far-reaching influence of that reform is indispensable to a proper appreciation of the Manyō poetry.
From the beginning of history Japanese society was built upon a patriarchal foundation. The unit in the system was the uji, or clan, consisting of a group of families headed by the main house and bound into a compact and well-ordered community by the ties of common ancestry. Each clan was under the control and leadership of a chief called uji-no-kami, and the members of the clan were known as uji-bito or clansfolk. Generally a clan embraced within its system alien people working for it as serfs and enjoying its protection. These were called kakibé. As is usual in an agricultural society, the clans possessed lands of their own, which they exploited with the help of the man-power at their disposal, so that even economically each formed a sort of commonwealth independent of the others. When thus stated, it would appear that the social order of old Japan was nothing but a primitive and decentralized one that had grown up naturally on the soil. But such was not the case. Though there were numerous clans, with their three ‘divisions’ according to ancestry—(1) scions of the Imperial House, (2) descendants of the imperial followers or of the aboriginal tribal chiefs who had submitted to the imperial rule, and (3) descendants of alien settlers,—they were officially recognized only by virtue of their respective services to the Throne; and, theoretically as well as actually, they formed a vast and unified society with the Imperial House as its centre.
The reality of the imperial prestige and power lay in the very principle of this clan system. The emperor was the supreme head of all clans. Every man born in Japan owed allegiance to him, served and obeyed him as he would serve and obey the chief of his own clan, and looked up to the Imperial House as the head of his own family. With a sovereign of unbroken lineage reigning above, Japan's clan system formed a great family state, transcending the rivalry and strife of individual clans. Under this system the chiefs of various clans were subjects of the Imperial House for which they performed their respective hereditary functions, some as priests or ministers of state, others as soldiers or artisans.
It should be noted, however, that the system permitted the authority of an individual clan chief to intervene between the people and the Imperial House, for the latter ruled directly only over state lands and the people living thereon, while the rest of the country and its population were subject to the Throne through the clan chiefs. And wherever the chief of a clan controlled a wide domain and large numbers of clans-folk and kakibé, there was likely to emerge an independent local régime which cut off the people from the Imperial House. Moreover, greed for power and wealth on the one hand, and the growth of population and land development enterprises on the other, led to a struggle between clans for territory and serfs and to the evil practice of annexation, which destroyed the peace and stability of the country. In fact, from the 6th to the middle of the 7th century, this tendency became more and more pronounced. The lands of the weaker clans were annexed or absorbed by the more influential families. There were quarrels among powerful houses over spoils, especially in connection with the newly conquered territories in Korea. The period was marked by deep social unrest and frequent political upheavals, culminating in the rise of the Sogas, father and son, who conspired to augment their own power at the expense of the Imperial House. It was this situation that called for the Reform of Taika.
What had to be done at that time was clear. It was necessary in the first place to check the domination of the mighty families at court and in the country, and to eliminate the excesses of intermediate powers so as to enable the people at large to enjoy the direct rule of the Imperial House; and in the second place, to suppress the practice of annexation, to strengthen the national finance and to promote the welfare of the people. The need of these remedial steps was well realized without any prompting from abroad. At the same time, as regards the actual procedure, Japan could, and did, learn much from China.
Some historians call this period the ‘age of imitation of China under the Sui and the T'ang dynasties,’ and in a sense they are justified. The significance of the Reform of Taika could never be grasped without taking into account its continental elements. It should, nevertheless, be remembered that those elements were adopted only in so far as they suited the conditions in Japan, and moreover that it was not a case of blind imitation, for the reforms were carried on with an ardour and ambition which not only equalled but surpassed the examples set by the continent.
Japan's political and cultural contact with the Asiatic continent was first established through Korea. The Japanese-Korean intercourse, which may probably be traced back to remotest times, becomes a matter of recorded history with the expedition of the Empress Jingu to the peninsula in the year 200 (according to the Nihonshoki). For several centuries subsequently Korea proved politically a source of perpetual trouble for Japan, but from the cultural standpoint that country rendered a signal service by acting as an intermediary for the introduction of Confucianism along with Chinese arts and letters, and also by sending her own scholars and craftsmen, and large numbers of immigrants. In the middle of the 6th century the King of Kudara, a state in the south-western part of Korea, presented to the Japanese court an image of Buddha together with some Buddhist scriptures and ritual furnishings. This was an event that marked a decisive stage in the history of Japanese cultural contact with the continent.
With the advent of Buddhism there developed a new situation that had two important aspects. One was that this sudden confrontation of the native cult of Shinto, the backbone of Japanese life, by a strange faith from abroad, had considerable repercussions. So violent was the shock that it caused an open breach between the new and the old schools of thought and even produced a movement among the conservatives against the importation of foreign culture in general. The other was that the continental culture now entering Japan had assumed a cosmopolitan character, considerably widening the field of Japanese vision. Concerning the former of these two aspects more will be said later. Here a few words will be added regarding the latter.
In the year 589 China was unified under the Sui dynasty—China that had been torn for many centuries, during which the so-called ‘Three Kingdoms’ and the ‘Six Dynasties’ rose and fell. It is recorded that during these periods of internecine strife, bands of war-stricken Chinese sought refuge in Japan, but it appears improbable that any attempt was made on the part of Japan to establish friendly intercourse with any of the Chinese states for the sake of cultural benefits. There was, of course, prior to those periods, the mighty empire of the Hans; but of its civilization, only a meagre stream, trickling through Korea, had entered Japan. But when under the Sui a new China emerged, reunited and re-vitalized, and a swelling tide of Asiatic culture began to sweep the continent, Japan, with new vistas opened up to her by Buddhism, was in a ferment, eagerly seeking to import the continental civilization. The movement was headed by the great and progressive national leader—Prince Shōtoku (d. 622). In 607 Ono Imoko was despatched as ambassador to the court of the Sui emperor. Friendly intercourse with China being thus formally inaugurated, Japan herself joined in the broad current of Asiatic civilization.
The civilization of the Sui dynasty and its successor, the T'ang, was characterized by its cosmopolitanism. Militarily and politically the Han empire, whose armies marched far into foreign lands and whose government effectively held the conquered territories, was also cosmopolitan. But the Han culture possessed few international elements. It is this essentially Chinese civilization of the Han race that was preserved and even enhanced by the Three Kingdoms and the Six Dynasties, notably by the state of Wei in the north, and by the states of Tsi and Liang in the south, and that had found its way to Korea, and thence to Japan. The Sui and T'ang, showing a far more liberal and tolerant attitude towards alien races and alien cultures, proceeded to create a new cosmopolitan fusion of all cultural elements.
Military campaigns opened new routes of travel and commerce. Products of Persia and India and their arts and religions were brought into China through Central Asia. Even traces of Graeco-Roman civilization from farther west were discernible. Above all, Buddhism played an important part in stimulating the creation of a new culture as it brought not only its tenets and creeds but also the music, arts and learning of the countries which were situated along its long road to China. Thus, contact with the Sui and T'ang meant that Japan was able to be in touch with the rest of the world as far as was possible at that time.
The Sui dynasty, which fell in less than 30 years, was followed by the T'ang dynasty, under which the new civilization continued to make swift strides toward its consummation and usher in the golden age of China. Such a brilliant cultural progress could not have been achieved without political and economic stability. Naturally, attention was first focussed upon the centralization of power with a view to reuniting the country that had suffered so long from being a house divided. In order to execute this policy, men of talent were required to serve in various Government posts. Accordingly, an elaborate system of civil service examinations was inaugurated. Something like a socialization of land was also adopted, to ensure revenue from taxation and to put national finance upon a solid basis. The so-called ‘Land-allotment Law’ which was promulgated in this connection was designed to render plastic the private title to immovable property and to effect wider and more equitable distribution by prohibiting perpetual ownership and forestalling unrestricted expansion of large estates. It was these and other laws and institutions of the early T'ang that supplied Japan with valuable models and examples.
Centralization of power was also one of the crying needs of Japan for which the country with its patriarchal system headed by the Imperial House had long been prepared. The principle of government by a central authority was already there, deep-rooted like a religious faith in the minds of the people. What was necessary was to remove the noxious incrustations of later centuries that had obstructed its operation. Consequently, in Japan the desired reform was accomplished far more smoothly and thoroughly than in China. The first task of the reformers was the elimination of the extraordinary political powers and economic privileges enjoyed by the great clans which had grown semi-independent of the Imperial House, and of which the Soga family was the most powerful, arrogant and unscrupulous. In the 4th year of the Empress Kōgyoku's reign (645) the Soga usurpers were put to death, Emishi, the father, at his home and Iruka, the son, in the Council Hall of the Palace. The heroes of this historic drama which paved the way for the Taika Reform, were the Prince Naka-no-ōé (later, the Emperor Tenji) and Kamako (later, Fujiwara Kamatari) of the priestly clan of Nakatomi. In the same year the system of eras was established, to the first of which the name Taika was given. Hence the name of the series of reforms which were begun with that year.
Thus the first obstacle to the proposed reform was removed, but the real work still lay ahead. After having disposed of the obnoxious clan system, what new order was to be set up in its place? What steps were to be taken to facilitate the transition from the old order to the new? These were large and difficult problems. However, judging from the manner in which the Prince embarked upon a series of innovations immediately after destroying the Soga family, it may be that his programme had been carefully formulated in advance in consultation with Kamatari and other advisers. Be that as it may, the principal features of the reform were as follows. All free citizens, instead of being left under the control of their clan chief, were made subject to, and protected by, the Central Government. All lands were turned over to the Government and re-distributed among individuals according to their family standing, their services to the state, and their needs of a livelihood. The country was newly divided into provinces, provinces into districts, and local administration was put in the hands of officials appointed by the Central Government. Hereditary office-holding was considerably curbed to make room for the appointment of the most talented to government posts. Such drastic innovations were bound to be attended by profound and alarming social changes. Practical statesmanship was obliged to face the question of how to adjust to the new age the old forces that still remained unextinguished. The Government instituted a new system of court ranks and grades and conferred various caps and titles upon persons of distinguished lineage, or appointed sons of great families to offices and provided them with emoluments from the national treasury, in an attempt to compensate the clans for the loss of their former powers and prosperity. Although such measures tended necessarily to obscure the principle underlying the socialization of land or the mobilization of the country's best talents, the prevailing spirit of progress was not so weak as to be checked by mere compromises of this kind. Those nobles without ability, although some out of sheer discontent offered a feeble resistance, had no alternative but to follow the road of steady decline, while new forces with a new spirit gained ascendancy and proceeded to build up a new Japan. All such innovations, of course, are bound to be attended with excesses. As time passed the new order disclosed its maladjustment with reality at various points: the Reform of Taika had to be modified and revised in many ways according to the actual conditions of the country. The earlier part of the Manyō age, i. e. the three decades from 673, when the Emperor Temmu moved the court to Asuka, to 710 when the capital was established at Nara by the Empress Gemmyō, was a period of political experiment and innovation. It was in the next 50 years, the later Manyō age, that the Reform of Taika was brought to a stage of completion, and this period coincides with the reign of the T'ang emperor Hsuantsung under whom China reached the zenith of her civilization.
