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The Man'yōshū (万葉集, literally "Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves", but see § Name below) is the oldest extant collection of Japanese waka (poetry in Classical Japanese), compiled sometime after AD 759 during the Nara period. The anthology is one of the most revered of Japan's poetic compilations. The compiler, or the last in a series of compilers, is today widely believed to be Ōtomo no Yakamochi, although numerous other theories have been proposed. The last datable poem in the collection is from AD 759 (No. 4516). It contains many poems from much earlier, many of them anonymous or misattributed (usually to well-known poets), but the bulk of the collection represents the period between AD 600 and 759. The precise significance of the title is not known with certainty.

The collection is divided into twenty parts or books; this number was followed in most later collections. The collection contains 265 chōka (long poems), 4,207 tanka (short poems), one tan-renga (short connecting poem), one bussokusekika (a poem in the form 5-7-5-7-7-7; named for the poems inscribed on the Buddha's footprints at Yakushi-ji in Nara), four kanshi (Chinese poems), and 22 Chinese prose passages. Unlike later collections, such as the Kokin Wakashū, there is no preface.

The Man'yōshū is widely regarded as being a particularly unique Japanese work. This does not mean that the poems and passages of the collection differed starkly from the scholarly standard (in Yakamochi's time) of Chinese literature and poetics. Certainly many entries of the Man'yōshū have a continental tone, earlier poems having Confucian or Taoist themes and later poems reflecting on Buddhist teachings. Yet, the Man'yōshū is singular, even in comparison with later works, in choosing primarily Ancient Japanese themes, extolling Shintō virtues of forthrightness (真, makoto) and virility (masuraoburi). In addition, the language of many entries of the Man'yōshū exerts a powerful sentimental appeal to readers:

his early collection has something of the freshness of dawn. There are irregularities not tolerated later, such as hypometric lines; there are evocative place names and makurakotoba; and there are evocative exclamations such as kamo, whose appeal is genuine even if incommunicable. In other words, the collection contains the appeal of an art at its pristine source with a romantic sense of venerable age and therefore of an ideal order since lost.

Name

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Although the characters in the name Man'yōshū literally translate to "Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves" or "Collection of Myriad Leaves", the intended meaning of the title of the work has been interpreted variously by scholars. Sengaku, Kamo no Mabuchi and Kada no Azumamaro considered the character yō (葉) to represent words (koto no ha), and so give the meaning of the title as "collection of countless words". Keichū and Kamochi Masazumi (鹿持雅澄) took the middle character to refer to an "era", thus giving "a collection to last ten thousand ages". The kanbun scholar Okada Masayuki (岡田正之) considered yō to be a metaphor comparing the massive collection of poems to the leaves on a tree. Another theory is that the name refers to the large number of pages used in the collection.

Of these, "collection to last ten thousand ages" is considered to be the interpretation with the most weight.

Periodization

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The collection is customarily divided into four periods. The earliest dates to prehistoric or legendary pasts, from the time of Emperor Yūryaku (r. c. 456 – c. 479) to those of the little documented Emperor Yōmei (r. 585–587), Saimei (r. 594–661), and finally Tenji (r. 668–671) during the Taika Reforms and the time of Fujiwara no Kamatari (614–669). The second period covers the end of the seventh century, coinciding with the popularity of Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, one of Japan's greatest poets. The third period spans 700 – c. 730 and covers the works of such poets as Yamabe no Akahito, Ōtomo no Tabito and Yamanoue no Okura. The fourth period spans 730–760 and includes the work of the last great poet of this collection, the compiler Ōtomo no Yakamochi himself, who not only wrote many original poems but also edited, updated and refashioned an unknown number of ancient poems.

Poets

Among the collection's representative poets are Princess Nukata, Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, Yamabe no Akahito, Yamanoue no Okura, Ōtomo no Tabito and his son Ōtomo no Yakamochi.

Linguistic significance

In addition to its artistic merits the Man'yōshū is important for using one of the earliest Japanese writing systems, the cumbersome man'yōgana. Though it was not the first use of this writing system, which was also used in the earlier Kojiki (712), it was influential enough to give the writing system its name: "the kana of the Man'yōshū". This system uses Chinese characters in a variety of functions: their usual logographic sense; to represent Japanese syllables phonetically; and sometimes in a combination of these functions. The use of Chinese characters to represent Japanese syllables was in fact the genesis of the modern syllabic kana writing systems, being simplified forms (hiragana) or fragments (katakana) of the man'yōgana.

The collection, particularly volumes 14 and 20, is also highly valued by historical linguists for the information it provides on early Old Japanese dialects.

Translations

Julius Klaproth produced some early, severely flawed translations of Man'yōshū poetry. Donald Keene explained in a preface to the Nihon Gakujutsu Shinkō Kai edition of the Man'yōshū:

One "envoy" (hanka) to a long poem was translated as early as 1834 by the celebrated German orientalist Heinrich Julius Klaproth (1783–1835). Klaproth, having journeyed to Siberia in pursuit of strange languages, encountered some Japanese castaways, fishermen, hardly ideal mentors for the study of 8th century poetry. Not surprisingly, his translation was anything but accurate.