As for the new Japan born of the Taika Reform, its most conspicuous aspect was a deep and pervading devotion to the Throne and the thorough consolidation of its authority. In a way, of course, this was nothing new either in fact or in idea, since the Imperial House as political centre was a thing as old as Japan itself. What was new was the free and untrammelled operation of the old principle now that it had been embodied in a proper political frame-work. The common people throughout the land, delivered from the control of intermediate powers, rejoiced in the direct rule of the Imperial House. The newly-awakened sense of loyalty in all its freshness and fullness may be perceived on almost every page of the Manyōshū. It was a joyful devotion arising from the close relationship between sovereign as parent and subjects as children—a relationship based upon the idea of a great family-state, which was then so forcibly projected upon the national consciousness. The clan system was not destroyed, but refined and elevated. Each clan, rising above its selfish interests, re-discovered its raison-d'être in the light of its obligations to the Imperial House. The clansman realized his responsibility to uphold the reputation of his ancestors and strove to live and act accordingly, as may be readily seen from the works of the poets of the Ōtomo clan. This moral awakening was not confined to great families alone: that even the humblest people in the provinces were animated by a noble spirit of loyalty is amply demonstrated by the poems of the frontier-guards.
Centralization of power required the maintenance of close contact between the capital and the provinces. For purposes of efficient local administration it was necessary to construct new roads and to develop a courier service, posts, ports and other facilities for travel and communication. The growing intercourse with the capital meant for the provinces a gradual elevation of their culture and living standards. Moreover, with the firm establishment of internal order and security, and the enhancement of the Government's power and prestige, the borders of the empire were extended into remoter regions occupied by untamed tribes such as the Yezo in northern provinces or the Hayato in south-eastern Kyūshū. Thus, the Manyō age was one of unprecedented cultural progress and political expansion. Viewed from the present day, what was then actually accomplished appears quite small in scale, but its significance is to be discovered in the temper of the Manyō man in the course of this expansion and growth. An exuberant enthusiasm, a buoyant spirit and a highly imaginative and susceptible mind gave to his emotional life a refreshing and colourful glow, as of the dawning sky, and produced this rich crop of poetry. That there are so many fine poems of travel is but an indication of the pioneering nature of the age.
Places which had an important bearing on the Manyō poems are, with the exception of the metropolitan area surrounding the capital, more or less outlying provinces, such as Izumo, Iwami, Koshi, Hitachi, of which the last three are associated respectively with Hitomaro, Yakamochi, and Mushimaro. The island of Tsukushi, which recalls the names of Tabito and Okura, has a wider significance; it invites our attention to Japan's foreign relations at that time and their influence upon the life of the nation.
The Asiatic continent was not only the motherland of a new culture, with which Japan had to keep on good terms, but also a conceivable enemy against which she had to make military preparations to defend herself. Thus, the Government General of the Dazaifu in northern Kyūshū, which was charged with foreign affairs and the local administration of the island, was also a military centre directing the frontier-guards garrisoned along the coast. Numerous officials plied back and forth along the way between the capital and the Dazaifu. The soldiers were obliged to spend long years at forlorn outposts on islands or capes far from their homes in Eastland: embassies despatched to Shiragi (a Korean state in the south-east of the peninsula) or to China sometimes passed through the Dazaifu before they set out on their perilous journeys across the ocean. The envoys to Po-hai (in Manchuria), it should also be mentioned, departed from the port of Tsuruga on the Japan Sea.
The sea journey was fraught with dangers, and all the more poignant was the sorrow of leave-takings and the longing for home. It was due to these circumstances that the Manyō age produced hosts of sea poets, such as are encountered nowhere else in Japanese literature; and the poems by members of the Embassy to Shiragi found in Book XV (Nos. 738-763) afford a most conspicuous instance of this. On the other hand, there were in the Nara Period not a few foreigners who came to Japan on their own account, like the ‘Brahmin Prelate,’ who came from India, with an Annamese priest Buttetsu, or Abbot Ganjin of China who arrived as a blind man after a series of trying hardships at sea, or the nun Rigan (Nos. 388-9) who immigrated from Shiragi and spent the rest of her life in modest seclusion as a guest of the Ōtomo family.
The fruits of this intercourse were many and varied, rich and dazzling. Not only religion and learning were imported, but also Buddhist sculpture and architecture, together with their auxiliary arts and crafts. These gave Japan temples and palaces of unheard-of splendour and grandeur. Musical instruments, like flutes, drums, gongs and cymbals brought from India, Central Asia, China and Korea sounded, as it were, the sweet music of the Land of Bliss. There arrived cargoes of rare treasures and articles of exquisite beauty and workmanship, such as may be seen to-day in the Shōsō-in (Nara), where have been preserved under imperial seal the personal belongings of the Emperor Shōmu. No wonder then that on this new rich soil poetry blossomed like flowers in spring. It is rather surprising that the Manyōshū contains comparatively few allusions to these articles of alien cultures and civilizations, but we should not overlook the rôle they had played in creating the necessary atmosphere for an efflorescence of poetry. It is not difficult to imagine, for instance, with what wonderment, with what ebullition of enthusiasm and joy the Manyō men hailed the dedication of the Great Buddha of the Tōdai-ji temple, in 752, which was performed with great pomp and magnificence.
The Manyō age naturally fostered the growth of cities. The immemorial custom of removing the court at each change of reign was broken, and Nara remained the capital for seven successive reigns. There may have been many reasons for this, but the growth of the city's population, the permanence of its various establishments, the importance of its trade and industry, were no doubt some of the most important considerations against the transference of the court. At that time Nara was a great metropolis, four miles long and more than three miles wide, with its imperial palaces and official mansions, its beautiful temples and towers, and its broad avenues planted with willows and orange-trees. The city had two markets—one on the east side, the other on the west. Money economy was beginning to prevail, and trade was steadily expanding. Poems with reference to commerce (e. g. No. 885) which are occasionally found in our Anthology are the reflections of yet another aspect of this new age.
THOUGHTS AND BELIEFS
The Manyō man lived in a world peopled by multitudes of gods and spirits, genii and fairies. And it is noteworthy that despite the wide acceptance of Confucianism and Buddhism, almost all the gods whom he sang, or who fed the well-spring of his lyric inspiration, were purely Japanese. They were gods of the indigenous cult which was named Shintō, or the Way of the Gods, in contradistinction to Buddhism.
There is here no need of attempting to explore the whole field of Shintō mythology. So far as the Manyōshū is concerned, it suffices that on the one hand there were the spirits, which had survived from the remote past in folklore, and which still affected daily life; and on the other, those whose influence was steadily rising as gods of the clan or nation. When analyzed historically, it will be seen that the Manyō idea in this connection was really an admixture and fusion of concepts which had different origins and which were in various stages of development. There were mysterious powers which moved and had their being in nature but which were too vaguely felt to be personified: lands and provinces, mountains and rivers, trees and herbs, and even human acts such as speech, were believed to be endowed with spirits, and as such were made objects of reverence or fear. There were gods possessing full personalities, namely the ancestors of the Imperial House and of various clans, the patrons of arts and industries, the tutelary deities of communities and the spirits of nature. Thus, individual objects of nature in their various capacities, sometimes as mediums through which gods manifested themselves to man, sometimes as gods in themselves, and sometimes as divine property or demesne, occupied their respective places in the religious life of the nation. The practice of taboo, charm and divination, so frequently alluded to in the Manyōshū, points unmistakably to a belief in the mysterious powers of the first category. Belief in gods of the second category in all its simplicity and naivety is illustrated in the poems of the ‘Three Hills’ (Nos. 9-10), although similar cases of the deification of mountains or districts are to be met with frequently throughout the Anthology. The spirits of nature, such as storm and thunder, fire and water, seem to occupy an intermediate place between the first and second categories. The transition from the second to the third is exemplified in Tatsutahiko—the deity who ruled the wind. Finally there were gods conceived as personalities. This concept, which has all the other feelings for the supernatural as its background and as its intrinsic element, is best embodied in the ancestral gods. It is this concept which developed as the central idea, purifying, assimilating and unifying all other beliefs, and whose growth was parallel with the progress of the political unification of the country. The Goddess Amaterasu—the ancestral deity of the Imperial House—was the chief guardian of agriculture, as well as the supreme god of heaven and earth. Consequently all the gods of heaven and earth and all the ancestral gods of clans were gradually systematized into a cult on the basis of communal and national life. It is, therefore, most natural that the ‘eight hundred myriad gods’ came to form a pantheon with the Goddess Amaterasu as its central figure.
Now how did the Manyō man seek to communicate with his deities? Generally in worshipping his god, he set in the earth before the altar a sacred wine-jar filled with saké brewed with special rites of purification; hung up mirrors and beads on the sacred posts; tied his shoulders with a cord of yū-fibre, presented the sacred nusa, ‘with the sakaki branch fresh from the inmost hill’ (No. 386), and bending on his knees, recited his litany (norito). The greatest impediment to his prayer reaching the god was ‘uncleanliness’ of body and mind. He did not therefore neglect to redeem himself in the eyes of his deity by performing the rites of ablution (misogi) and purification (harai) (No. 803). It was his ideal of life that he should keep himself clean in body and soul, and in constant communion with his gods, to obtain their protection and thereby live and work in a happy world.
Gods were worshipped either in supplication or in thanksgiving. There were national feasts and communal feasts and those observed by individual households. Of the national feasts the most important were those held to pray for good crops and to give thanks for harvest, as was quite natural with an agricultural country like Japan. The first took place in spring, in the second month of the year, and the latter in autumn after the harvest. On the latter occasion the emperor himself offered new rice to the gods, after which he himself partook of it. Hence the feast was called niinamé or ‘new-tasting.’ On the following day, at the palace, the court nobles and officials were invited to a grand banquet of Toyo-no-akari (Nos. 730-1, etc.). The observance of the ‘Feast of New-tasting’ was not confined to the court but was celebrated throughout the country by each community and family.
Life had many trials and tribulations in the Manyō, as in any other, age. There were, for instance, the universal pitfalls of love. Equally unforeseen and vexing were the dangers of travel and military campaigns. The Manyō man before starting on a voyage would pray to the Gods of Suminoé for safety, or he would worship at the Shrine of Kashima, if he were setting out as a soldier. Even in crossing a steep mountain he would make offerings to the god of the ‘awesome’ pass (Nos. 882, 812, 237, 781, 782, 533, etc.). Prayer was also the usual recourse for the love-lorn (Nos. 161, 165). But when hope was fast waning and his fate seemed uncertain, the Manyō man resorted, now to charms to exorcize evil spirits, now to magical spells for the fulfilment of his desires; and for telling his fortune he relied on omens and divinations. The use of the shimé (sacred rope) to mark off a place, or an object, was the principal method for making taboo (No. 35), while the binding of a stalk or spray of a plant for happiness and long life (No. 21, etc.) and sleeping with one's sleeves turned back to anticipate a visit from a lover or friend, were some of the commonest forms of sympathetic magic (No. 442). Among the omens, which were believed to be auguries of the coming of one's lover, an itch in the eyebrow, a sneeze, or unfastening of the girdle, may be cited as examples. It was believed that desired information was transmitted to a person in mysterious ways through certain mediums. Dreams served as this medium while one was asleep (Nos. 865-6); while in waking hours it consisted of such physical phenomena as mentioned above, to which may be added the stumbling of a horse a man was riding, which was regarded as a sign of the anxiety and longing of his people at home (No. 284). Apart from these natural and unsolicited signs there was another means by which the divine will was sought and man's fortunes told. This was divination, which was widely practised and for which there was even an hereditary office called urabé. Many were the forms of divination. There was one of native origin called ‘deer oracle,’ of which the exact character is not known. There was another introduced from China, according to which a forecast was made by the cracks appearing in a tortoise-shell roasted over the fire (No. 330). But among simpler and more popular forms were the ‘evening oracle’ and ‘foot divination,’ of which the first was supposedly performed by standing at a cross-roads in the evening and listening to the words spoken by those passing, and the second by counting the number of steps from one place to another, or by noting which foot, the right or the left, was required for the last step in covering a given distance. There was divination by dreams, and also divination by stone, based on a superstition that a stone varied in weight according to whether the occasion was evil or auspicious. The Manyō man's world was pervaded by mysterious powers, even to its minutest detail. These beliefs, generally held by the Manyō man, which appeared to comprise all the religious notions of his ancestors from primordial times, were undergoing changes with the progress of the age and through contact with alien influences. There were indications that some had already lost their positive ‘awesomeness’ and were being treated with levity and freedom, while others were being elevated to a predominant place in the religious life of the people. Among decaying beliefs, we may cite, for instance, a poem (No. 837) in which a readiness is expressed to commit sacrilege for the sake of love. This is a romanticism exalting passion at the expense of the gods, and it is significant that such a sentiment is discovered in the works of apparently common people. In another poem (No. 833) its author, in his grief and despair, having lost his beloved wife, doubts the existence of any gods. Still another poem (No. 249) falls into sheer fantasy, as it speaks of persuading the moon-god to prolong a beautiful moonlight night! There occurs even a cynical poem by a disillusioned poet who demands the return of the offerings made to a god because his prayers for a tryst with his maid had failed. Obviously in many cases magic, taboo, and divination were practised not through a complete reliance upon their efficacy, but more or less as sentimental exercises. They were even sometimes treated in a whimsical spirit and their failure was of little concern. While the folklore beliefs, retained in the twilight of sentimental attachment, were being transferred into the province of poetic symbolism, the belief in ancestral gods, gaining more and more in its solemn and spiritual qualities, came to be clothed with high authority. This development went, as we have seen, hand in hand with the process of centralizing the political power. The ancestral gods of clans being placed in subordinate positions under the ancestral gods of the Imperial House, the emperor, as ‘succeeding to the Celestial Throne,’ was to wield its divine authority over the land. He was called Akitsu-kami (Manifest God) who stood above and over all other deities of heaven and earth, commanding their devotion and services. (Nos. 79-80, etc.)
Lo, our great Sovereign, a goddess,
Tarries on the Thunder
In the clouds of heaven.
(No. 118)
So sang a poet, with genuine conviction in the divinity of the sovereign, which was one of the basic concepts underlying the Shintō faith. Since the authority of the emperor was derived from the virtues and powers of his imperial ancestors which he had inherited, the poems magnifying a sovereign usually begin with a solemn description of the tradition concerning the Celestial Throne, and sometimes imperial princes are spoken of, by anticipation, as possessing the prerogatives of the sovereign. (Nos. 94, 103, etc.)
The emperor clearly occupied a place in which, not only as political but also as religious head of the country, he was to rule over the state with divine authority. As a matter of fact all the efforts of the reformers were concentrated upon moulding Japan into a great state with the emperor as its central figure; and it was with this high purpose that foreign cultures and civilizations were transplanted, adopted and assimilated. The ultimate aim was to bring into being a new Japan that should rival and surpass China or India in splendour. The fact that continental institutions and systems of government were imported in accordance with this policy is plainly seen by comparing the laws and statutes of the T'ang empire with those which were promulgated in Japan subsequent to the Reform of Taika. The acceptance of Buddhism was also part of the same programme. In other words, the new faith was embraced with the avowed purpose of making it serve as a mighty spiritual power to guard the state, and to provide the nation with new and high ideals in the field of culture.
When Buddhism was officially imported, it produced repercussions far more profound than those caused earlier by the introduction of Confucianism, for Buddhism came as a distinctly new religion to confront the native cult of Shintō, whereas Confucianism was largely a system of moral teachings. Buddha was, it was contended, a strange god from a strange land, who would compete with the deities of the nation. Acceptance of Buddhism would incur the displeasure of those gods of old and invite calamities to fall upon the country. In the face of bitter opposition and dire warnings Prince Shōtoku displayed both wisdom and statesmanship by accepting Buddhism, as he had accepted Confucianism before, when he installed the alien god in the pantheon of native deities. The prince himself welcomed and fervently embraced the new faith in order that it might be made, together with the continental culture behind it, an important factor of national progress and enlightenment. It is this progressive policy of tolerance that won over, as it did repeatedly thereafter, the temporary opposition from conservative and reactionary forces, and laid the foundation of the Japan that was to be.
From the Taika era to the Tempyō the above policy of Prince Shōtoku was followed. What was expected, then, of Buddhism was that it should provide the country with guardian deities and patrons of national well-being and progress. In this spirit ‘provincial temples’ and also the Great Buddha at Nara, which constitute the most conspicuous monuments of those times, were constructed. Similarly, the Sutras of the Golden Light (Konkōmyō-g yō) and of the Benign King (Ninnō-g yō) were, in all probability, taught, read, and copied more widely than any other of the numerous Buddhist books. After all, these were more or less cultural enterprises differing little from the compilation of books and the decoration of the capital for the basic purpose of rendering Japan a happier land to live in.
The external manifestations and proselytizing methods thus preceded the spiritual penetration of Buddhism. The view of the earthly existence as one of sorrow and pain, the ardent desire inspired thereby for deliverance, the idea of karma, and the practice arising therefrom of pious dedication—to these phases of the new religion, the Manyōshū contains few direct references, although Buddhistic thoughts and allusions are scattered here and there. The fact that sentiments concerning life's vanity and evanescence, such as ‘life frail as foam’ (Nos. 141, 543), ‘all is vain’ (Nos. 716, 69, 809, 276, 443), ‘nothing endures’ (Nos. 368, 388, 809, 499, 500, 513), are frequently encountered, indicates that it is at this point that Buddhism first entered the province of Japanese poetry. Nevertheless, it should be recalled that to the Manyō man who had accumulated rich personal experiences, having witnessed stupendous political upheavals and social changes and standing at a concourse of sundry cultural streams, this sort of idea made a great appeal. It should, however, be remembered that it gave rise to no intense religious aspirations; nothing more than what appear to be rather lukewarm and conventional sentiments (Nos. 828, 541-2). More genuine, perhaps, is the calm contemplative attitude which was induced by the same view (Nos. 501, 515). In the poems of the later Nara Period, there is to be found a pensive mood, ready to respond to the slightest quivering of nature, presaging the approach of a new age of lyricism. (Nos. 521-2, 523)
As regards what is to come after death, generally speaking, the traditional notions prevailed. The dead are either to rise to heaven (No. 94), or to descend to the netherworld (No. 639), or wander in the vague space between (No. 640). The Buddhistic belief in a life to come crops up as a solace in a hopeless case of love (No. 267), but the Manyō man was not seriously concerned over the vexed problem of metempsychosis. The idea of the possibility of a man's being born an insect or a bird in his next life is introduced in one of a series of Anacreontic verses of Taoistic inspiration (No. 369) for no other purpose than to emphasize the importance of the pleasures that the present life holds in store.
Chinese learning was introduced into Japan much earlier than Buddhism. In the days when embassies were despatched to China, each ship bearing an ambassadorial suite, accompanied by students and monks, returned with a cargo of books on laws and institutions, astronomy and mathematics, arts and crafts, and various other subjects. Confucianism was a new lore imported thus from China and was readily accepted in Japan as a practical system of social morality and statecraft. To say this is not to deny the essential difference in character between the Japanese ‘way of living’ of those days and the Confucian attitude of mind. In the moral sphere the Japanese valued honesty and sincerity, and regarded uncleanliness in any form as a vice. As for individual conduct, importance was attached to candour and spontaneity. Difference there was indeed between the Japanese way of living and the Confucian attitude, which was didactic and disciplinary, and which strove in the main to regulate life socially and institutionally by the application of external laws and standards. But the realization of this basic incompatibility was to come later. Japan in the Manyō age, in the midst of rapid social changes, needed order and discipline. Confucianism must have been gratefully accepted since it ministered to this need and supplied something like a canonical basis for those social values that had already prevailed. Loyalty, filial piety, brotherly affection, conjugal devotion, faithfulness, etc. taught by Confucianism, were virtues that had naturally grown within, and been fostered by, the clan system of Japan. Then why is it that Confucianism has left so few traces of its influence in the Manyōshū? The first and simple reason is that few Japanese at that time had any proper training for reading Chinese classics and assimilating the mental attitude of Confucianism. The second reason is that Confucianism by its own nature as a teaching of social adjustment through ‘etiquette and music’ has little to do with pure lyricism; only in the realm of didactic poetry may it become a source of inspiration. In these circumstances Confucianism possesses among the many Manyō poets only a single representative in the person of Yamanoé Okura. A scholar sufficiently distinguished to be chosen and sent to China, and a man of the utmost honesty with a keen concern in social welfare, Okura was naturally inclined to didacticism. Although he has but few followers among the lyric poets of later ages, he occupies an important place in the history of Japanese thought, as the one poet in the Manyōshū reflecting the doctrine of Confucianism which, starting from its encouragement by Prince Shōtoku, was to spread over the entire country.
Taoism is another cult that was imported from China. Largely derived from the transcendental teachings of Laotsu and Chuangtsu, but compounded with all manner of folklore and superstition, it had fostered on the continent a belief in fairies and genii, and gave rise in certain circles to the vogue of the so-called ‘serene conversations’ and voluntary retirement from the world; and through its varied and startling manifestations it had left indelible marks on Chinese thought. It was received, however, in Japan with divided interest, in some quarters with an apparently evasive, even hostile attitude. Its spiritual influence on the Manyōshū is even less, as compared with that of Buddhism. In the Anthology we find sometimes meditative tendencies and Arcadian longings, Taoism serving as an adjunct to Buddhistic thought and providing a certain vocabulary, or sometimes supporting an Epicurean philosophy of life, as in the case of the series of verses composed by Tabito in praise of saké. Of course it should not be forgotten that, as regards subject matter for poetry, Taoism contributed, as is noted elsewhere, a rich store of parables and fables of a highly imaginative character.
LIFE, MANNERS AND CUSTOMS
How did the Japanese live in the Manyō age? What did they wear? What did they eat? And how were they housed?
Let us turn first to the clothing. The common materials in use were fabrics of taku (paper-mulberry fibre) and hemp. In the finer class stood silk, while the coarsest material was cloth woven of the kuzu-vine fibre (Pueraria Thunbergiana). Rarely were furs worn. All fabrics were ordinarily plain; but there existed, besides the much-prized native weave of striped patterns called shizu, various richly-figured silks obtained by the weaving methods imported previously from Korea and China, such as aya (twill) or nishiki (brocade) or even a gauze ‘shining like the wings of a dragon-fly.’ A primitive mode of dyeing was retained in the suriginu or ‘rubbed cloths’—so called because they were obtained by rubbing with the flowers or leaves of the season such as bush-clover (Lespedeza bicolor), iris and ‘mountain-indigo’ (Mercurialis leiocarpa). At the same time there were dyes for red, purple, green, blue, black, etc. and numerous halftones compounded thereof, so that it was possible to produce fabrics of many colours and shades. Although the common people were usually clad in plain white, the wearing of coloured dresses was by no means rare. The court prescribed different hues and shades for officials and nobles according to their ranks and grades; one can, therefore, imagine what processions of gorgeous colours must have moved up and down the broad avenues of the capital city!
The style of dress differed between the periods before and after the introduction of the T'ang customs. But most commonly a tight-sleeved coat of a comparatively short length was worn by both men and women. This coat was either unlined, lined, or wadded, according to season. Over the coat, a sort of loose trousers, called hakama, was worn by both sexes, while women put on, in addition, a long skirt (mo), or let the girdle-ends hang down. Among special accessories, the osuhi—probably a cape or shawl of a sort—was worn by men as well as women, while on a journey or in worshipping the gods, the ayui (leg-ties) were used by soldiers, travellers and workmen to bind their hakama at the knees, and women wore hiré (scarfs) about their shoulders.
As for personal adornments, there were gems or beads of various shapes and colours, which had been extensively used from the earliest times. Strings of these worn round the neck, on arms and ankles, were prized, especially as female ornaments. Young girls clinking their bracelet gems as they danced (No. 152), or the ‘Weaver Maid’ at work with all the jewelled bangles on her wrists and ankles swinging (No. 921), were visions invoked by the poets and sung with a genuine warmth of feeling. Kushiro, or rings of metal or stone worn on the arm, were also favourite ornaments for men as well as women. The coiffure changed from time to time. The typical mode for men was to bind the hair into two knots on either side of the head, or in a single large knot on the top. The style for women varied according to age. A child had the hair bobbed short, while a young girl wore it long, sometimes parted and hanging down to the shoulders; but as soon as she reached marriageable age it was either done up, or left to hang down still longer. Both sexes wore combs in the hair, a boxwood comb being considered a precious addition to female charm. Thus, the comb-case, together with mirror, made an indispensable and most intimate item of a lady's personal effects. In their full attire, gentlemen of rank wore the prescribed caps, which sometimes were decked with garlands, either artificial or of fresh flowers and leaves. A pretty custom of breaking off sprays of flowers or autumn leaves and wearing them on the head as ornaments prevailed with both sexes. For foot-wear, shoes of leather or cloth were worn by the upper classes. However, since even the beautiful maid of Mama, famous in story, is going barefoot (No. 672), the use of shoes appears to have been rare in rural communities. A simpler wear for the commoners was sandals made of rice-straw.
Turning to food, the main article of diet was, of course, rice—a staple which was destined to shape Japan's industrial structure for all the succeeding ages, and even to colour the religious life of the nation. Millet, kibi (Panicum miliaceum), barley and hié (Panicum frumentaceum) served as supplements to, or substitutes for, rice. The subsidiary dishes included vegetables, both cultivated and wild, such as wild celery, bracken shoots, yam, lettuce and other greens, onion and garlic, and sea-weeds of various kinds; such fish foods as bream, bonito, bass, carp, trout, eel, abalone, crab, mussel, etc.; birds like the wild goose, duck, pheasant, quail, snipe, and so on. It is interesting to note that no beef or horse-flesh was used, but whale-meat was undoubtedly eaten. The chief game animals were deer, boar and rabbit. All these things were served raw, boiled, broiled, or pickled. As may be gathered from the above list, fishing was a flourishing industry all along the sea-coasts. Hunting was also an occupation, but it was quite frequently done by the aristocracy as a knightly exercise or merely for sport. The Manyōshū mentions specifically hawking and the ‘medicine hunt,’ the latter being undertaken to obtain the horns of young deer for medicinal use. As for fruits, there were melons, chestnuts, oranges, peaches and many others. The principal beverage of the time was saké brewed from rice, which was universally drunk and used also as a sacred offering to the gods.
Thirdly, housing. Buildings varied widely in size and appearance and in their manner of construction, ranging from a hut in the primitive style to the palaces and temples constructed according to architectural plans and methods introduced from the continent. A rural dwelling had logs for posts, grass or board for roofing, and its earthen floor was covered with rushes or rice-straw. Wealthier families lived in larger, sometimes two-storied, houses, which had wooden floors, and also barns and stables. The fences were sometimes of living bushes, and sometimes of dead brushwood, reed or bamboo. Alongside such humble quarters, there rose palaces and temples in the new style. The building material for these edifices was still mainly timber, but construction was on a grand scale with vermillion-tinted pillars and beams and tiled roofs. The mansions of the nobles and the rich followed suit. And in consonance with this architectural magnificence, many a great garden was laid out with its rocks, artificial lakes and islets, its pines, willows and plum-trees and clumps of staggerbush and azalea and flowers of the four seasons, and even with mandarin-ducks in the lakes. With the increasing luxury in house and garden, the old ritual feasts always held in connection with the construction of a new dwelling (No. 152, etc.) were celebrated all the more heartily.
The mode of life differed radically between town and country. The contrast was not perhaps so marked in the early part of the Manyō age—namely, the Ōmi Period and the Asuka and Fujiwara Periods—when the court was being removed from place to place and the influence of the capital remained comparatively insignificant despite the steady enhancement of the metropolitan greatness through the importation of T'ang culture and civilization. That the prosperity of a capital in those periods was altogether transitory may be seen from the fact that as soon as it was evacuated by the court, it fell rapidly into ruin, so that the decay of an ‘old Imperial City’ came to be one of the stock themes for poets. But with the Nara Period, the capital was really the glorious centre of national life. The Emperor Shōmu transferred the court once to Kuni, and then to Naniwa, but each time he was drawn back irresistibly to Nara, so powerful had that city grown.
The Imperial City of fairest Nara
Glows now at the height of beauty,
Like brilliant flowers in bloom.
(No. 282)
Young gallants wearing silver-wrought swords paraded the wide boulevards while ladies of the court walked along the tree-shaded avenues trailing their crimson skirts. It was such a picture of the gay metropolis which the officials stationed at the Empire's outposts, ‘the far courts of the Sovereign’, could never forget and which caused them the most unbearable pangs of nostalgia (Nos. 558-9). Various functions, temple services, holiday outings, banquets and entertainments, occurring from day to day, made life in Nara a delightful thing not only to those ‘lords and ladies of the Great Palace’ (No. 912), but to the common run of its citizens. Of course there were the poor who grieved of having ‘no sackcloth for my children to wear’ and envied ‘those silks and quilted clothes’ thrown away by the rich (Nos. 634-5). But that, in the face of the general temper and actual prosperity of the metropolis, was allowed to cast no shadow to mar its brilliance and gaiety.
On the other hand, life in the country, keeping the tenor of the ancient days, went on with charming simplicity. In the Manyōshū we find a village maid who, at a river-side overgrown with green willows, draws no water from the stream but waits for her lover, ‘ever stamping the ground’ (No. 856), or a working girl worrying how her hands, chapped from rice-pounding, might distress ‘my young lord of the mansion’ (No. 850), and again a lad asking his lass to give him water out of the well-pool for the post-horses: ‘Mind you, straight from your own sweet hand!’ (No. 847). This last instance recalls the system of highways and posts, which in those days carried the exhilarating air of the country into the town and at the same time preserved rural communities from falling into stagnation and decay.
Mention has been made of embassies to the continent, of frontier-guards, and of province officials. It was their comings and goings that enlivened and invigorated the entire nation. Besides, a direct link between the court and the country was found in the occasional or periodical progresses of the sovereign to various hot spring resorts (Arima Hot Springs in Settsu Province and the spas of Iyo and Kii) or to the imperial villas at Yoshino and elsewhere. The journeys of palace-guards between the capital and their homes in the provinces, and the imperial excursions and hunting-trips may also be mentioned in this connection. All these things not only enlivened the country-side and served as a tonic for the city-dwellers, but provided the Manyō poets with an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
Distant journeys on land and sea were attended with dangers and difficulties. Although there were already in existence large vessels that could carry hundreds of passengers and a considerable quantity of goods, in most cases the ships were small and frail. The seafarer had to wait for favourable winds before he could hoist sail; and relying upon good weather, he steered his uncertain course along rugged coasts and from island to island. Neither was the lot of the land traveller to be envied, for he had to make his way over steep hills or by a ‘new-cut’ road bristling with tree-stumps. Hostels were few and far apart, so that even a prince of the blood was sometimes obliged to spend the night in a hurriedly improvised hut, to say nothing of the common wayfarer who frequently had to sleep literally ‘with grass for pillow.’ The Manyōshū contains a number of poems on the drowned or starved found on the roadside, giving a vivid proof of the extreme hazards of travel in those days. These hardships and privations, however, only served to reveal the depths of human existence, as contrasted with the amenities afforded by imperial progresses and hunting excursions, of a few days' duration and not even very far away from the capital. It was indeed a delightful privilege for courtiers to accompany their sovereign on these occasions and to wade through the dewy grass, starting the birds to flight, or to stain their clothes with the bloom of lespedeza in the autumn fields, or to stroll along the seashore and gather shells for their wives at home; and in this way to disport themselves in the very bosom of nature.
Now let us follow from season to season the principal festivals in the calendar of the Manyō age. New Year's Day is celebrated with a state banquet at court, and with the feastings of relatives and friends in private homes. On the first Day of the Rat, in January, another banquet is held in the palace and ‘jewelled brooms’ are distributed—a symbolic act for the encouragement of sericulture, a broom being used to collect young silk-worms. On the same day, people went out into the country, and gathered the young spring herbs, which were boiled and eaten. On the 7th of January the Feast of the Blue Horse is celebrated at the court. Blue being the colour of spring, according to Chinese tradition, ‘blue’ (black) horses were led before the Throne and prayers were offered for a prosperous year. The 15th and 16th days were reserved for a song-feast, also of Chinese origin, at which the participants sang, keeping time by stamping on the ground. Early in February the important rites of praying for a good crop were performed. Also during this month some clans held the festivals of their respective tutelary gods. These clan festivals took place twice annually, in spring (either in February or in April) and in winter (November). Now, as the balmy spring invites country-folk as well as townsmen out-of-doors, the roads and the fields are crowded with holiday-makers. On March 3, the court holds in some years a poetry festival in the Chinese style, in which the courtiers sit here and there alongside running water and compose Chinese poems, while cups of saké float down the stream towards them. Between April and May the ‘medicine hunt’ takes place, the young nobles on horseback presenting a beautiful and thrilling spectacle. May 5 is the Feast of Tango—now popularly known as the Boys' Festival—on which day anciently bags filled with spices were hung on the door-posts together with sweet-flag leaves or orange-flowers as a means of warding off uncleanliness and evil spirits. This is about the time when the cuckoo begins to sing. In fact, all the birds and flowers of the season seem to join in the festival. On the last day of June the rites of Ōbarai (Great Purification) are observed. Great importance was attached alike by court and people to the sacred rite of misogi by which mortals were to be cleansed of their sins and stains. With the autumn comes the Feast of Tanabata—on the Seventh Night of the Seventh Month. The feasts of Tango and Tanabata are both Chinese in origin, but they were assimilated and absorbed into Japanese folklore just about this time, and have since been preserved even to this day. The number of ‘Seventh Night’ poems in the Manyōshū exceeds 120; which helps us to judge how deeply the ‘Romance of the Milky Way’ thrilled the hearts of the Manyō man and kindled his imagination. The story is about the love of two stars—the Oxherd and the Weaver Maid who, having incurred the displeasure of the Ruler of Heaven, were doomed to live on the opposite shores of the Heavenly River, and were allowed to meet only once in the year—namely on the Seventh Night of the Seventh Month, which as such is celebrated by mortals to share in the joy of the celestial lovers. It is to be noted that in the Manyō poems, man goes to maid instead of maid going to man as the original Chinese version has it, and the boat used by the Oxherd for crossing the Heavenly River and the costumes and the loom of the Weaver Maid are all quite naturally in the Japanese style of that time. As the season advances, autumn flowers and foliage, with an appeal no less tender and irresistible than spring flowers, call out the people once more to hill and field. Towards the end of November, Thanksgiving, the ‘Feast of New-tasting,’ is solemnly observed at court and throughout the land. This is the last and most important of the series of agricultural feasts and festivals of Japan held in the year, beginning with the prayer for a good harvest early in February. Finally, another ‘Great Purification’ takes place in December. Having been purified thereby, body and soul, the nation is now ready to welcome the New Year.
Turning to human relations, Japanese clan morality in its purified form—namely, that which is based upon the consciousness of the Imperial House as the supreme head of all clans—manifests itself in the Manyōshū in spontaneous sentiments of the loveliest kind, giving the Anthology its chief distinction. Parental love, such as pervades the poems of Okura, may be regarded as a natural human feeling, common to all races and to all ages. But filial piety, so sincere, intense and instinctive as shown in the Manyō poems is not likely to be duplicated by any other people and under any other social order. Among the upper classes this virtue was so extended from parents to forefathers as to include an obligation to keep one's ancestral name unspotted and to enhance the prestige of one's family; and in that sense it was necessary to guard jealously one's integrity and honour (Nos. 470, 538-40, etc.). How warm and genuine filial devotion was also in the lower strata of society may be seen in the poems of the frontier-guards, who, on taking leave of their families, exhibit as much, if not more, tenderness and solicitude toward their parents as toward their wives and children (Nos. 766, 767, 772, 774, 775, 789, etc.). From this love between parents and children is derived the love between brothers and sisters, such as is revealed in the tanka of Princess Ōku on her ill-fated brother Prince Ōtsu (Nos. 54-5, 56-7), or in the chōka composed by Yakamochi on the death of his younger brother (Nos. 496-8). Because of the custom of that time, the sense of consanguinity tended to be restricted to the children born of the same mother and brought up under one roof. As a notable case we may mention that of Lady Ōtomo of Tamura who displayed intense love for a half-sister, Lady Ōtomo of Sakanoé's Elder Daughter (No. 408, etc.).
Then there was the love between man and woman—the most personal of all attachments. What attitude did Japanese society assume towards it under a clan system? Here will be discovered conflicting circumstances. The individual man or woman seeks to unite with his or her partner in love according to a natural and spontaneous inclination. But the ‘family’ which was always growing in complexity and more rigid in its demands on all its members to conform to its needs, does not always give countenance to such a union. Already in the Manyō age there was a law requiring the consent of parents and the formal recognition by society as a sine qua non of marriage. Hence passionate love had often to chafe at insuperable obstacles. A girl must keep her lover's name secret at the risk of her life. It became a desperate task to guard against the prying eyes and the busy mouths of the world. But tameless, bold, and unconquerable is the Manyō lover; intense passion pursues its course like a mountain torrent that sweeps on—swirling, splashing and crashing against the rocks. Herein lies the glory of the Manyō love-poems. The piteous tale of the forbidden love between the courtier Nakatomi Yakamori and Sanu Chigami is a good example (Nos. 339-48).
But unless love is forced to flounder tragically, as in the above example, it will eventually arrive at its goal, which is marriage. And as far as we may judge from the poems, conjugal love, reflecting and retaining the ardour of courtship days, is fraught with genuine warmth and tenderness. The wife cherished the husband with a single-hearted devotion, which was reciprocated by him with loving care and attention, though this, under the existing social system, may not have been altogether undivided. At any rate, our Anthology contains a poem in dialogue—a chōka by a wife and a tanka (given as its envoy) by her husband—which tells of a conjugal love as unassuming as it is tender. The story is worth recounting. The husband is evidently one of those men whose business takes him regularly to the Province of Yamashiro over a mountain road. The wife cannot bear to see him go on foot while others travel on horseback. She takes out a mirror and a scarf which she has treasured as a keepsake of her mother, and offering them to her husband, she asks him to exchange them for a horse. The husband declines the present, since his wife must walk even if he gets a horse. ‘Though we tread the rocks,’ says he, ‘let's walk, the two of us, together!’ (Nos. 871-4).
There was one sentiment which demanded, when the occasion arrived, a willing sacrifice of all these personal affections, no matter how dear, and of which the nobles and peasants were always deeply aware. This supreme devotion was due to the sovereign, under whose rule Tabito at the Dazaifu was content to say: ‘In Yamato or here in this far province, I feel ever the same’ (No. 381). ‘At the dread Sovereign's word,’ the embassies to China defied storms and went ‘whither his royal ships took them’ (No. 753). Courage and military prowess were prized by the warriors as necessary qualities in their service to the Throne. Carrying sword, spear, or shield, or shouldering a quiver and grasping a birchwood bow, they went to meet their foe in the field. All was for their lord and sovereign. It was not only among the educated or the higher classes that this sentiment of loyalty to the Throne prevailed.
Let us once more turn to the poems of frontier-guards (Nos. 769, 783, etc.). These young men, taken out of their lowly cottages in Eastland, bravely set forth for the far island of Kyūshū, leaving behind them their beloved parents, their wives and their sweethearts—who clung to them, ‘even as the creeping bean-vine clings to the wild rose-bush by the wayside’ (No. 777), or who ‘wept, standing in the reed-fence corner’ (No. 778). Their patriotic zeal is well illustrated by the following poem:
I will not from to-day
Turn back toward home—
I who have set forth
As Her Majesty's humble shield.
(No. 783)
Thus, all the threads of human relations are drawn to a single point—the Throne, Japanese morality ending where it ought to end.
OUTLOOK ON NATURE
The Manyō poems display an outlook on nature, which excels the later anthologies of Japan in scope and in depth of sympathy; it would perhaps be difficult to find a like intimacy with nature in the contemporary lyric poetry of any other country in the world.
Japanese appreciation of nature, deep-rooted in religious sentiment, had long been cultivated through an intimate contact between nature and man. In the Manyō age nature was animated directly by such of its phenomena as were still looked upon with religious deference and were identified with personal emotions. There were, of course, things in nature which had become objects of affection and admiration by virtue of their beauty or loveliness. There were things which were regarded as resounding with human emotions in that they reflected the joys and sorrows of man. Even in such cases, where natural objects are dealt with purely as poetical material, they seem to retain each their individuality and life—a spiritual entity permeated by a mysterious atmosphere. Never are they allowed to lapse into cold lifeless rhetorical ornament, or metaphor without some fringe of emotion. In the great majority of cases natural phenomena are still divine manifestations, or guardians of life in one way or another to whom man's gratitude is due, or else powers of destruction to be feared and dreaded. When their spiritual import or acute bearing on life are forgotten—as, for instance, when a man goes out gathering violets, and spends the night in the field (No. 599), or when young girls are boiling starworts on Kasuga Plain (No. 819), or when a poet, mourning his wife, ascribes the for rising on the hill to his sighing breath (No. 610),—even then nature is man's friend and companion and there still exists a sense of mutual sympathy. It is this profound feeling of mutual sympathy that made the Manyō man look far and wide and search deeply with lively emotions into all aspects of nature and grasp them with such eminent success. Probably every phase of nature that had anything to do with the life of those days appears in the Manyōshū in one form or another.
Mountains were considered the most divine of all natural phenomena. It is scarcely necessary to recall that Mount Fuji, then an active volcano, was worshipped as the tutelary god of Japan. The peak is immortalized also by Yamabé Akahito (Nos. 567-8), and by another, unknown, poet (Nos. 651-3). As these poets sing of Fuji the majestic and beautiful, or of Fuji the sublime and mysterious, Japanese poetry itself seems to soar to a rapturous height nowhere else surpassed. Among other mountains that were revered as deities, there is Tateyama, sung by Ōtomo Yakamochi (Nos. 550-2, 553-5); also the Tsukuba Mountain, famous for its festival of Kagai which was held in spring and autumn, and in which men and women gathered to pass the night dancing and singing (Nos. 668-9). All these mountains, which were greatly revered, are located far from the capital; but there are a number of mountains and hills nearer the capital, especially in the province of Yamato, which, either by their divinity or by virtue of their graceful features, were famous in song and story. In the south of Yamato Plain there is Unebi, a female mountain, with the two male mountains of Kagu and Miminashi standing near by. An old legend of the quarrels of the latter for the love of the former forms the subject of Poems Nos. 9-11. Further southwards, there is Mount Kamunabi of Asuka, overlooking the site of the former capital (Nos. 571-2). Beyond, rise the Yoshino Mountains which, with an imperial villa, their scenic beauties of green slopes and tumbling waters, spring flowers and autumn leaves, invoked an endless chorus of pious admiration and praise (Nos. 77-8, 79-80). Midway between Asuka and Nara and in a slightly easterly direction there stands the sacred hill of Miwa, and to its north a higher hill, Makimuku. The hill of Tatsuta, situated on the way from Nara to Naniwa and celebrated in those days for its cherry-flowers, was held in fee by Tatsutahiko, the god of wind. Ikoma is a large mountain that dominates not only Yamato Plain, but also the province of Settsu and the bay of Ōsaka on the opposite side. It was to its blue peak that the men of Nara, sailing out from the port of Naniwa, turned with wistful eyes to bid a last farewell to their beloved land of Yamato. In the immediate neighbourhood of the capital the hills of Kasuga, Mikasa and Takamado provided the urban population with convenient and beautiful grounds for outings and excursions.
The river most praised in the Manyōshū is the Yoshino, which rises in the mountains of Yoshino already mentioned, and the scenic beauty of its rock-strewn rapids delighted visitors from the capital. The Saho, the Hatsusé, and the Asuka, sometimes known as the Kamunabi, all flowing through Yamato Plain, were also favourite streams of the Manyō poets, who sang of their plovers and singing-frogs, or the yellow-roses on their banks. The Izumi River and the Uji River of Yamashiro were used for the transportation of timber required in the construction of a new capital. Yet another important waterway was the Horié Canal in Naniwa, which was crowded with ships from far provinces. Other rivers mentioned in the Manyōshū include the Tama and the Toné in eastern Japan, the Chikuma of Shinano Province, the Ogami, the Imizu, and the Haétsuki in northern Japan, and the Matsura in the island of Kyūshū. The lake that almost monopolized the attention of the Manyō poet is the Biwa in Ōmi, the largest lake in Japan, on whose shore stood at one time Shiga—the seat of the Emperor Tenji's court. Even in the Nara Period only ruinous traces of his palace and city remained for the melancholy contemplation of poets. The lake offered a convenient passage to the northern provinces of Japan, but a traveller crossing it in the frail boat of those days must have been seized by a sense of helplessness, as upon the open sea. Of the Fusé Lake, made famous by Yakamochi's poem, the name alone survives to-day, most of it having since been converted into cultivated fields.
The ocean represented, quite as forcefully as did mountains, the mighty powers of nature to the Manyō man, who travelled so much by sea and was personally and intimately acquainted with its manifold aspects, fair and genial, awesome and terrible. Of the many beautiful bays of Japan, the most famous, lying on the route from Yamato to the eastern provinces, was Miho Bay with its beach of white sand and green pine-trees and with its magnificent view of the sacred peak of Fuji in the distance. Between the bay of Naniwa and the Straits of Akashi in the west, or along Waka Beach in the south, the sea-coast unfolded a panorama of beautiful scenes that charmed excursionists from the capital. But the courtier on a journey to the south of Kii Province, even as a member of the imperial suite accompanying the sovereign on his visit to the spa of Muro, begins to yearn for home, wearied and awe-stricken by the waves of the vast Pacific beating upon the shore. As for the official journey to his post in Tsukushi, he has to sail the whole length of the Inland Sea, trusting his fate to a small ship. He crosses the thundering whirlpool of Ōshima and sails on westwards—sometimes stopping storm-bound in an island lee, sometimes steering ahead in the darkness of night. The insufferable anxieties and uncertainties of such a voyage are graphically told in many a Manyō poem. But above all, the most solemn and indelible impressions of the sea's ‘awefulness’ were engraved in the minds of those envoys to China or Korea who, leaving the shores of Kyūshū behind them, sailed over the rolling billows of the boundless ocean. The difficulties of the voyages seem to have added to the enthusiasm with which the Manyō poets sang of ports and harbours. From the travel poems by those who went to Tsukushi or abroad, it is possible to conjecture regarding the ports of call on their route through the Inland Sea. Mitsu of Naniwa, as the principal port of embarkation and debarkation, is mentioned most frequently in the Anthology. Next comes the port of Tomo in Bingo Province. Both of these served also as ports of landing for foreign embassies to the court of Nara. The latter, owing to its beautiful scenery, was a harbour specially dear to the hearts of all travellers in the Inland Sea.
As for the names of animals and other creatures appearing in the Manyōshū, the Kogi lists 37 kinds of birds, 13 of insects, etc., 11 of beasts, 9 of fishes, 6 of shells, or 76 kinds in all. With the rare exception of a foreign animal, the tiger, and a fabulous creature, the dragon, they were all familiar in various ways, so that they are treated with intimate knowledge and understanding in the poems. Fish and shell-fish; domestic animals like oxen and horses; domesticated birds such as fowls and hawks; silkworms; all these were of great importance for their practical uses, but they also occupied their respective places in the realm of poetry as familiar objects of nature, quite irrespective of practical consideration. For instance, the univalvular appearance of the abalone shell suggested unrequited love, while the silkworm cocoon recalled a lady secluded in her bower (No. 168). But it is not merely utilitarian purpose that binds the animal world to human society. The birds and beasts that come and go with the seasons and visit hill or field, or waterside, never fail to stir the Manyō man's emotions. What is noteworthy is that the poetic appeal of these animals lay apparently not so much in their colours or shapes as in their cries and sounds. The uguisu is the harbinger of spring. Though the picture of this dainty warbler flitting among the branches of bamboo or plum-trees does certainly attract the attention of the Manyō poet, his heart is more thrilled by its sweet hymn of joy. In contrast to the uguisu, the ‘night-thrush’ (nué) is mentioned for its plaintive note. When the sound of the singing-frogs is heard from clear streams, the spring is almost over. Summer brings the cuckoo. This bird, with its rich legendary and other associations, is apt to move the heart of a poet brooding over long-past ages. Summer dies amid the mournful shrillings of cicadas. Now the wild geese come crying, riding the autumn wind. As the dews thicken on the bush-clovers (hagi), the stag calls for his mate in the wakeful night-hours of a lonely lover. The cricket's chirping in the garden only deepens the melancholy. Winter draws near. The sanderlings call on the river-beaches, and the wild duck among the reeds. Numerous references to the voice of the cranes indicate that they were not then rare in central Japan. It is these birds, beasts, and insects, with their widely varied notes, that played the accompaniment to man's emotional life through all the seasons of the year.
As for the plants, the Kogi is again our authority for stat ng that there are 157 in number, consisting of 86 herbs and grasses, 67 trees and 4 kinds of bamboo. The familiar plants used for food have already been mentioned. These and many other useful plants, including the mulberry which supplied fibre for cloths, birch and spindle-tree for bows, bamboos for baskets, arrows and other articles, boxwood for combs, the gromwell, madder and other herbs for dyes—all served as poetic material exactly in the same manner as the useful animals. And it goes without saying that the number was especially large of those plants, cultivated or wild, which were regarded purely as objects of admiration because of their beauty and loveliness.
The earliest of all flowers was the plum-blossom which is described fancifully as offering a hospitable shelter to the uguisu, or realistically in a delectable word-picture of its white petals fluttering and falling together with the snow-flakes. Being a comparatively late importation from the continent, the plum-tree must have had a specially fresh appeal and charm. Then followed the peach-blossom, somewhat neglected by poets who were eager to welcome the cherry-flowers, which soon burst forth in all their glorious profusion. Here we must not forget to mention the fragrant little violets which were sure to attract the poet's eye and capture his heart. The long-blooming camellia, symbolic of the lengthening spring day, the staggerbush, still abundant in Kasuga Plain, the wild azalea—so passed by the gay procession of vernal flowers with wistaria and yellow-roses bringing up the rear.
In summer bloomed the kakitsubata, a species of iris, which is often cited in love poems, owing probably to its colour and form, in which there is something that suggests feminine beauty. The fragrant sweet-flag, as a plant capable of warding off evil spirits, was used together with the mugwort to decorate the ‘medicine bags’ that were hung up for the Feast of Tango on May 5th. The sweet-flag is also mentioned frequently in Manyō poems with the cuckoo, the favourite summer bird, as are also the unohana (Deutzia crenata) and the orange-flower. The orange-tree, brought over with great difficulty from the continent early in the history of Japan, was highly valued both for its flowers and fruit. Of other flowers of this season two more are worthy of mention, the auchi (bead-tree) and the lily—‘the deep-grass lily on the wayside.’
‘The seven flowers that blow in the autumn fields’ are attractively catalogued by Okura (Nos. 645-6). Of these, the more particularly liked were the bush-clovers that grow in thick clumps, profusely covered with purplish flowers, the ‘tail flower’ (Miscanthus sinensis) with its glossy ears of dark red, waving as if beckoning a friend to its side, and the patrinia, with its clusters of little yellow flowers twinkling like golden grains.
The green willows of spring and the yellow and crimson foliage of autumn were also universally admired, perhaps in the same sense as flowers were, for the richness and brilliance of their colours. But there was another side to the Manyō taste for plants. Non-flowering and unostentatious plants like bamboo, reeds, and rushes also attracted the poet. The pine-tree held a place of honour because of the noble and masculine character of its sturdy limbs, or because of the clear tone of the wind soughing through its branches. There still survived the primitive tendency to worship a large elm, or cryptomeria of great age, as a sacred object, demonstrating the presence of religious elements in the Manyō man's love of plants. The epithet maki tatsu (true-wood standing) was a favourite pillow-word for yama (mountain). It is quite likely that the sanctity of a mountain was believed to be enhanced by the luxuriance of its vegetation.
Finally, what was the attitude of the Manyō man towards the celestial and atmospheric phenomena which hung over, surrounded, and enfolded all these terrestrial things? Poetically and symbolically, and no doubt animistically also, homage was paid to the sun as the source of light and life. The moon was looked upon as a mirror to reflect the face of one's beloved far away. The star Vega shining high in the autumn sky was the ‘Weaver Maid’ in a romantic legend of the heavens. A floating cloud was spoken of as a messenger making for one's distant home, and the fog as rising up with the sigh of one in grief. While it is true that these phenomena were regarded with reverence or affection as living things possessing intimate ties with man, we should also remember that the Manyō man was a keen observer of all their multiple aspects. It is to his objectivity, combined with his sensitiveness, that we owe the rich variety of description that we find in the Manyō poems. Take the moon, for instance. We read of a young moon as being reminiscent of ‘the eyebrow of you whom I have seen but once’; the evening moon that rises before the day is over; the full moon bright and clear; the moon past its full for which one must sit up and wait; the moon that remains in the dawning sky; again, of the hour when the sky glows before moon-rise; when the moon traverses the sky at night or when it hangs low; or the dusk of dawn produced by the sinking of the moon: in fact every phase of the moon as it waxes and wanes in the course of a month and all the hours as they are affected by it are touched upon. The beauty as well as the movements of the yūzutsu (Venus), which both as evening- and morning-star ‘wanders hither and thither,’ had been noted so early that in the Manyō time ‘the star of eve’ is used as a pillow-word for ‘wavering of the mind.’
Since Japan's range of temperature is rather extreme for the temperate zone, and the atmospheric changes are varied and startling, the rainbow, hail and thunder, to say nothing of the spring haze, the autumn mist, the dew-drop or ‘the frost that falls at night’ are all used as poetic material. As for the clouds, they are mentioned in infinite variety, including ‘banner clouds,’ ‘heaven-flying clouds,’ ‘swinging clouds,’ ‘fading clouds,’ and ‘horizontal clouds’; while rain is differentiated according to certain poetic characteristics into harusamé (spring rain), yūdachi (sudden shower), shiguré (passing shower), and so forth. In Japan, the four seasons, though not abrupt in transition, are clearly marked off from one another, so that from early times each season was associated with a distinct set of poetic sentiments, and began to possess a poetry of its own, springing from a separate source of inspiration. The sense of the seasons and a delicate susceptibility to the peculiar aspects of each, which were cultivated more and more, came to constitute one of the more important characteristics of Japanese literature in all the succeeding centuries. But this literary tradition was well established in the Manyō age, whose poets showed a very great and lively concern for all the seasonal changes.
POETRY AND POETS
Manyō poems are characterized by directness and frankness in their expression of life's joy, love, grief and indignation. No poetry of later ages can attain to the level of beauty of these poems, alive as they are with sentiments that are instinctive, robust and undisguised. This does not mean, however, that the Manyōshū forms the primeval poetry of the Japanese race, for, as a matter of fact, the Anthology represents a literature which presupposes the development and cultivation of a language extending over centuries. The Manyō man himself was aware of this historical background. His emotional reactions to the events in his daily life or in his natural environment were directly or indirectly linked to the ‘times of old.’ The Manyōshū is by no means primitive. Its artistic value and significance are to be found in the fact that it reflects a culture that retained its primitive freshness and vigour. A conscious effort is visible throughout the book to discover in mythology a basis for the present life. A longing for the past, and regret for its disappearance are conspicuous everywhere, especially in the poems lamenting the decay of former capitals. Such tendencies served to introduce, in addition to the realms of life and nature, a third class of subject-matter for poetry—namely the realm of tradition and legend.
Rivalry in winning a wife is the theme of many legends. In the ‘Age of the Gods’ even mountains, as already noted, quarrelled over a prospective spouse (Nos. 9-11). The well-known tales of the Maiden Unai (Nos. 674-6) and Tekona of Mama (Nos. 575-7, 672-3), or of the Cherry-Flower Maid (Nos. 823-4) and Kazurako, all tell of fierce contentions between lovers. In every case, it is to be noted, the story ends with the self-destruction of the poor helpless girl. Among the legends concerning the origin of place-names, those of the ‘Scarf-Waving Hill’ (No. 802) and the ‘Yōrō Waterfall’ (No. 556) are best known. The latter story, having to do with the ‘elixir of youth,’ directs our attention to the Taoistic elements in the Manyōshū. All the poems dealing with the supernatural, the life of perpetual youth and happiness, or the marriage between a mortal and a fairy maid, and others on like subjects, are to be considered as more or less connected with Taoistic superstitions. As for the famous legend of Urashima (Nos. 656-7), while no hasty conclusion is permissible regarding its origin and evolution, it is not difficult to detect the Taoistic influence in its description of the ‘Everlasting Land’ without age and without death. Of a similar and even deeper significance are the stories of ‘Yamabito Tsuminoé’ (No. 712) and the Maidens of Matsura (Nos. 793-6). Thus those Taoistic ideas, which extend the concept of life beyond the bounds of earth, served to enrich considerably the Manyō world of poetry. Here one finds an instance of the influence of Chinese literature on our Anthology.
Now, having before him this world of rich poetic material, embracing life, nature and history, together with mythology and legend, how did the Manyō poet grasp it? How did he portray it? These questions bear upon another historical aspect of the Anthology. In the Manyō age, though it possessed an artistically finished language and a certain tradition in world outlook, Japanese poetry still retained its primitive vitality, and was in the process of a steady and wholesome development. Hence, the Manyō poems are impregnated with the health and virility of youth—a fact which has made the Anthology an inexhaustible reservoir of strength for Japanese literature of all subsequent ages.
The language of the Manyōshū is highly sensuous; that is to say, a psychological reaction, instead of being described in an abstract and general way, is expressed in terms of the physical senses, visual or auditory, gustatory or tactual. When a man is in love with a maid, it is said that ‘she rides on my heart,’ even as the wave rolls and spreads over the beach. The intensification of passion is represented in terms of respiration, such as ‘breath-choking.’ Of course, such phrases were not inventions by individual poets; they constituted a literary heritage of the race which was held in common by all the people, high and low, in town and country. The prevalent use of pillow-words is a good illustration of this point.
We have already spoken of the danger of pillow-words becoming meaningless appendages or repetitions. In the case of the Manyōshū, however, a pillow-word usually serves as an overtone to magnify the amplitude of the tone of the head-word, leading us to the contemplation of a wider vista. Such juxtaposition of two different ideas does not merely affect the question of the structure or rhetoric of a language; it involves the question of how the Manyō man grasped his world. When a poet is inspired to put into verse a certain emotion that burns within him, he seldom stops at giving the mere description of the internal state of his mind but, by association, he introduces into the realm of his feeling the things about him—especially the objects and phenomena of nature—which he has seen or felt or which are claiming his attention at that very moment. It is by the employment of these things as ‘sympathetic chords,’ so to speak, that he proceeds to play the main string of his feeling. Herein lies the function of another rhetorical device, the ‘introductory verse.’ There are, consequently, a great many lyrics in the Manyōshū, which have what might perhaps be called harmonic construction.
To summarize the foregoing, the characteristics of the Manyō poetry consist in its freshness of language, its harmonic construction and its firm grasp of life and nature, and these may be regarded as a continuation and development of the old traditions of indigenous Japanese culture. In this Manyō respect the lyrics stand in marked contrast to the plastic arts which flourished in the same period, but which were largely continental in style and technique. Plastic art, by its very nature, is capable of being transplanted from one country to another and of thriving on the new soil practically in its original form—especially when it meets with no competition from a native source, as was the case in Japan of the 8th century, which could boast no greater tradition in this line than what was represented by the crude and primitive clay figures known as haniwa. Even among the sculptural masterpieces of the Asuka and Nara Periods, which mark one of the highest points in the history of Japanese art, it is usually difficult to distinguish which are the most typically Japanese specimens and which the general Asiatic type. The Manyō poetry, on the contrary, was eminently successful in preserving and developing characteristically Japanese elements. This is no doubt due to the fact that poetry is a word-art forming part and parcel of the very life of a race. At the same time, it indicates how strong and deep-rooted were the literary traditions that the Manyō age inherited from the ages past.
While the Manyōshū possesses as a whole a unique distinctive quality of its own, its poems naturally change in style with the changing times. Apart from those few works that belong to earlier periods antedating the reign of the Emperor Tenji, the bulk of the poems may be roughly divided into two groups—one belonging to the Asuka and Fujiwara Periods (673-710) and the other to the Nara Period (710-84). The poems of the former group are imbued with the freshness of elemental emotions and animated with a sturdy pioneering spirit. They possess an archaic solemnity, as well as masculine and vigorous qualities of tone, although marred at times by a crudeness or extravagance of expression. The latter group shows a marked gain in smoothness and lucidity of style; sometimes breathing a note of melancholy, and sometimes striving for rhetorical elegance with a tendency to substitute a refinement of sensibility for fervour of sentiment. This meant, of course, only an internal change within the healthy, honest and unsophisticated Manyō mind, and the process was influenced and complicated by the genius of individual poets. Nevertheless, it may be broadly stated that such is the general direction that Manyō poetry followed in the course of its development.
Among the poets prominent in the Manyōshū there are, as stated before, many members of the imperial family, beginning with the Emperor Yūryaku and the Empress Yamato-himé of the more remote periods. The most representative poet, however, of the early Manyō age, both in style and ability, is Kakinomoto Hitomaro, who excelled both in chōka and tanka, and whose works include elegies and hymns of praise, as well as poems of love and travel. In his poems every scene glows with the fire of his feelings, and he often uses sonorous cadences such as recall the sound of the sea. In travel poems Takechi Kurohito is considered Hitomaro's equal, but the poet, who has always been accorded the place of honour with Hitomaro as one of the two ‘Saints of Poetry,’ is Yamabé Akahito who flourished in the early Nara Period. In contrast to the former's impassioned attitude towards life, the latter, contemplating the world before him calmly and with unclouded eyes, wrote poems in a pure and limpid style. Takahashi Mushimaro, of whom a number of ballad-like poems treating of legendary subjects are preserved, is another important representative of this period.
The later Manyō age, i. e. the Nara Period, is best represented by a galaxy of poets centreing round the Ōtomo clan, of whom Tabito, his son Yakamochi, and his one-time subordinate, Yamanoé Okura, are the best known. They were all civilized men of the age, steeped in continental culture and well acquainted with the teachings of Confucius and Buddhism, by which they were consequently influenced to a considerable degree. Okura, a Confucian scholar, was seriously interested in human relations and social questions. On the other hand, it is worthy of note that Tabito, while showing in the prefaces to his poems a profound knowledge of Chinese literature, remained throughout his life a passionate and truly Japanese poet. But in his son, Yakamochi, we have the pre-eminent figure of this period. From the many, and occasionally frivolous, love poems which he wrote as a young court noble surrounded by a bevy of beautiful women, to those in which he gravely exhorts his clansmen to tread the path of rectitude and honour, his work ranges widely in content and tenor. Specially notable is that group of tanka (Nos. 521-2, 523) which shows the poet's soul, pensive and subdued, free from all violent emotions, and responding to every casual phenomenon of nature. They constitute in fact a new brand of poetry created in the closing years of the Manyō age.
Lady Ōtomo of Sakanoé—a sister of Tabito and a member of the above-mentioned group—is only one of the many distinguished women poets of the Manyōshū. There are also Princess Nukada who flourished in the reign of the Emperor Tenji, and Princess Ōku (elder sister of Prince Ōtsu) whose genius was prompted to blossom forth under the star of an evil fortune. Then there is the Maiden Sanu Chigami, author of a series of impassioned poems inspired by her tragic love. Further, there are those ladies who exchanged verses with Yakamochi, and many others, known or unknown by name, whose works deserve to rank among the best by virtue of the delicacy or tenderness or intensity of their feeling.
Finally, it should be noted that the Manyōshū contains a great number of excellent poems by anonymous authors and common folk, as may be readily seen in the Eastland poems, or those by frontier-guards, and some others which are scattered in Books XI, XII and XIII. In point of style, idea and simile, they are simpler and plainer, as compared with the works of court poets; but their rusticity has a rich charm of its own, and they are moreover no whit inferior in the genuineness of sentiment and in their observation and treatment of nature. Many of these poems have the qualities of folk-song, which makes the Manyōshū truly a ‘people's anthology.’ Those humble poets who sang, borrowing old familiar ditties of the country-side and weaving their own feelings into them, inject a refreshing and vital element into the Anthology, and throw interesting sidelights on the thoughts and beliefs of the age and the sentiments and modes of life in the provinces.
PART III
THE MANYōSHū IN LATER AGES
The Manyōshū seems to have been almost totally neglected for some time after its compilation. The first evidence we have of its having attracted any attention is a poem which was composed in the latter half of the 9th century in reply to a question of the emperor regarding the Anthology, and which is included in the Kokinshū, the first of the anthologies compiled at imperial command, which appeared in 905, and which was itself claimed to be a continuation of the Manyōshū. A small collection of tanka, called Shinsen (newly compiled) Manyōshū, dated 893, is also extant.
The Kokinshū and the subsequent ‘imperial anthologies’ continued to include some Manyō poems, though not without errors and misquotations. Of the Manyō poets, Hitomaro, Akahito and Yakamochi were honoured each by a book of random collections of their works. Especially Hitomaro and Akahito, as ‘Saints of Poetry’ among the ‘Thirty-six Master-Poets,’ came to receive universal veneration from this time onward. But little appreciation was shown of the true value and spirit of Manyō poetry.
It was some 200 years after the supposed date of its completion, that the first attempt was made at a textual study of the Manyō poems. By order of the emperor, Minamoto Shitagō (911-83), the leading poet and scholar of that time, who was also a lexicographer, produced a Manyō text to render its reading easier. For this work he has been accorded the first place in the long list of Manyō scholars. Subsequently for three or four centuries, gleanings, selections and classified collections of Manyō poems continued to be made, as well as a certain amount of textual emendation, and even investigation into the date and circumstances of the compilation. There is no doubt that the Anthology was cherished by court circles and the Shoguns; and the copying of it was a pious exercise, to which fact we owe the scattered volumes and stray leaves of manuscript copies of the Manyōshū done by master calligraphers. Of these the most famous are a fragment of the ‘Katsura MS.’—apparently a copy of selected poems made in the middle of the 11th century—now one of the ‘imperial treasures’; the ‘Genryaku Comparative Texts’ consisting of parts of a manuscript copy dated 1184, and the ‘West Hongan-ji Temple Book’—a complete copy of the 13th century.
A priest named Sengaku (1203-? 73), at Kamakura, by order of the Shogun Fujiwara Yoritsuné, carried on a thorough revision of the Manyō texts. His commentary in 10 volumes, completed in the middle of the 13th century, marks the beginning of really scholarly labour in this field. During the 15th and 16th centuries the Manyōshū gained in prestige and popularity, but no advance was made in the field of critical studies. It may be noted in passing that to the new school of renga poets the Manyōshū became an object of special esteem, and its great leader Sōgi (d. 1502) tried his hand at commenting on the Anthology. With the 17th century a new age of revival of classical learning dawned upon Japan. The first printed edition of the Manyōshū was made possible by the use of movable wooden types. The third edition, revised and corrected and superseding the previous editions, was published in 1643, and this is an epoch-making edition that has remained to this day as an authority for general consultation concerning the Manyō text.
Studies and researches, based strictly on bibliographical sources, were inaugurated by Keichū (1640-1701), a learned monk of Ōsaka. Tokugawa Mitsukuni (d. 1700), head of the Mito branch of the Shogunate family, who was one of the greatest patrons of learning in modern Japan, sponsored the labours of Keichū, which bore fruit in the Manyō Daishōki—a voluminous commentary in 20 books. For two centuries this book circulated, in the form of manuscript copies, as a valuable store of information. Keichū, a profound Buddhist scholar, was not only acquainted with Sanskrit, but was also versed in Chinese literature. He was thus well-equipped for his researches into ancient classics, and became the pioneer of Japanese philology as well as the founder of Manyō learning.
Sixty years after Keichū's death, Kamo Mabuchi (1697-1769), a great scholar of Japanese classics, carried on further studies in the Manyōshū. Without confining himself to exegetical work, he investigated the dates of compilation of all the books of the Manyōshū and formulated theories regarding their original order, the results of which are embodied in the book entitled the Manyōkō. Moreover, endowed with an extraordinary capacity for understanding and appreciation, he extolled the true spirit of the Manyō and demonstrated his devotion by writing poems in the Manyō style, so that many eminent scholars and poets, some of whom are mentioned below, appeared from among his pupils. Considerable as was his academic contribution, his influence upon the generation of Manyō scholars who followed him was no less.
Tachibana Chikagé (1734-1808) of Yedo, a disciple of Mabuchi, brought out the Manyōshū Ryakugé, a concise and convenient commentary, in 1812, which proved most successful in spreading Manyō knowledge. In contrast to this popular book, a monumental work in 141 volumes, embodying most elaborate commentaries and studies, known as the Manyōshū Kogi, was compiled by a scholar in the remote province of Tosa in southern Japan, Kamochi Masazumi (1791-1858), and it is still valued as an authoritative work of reference. A fine edition of the book was published under imperial patronage in the year 1891, which has since been followed by smaller editions. It was while the work on the Kogi was in progress, that Kimura Masakoto (1827-1913), who became a great Manyō bibliographer, and an indefatigable collector and commentator of various texts, was born in eastern Japan. He conducted special researches in the field of Manyō script and phonology, and has left a critical commentary, which, though not complete, was the most exhaustive in existence at the time. Of this book the parts dealing with bibliography and methodology are still valuable, while many of the author's views regarding textual interpretation compel attention and respect, representing as they do profound and conscientious scholarship.
The ground-work for Manyō textual criticism was completed by Dr. Nobutsuna Sasaki and his collaborators after many years' labour. The Kōhon Manyōshū, a variorum edition in 24 volumes (10 vols. in 2nd edition), published in 1924, is based on the standard edition of 1643 mentioned above, and takes note of all the variant readings found in 20 different sources, including such rare manuscripts as the ‘Katsura MS.’ and others already described. It also contains facsimile reproductions from old manuscripts and editions. Though it may yet have to be enlarged or revised in future, this book is final for the present, and anticipates the compilation of a definitive edition of the Manyōshū.
During the four decades from the beginning of the 20th century, when the first volume of Kimura's commentary was issued, more manuscripts have been discovered, and those already known have been reproduced. Old commentaries have been reprinted and new ones, large and small, have been written. Biographies, geographies and natural history books concerning the Manyōshū, indexes and concordances of various kinds, monographs and dissertations, giving original theories or the results of independent studies, books and essays, some critical, some popular, some cultural-historical,—thousands of publications have come from the press. Details of these are to be found in the Manyōshū Kenkyū Nempō (Year's Work in Manyō Studies) which has been issued regularly since 1930. It only remains to add that important contributions have been made in recent years by several members of our Committee to this Manyō renaissance.
The Manyōshū, which has given later scholars a storehouse of historical materials regarding Japanese poetry and culture, has in more recent times served for poets as an undefiled well of thought and language. It is true that superficial followers of the Manyō style began to appear early in the mediaeval age, and they grew more numerous in the 12th century, but they were mere imitators, and their number continued to multiply throughout the subsequent ages. The name of Minamoto Sanetomo (d. 1219), however, deserves mention, since this ill-starred Shōgun at Kamakura was a poet, young and sensitive, who in some of his poems showed a fine grasp of the Manyō spirit and style. In the modern age, despite the active interest aroused in Manyō studies, scholars did not necessarily write their poems in the Manyō style. We have already discovered in Kamo Mabuchi an early propounder of Manyōism in the 18th century. His pupils, Tokugawa Munetaké (d. 1771) of Yedo and Katori Nahiko (d. 1782), were both excellent neo-Manyō poets. More poets of the same school appeared in the 19th century in northern and western Japan, of whom Ryōkan the monk (d. 1831), Hiraga Motoyoshi (d. 1865) and Tachibana Akemi (d. 1868) may be mentioned. As for those of the Meiji era and after, there were—to confine ourselves to those poets who are dead—first of all Shiki Masaoka (d. 1902), who is remembered for his brilliant achievements as a reformer of tanka and haiku; Sachio Itō (d. 1913), Shiki's pupil, and Akahiko Shimaki (d. 1926), Sachio's pupil, who are also famous for their poems in the Manyō style. This trio of master-and-disciples wrote not only excellent poems but also useful books for popularizing the appreciation and the spread of the Manyō style; and future historians of Japanese poetry are not likely to overlook the contributions they made, in concert with other master-singers of their time, to the unprecedented vogue of tanka in Japan to-day.
TRANSLATIONS
European acquaintance with the Manyōshū began with the 19th century. It was in 1834 that Klaproth, a noted Orientalist, translated into French one of the envoys to Yakamochi's chōka (No. 471) concerning the discovery of a gold mine in 749. In the middle of the 19th century a specimen of some printed edition found its way into Holland, for the Manyōshū is listed in Siebold's catalogue of books imported from Japan. Translations, though of but a few poems in each case, began to appear from 1870 onward, after intercourse was firmly established between Japan and Europe.
The first of these was attempted by a French scholar, Léon de Rosny (1837-1914), who published his Anthologie Japonaise in 1871, which contained 9 Manyō poems. In the following year, 1872, an Austrian Orientalist, August Pfizmaier (1808-87) published in the Proceedings of the Imperial Academy of Vienna translations of more than 200 poems—a half of Book III and a great part of Book IV. But all these early translations are, as would be expected, extremely inaccurate. The first adequate work in this field appeared in 1880 in The Classical Poetry of the Japanese which was written by Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850-1935), then Professor of the Tokyo Imperial University and a foremost authority on Japanese classics. The book contains a few score of the more important poems from the Manyōshū. Since then, with the growing appreciation of the Anthology, good translations have been published one after another. Karl Florenz (1865-1939), formerly Professor of the Hamburg University and also Professor of the Tokyo Imperial University for many years, included 30 poems from the Manyōshū in his Dichtergrüsse aus dem fernen Osten, published in 1894. He also wrote in 1904 a history of Japanese literature, giving therein a brief exposition of the Manyōshū together with a few sample translations, as G. Aston (1841-1911) had done previously in 1899 for the English reading public.
The Primitive and Mediaeval Japanese Texts, brought out in 1906 by F. V. Dickins (1838-1915), contains metrical translations of practically all the chōka and a scholarly and comprehensive introduction to the Manyō age and poetry. Michel Revon's Anthologie de la Littérature Japonaise des Origines au 20eSiècle, published in 1910, has also a good many pieces, including 5 chōka. The little book by Arthur Waley, Japanese Poetry (1919), gives literal translations of some 90 poems, mostly tanka, with a view ‘to facilitate the study of the Japanese text.’ The German translation of all Hitomaro's poems and a study of the poet made in 1927 by Alfred Lorenzen, one of the pupils of Professor Florenz, should be mentioned as a notable contribution, while the work of Dr. Georges Bonneau, who has been staying in Japan and devoting his time to the translation of the Kokinshū and Japanese folk-songs, and who in the meantime has published a few translations from the Manyōshū, deserves notice. Dr. Bonneau claims that French is the European tongue best suited for translating Japanese poetry into because of certain intrinsic similarities between the two languages. By far the most colossal enterprise ever attempted in this field is being undertaken by Dr. J. L. Pierson, Jr., a Dutch scholar well versed in the Japanese language, who has embarked upon a complete translation of the Manyōshū with copious annotations ‘from the point of view of the linguist,’ of which the fifth volume, covering Book V of the original, has recently been published.
As regards the labours of Japanese scholars in this field, it may be recalled that in 1897 Tōmitsu Okazaki submitted to the University of Leipzig a doctoral dissertation, which contained an exposition of the Manyōshū and translations of its poems. Okazaki also gives translations of some Manyō poems in his Geschichte der japanischen Nationalliteratur, which was published in the following year. Among the contemporary writers of English, Professors Tetsuzō Okada and Asatarō Miyamori may be mentioned, the former being the author of Three Hundred Manyō Poems, published in 1935, and the latter of Masterpieces of Japanese Poetry Ancient and Modern (1936) in two volumes, of which fully one-third of the first is devoted to the Manyōshū.
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