In 1940, Columbia University Press published a translation created by a committee of Japanese scholars and revised by the English poet, Ralph Hodgson. This translation was accepted in the Japanese Translation Series of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Mokkan

In premodern Japan, officials used wooden slips or tablets of various sizes, known as mokkan (木簡), for recording memoranda, simple correspondence, and official dispatches. Three mokkan that have been excavated contain text from the Man'yōshū. A mokkan excavated from an archaeological site in Kizugawa, Kyoto, contains the first 11 characters of poem 2205 in volume 10, written in Man'yōgana. It is dated between 750 and 780, and its size is 23.4 by 2.4 by 1.2 cm (9.21 by 0.94 by 0.47 in). Inspection with an infrared camera revealed other characters, suggesting that the mokkan was used for writing practice. Another mokkan, excavated in 1997 from the Miyamachi archaeological site in Kōka, Shiga, contains poem 3807 in volume 16. It is dated to the middle of the 8th century, and is 2 cm wide by 1 mm thick. Lastly, a mokkan excavated at the Ishigami archaeological site in Asuka, Nara, contains the first 14 characters of poem 1391, in volume 7, written in Man'yōgana. Its size is 9.1 by 5.5 by 0.6 cm (3.58 by 2.17 by 0.24 in), and it is dated to the late 7th century, making it the oldest of the three.

Plant species cited

More than 150 species of grasses and trees are mentioned in approximately 1,500 entries of Man'yōshū. More than 30 of these species are found at the Manyo Botanical Garden Manyō shokubutsu-en (万葉植物園) in Japan, collectively placing them with the name and associated tanka for visitors to read and observe, reminding them of the ancient time in which the references were made. The first Manyo shokubutsu-en opened in Kasuga Shrine in 1932.

See also

• Kotodama
• Umi Yukaba

Notes

1. It is not the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry, since the Kaifūsō, an anthology of Japanese kanshi—poetry in Classical Chinese—predates it by at least several years.

References

Citations

1. Satake (2004: 555)
2. Earl Miner; Hiroko Odagiri; Robert E. Morrell (1985). The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature. Princeton University Press. pp. 170–171. ISBN 0-691-06599-3.
3. Uemura, Etsuko 1981 (24th edition, 2010). Man'yōshū-nyūmon p.17. Tokyo: Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko.
4. Uemura 1981:17.
5. Shuichi Kato; Don Sanderson (15 April 2013). A History of Japanese Literature: From the Manyoshu to Modern Times. Routledge. p. 24. ISBN 978-1-136-61368-5.
6. Roy Andrew Miller (1967). The Japanese Language. Tuttle. p. 32., cited in Peter Nosco (1990). Remembering Paradise: Nativism and Nostalgia in Eighteenth-century Japan. Harvard Univ Asia Center. p. 182. ISBN 978-0-674-76007-3.
7. Bjarke Frellesvig (29 July 2010). A History of the Japanese Language. Cambridge University Press. p. 14. ISBN 978-1-139-48880-8.
8. Peter T. Daniels (1996). The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press. p. 212. ISBN 978-0-19-507993-7.
9. Uemura 1981:25–26.
10. Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai. (1965). The Man'yōshū, p. iii.
11. Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai, p. ii.
12. Piggott, Joan R. (Winter 1990). "Mokkan: Wooden Documents from the Nara Period". Monumenta Nipponica. 45 (4). Sophia University: 449–450. Retrieved 19 August 2018.
13. "７世紀の木簡に万葉の歌　奈良・石神遺跡、６０年更新". Asahi. 2008-10-17. Archived from the original on October 20, 2008. Retrieved 2008-10-31. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
14. "万葉集：３例目、万葉歌木簡　編さん期と一致－－京都の遺跡・８世紀後半". Mainichi. 2008-10-23. Retrieved 2008-10-31.
15. "万葉集：万葉歌、最古の木簡　７世紀後半－－奈良・石神遺跡". Mainichi. 2008-10-18. Archived from the original on October 20, 2008. Retrieved 2008-10-31. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
16. "万葉集：和歌刻んだ最古の木簡出土　奈良・明日香". Asahi. 2008-10-17. Retrieved 2008-10-31.
17. "Manyo Shokubutsu-en(萬葉集に詠まれた植物を植栽する植物園)" (in Japanese). Nara: Kasuga Shrine. Retrieved 2009-08-05.
18. "Man'y Botanical garden(萬葉植物園)" (PDF) (in Japanese). Nara: Kasuga Shrine. Retrieved 2009-08-05.

Works cited

• Satake, Akihiro; Hideo Yamada; Rikio Kudō; Masao Ōtani; Yoshiyuki Yamazaki (2004). Shin Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei, Bekkan: Man'yōshū Sakuin (in Japanese). Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten. ISBN 4-00-240105-7.

Further reading

Texts and translations

• "Online edition of the Man'yōshū" (in Japanese). University of Virginia Library Japanese Text Initiative. Archived from the original on 2006-05-19. Retrieved 2006-07-10. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
• Cranston, Edwin A. (1993). A Waka Anthology: Volume One: The Gem-Glistening Cup. Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-3157-8.
• Kodansha (1983). "Man'yoshu". Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Kodansha.
• Honda, H. H. (tr.) (1967). The Manyoshu: A New and Complete Translation. The Hokuseido Press, Tokyo.
• Levy, Ian Hideo (1987). The Ten Thousand Leaves: A Translation of the Man'yoshu. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-00029-8. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
• Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai (2005). 1000 Poems From The Manyoshu: The Complete Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai Translation. Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-43959-3.
• Suga, Teruo (1991). The Man'yo-shu : a complete English translation in 5–7 rhythm. Tokyo: Kanda Educational Foundation, Kanda Institute of Foreign Languages. ISBN 4-483-00140-X. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help), Kanda University of International Studies, Chiba City

General

• Cranston, Edwin A. (1993). A Waka Anthology: Volume One: The Gem-Glistening Cup. Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-3157-8.
• Nakanishi, Susumu (1985). Man'yōshū Jiten (Man'yōshū zen'yakuchū genbun-tsuki bekkan) (paperback ed.). Tokyo: Kōdansha. ISBN 978-4-06-183651-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Nakanishi, Susumu; Itō, Haku; Gomi, Tomohide; Ono, Hiroshi; Inaoka, Kōji; Kinoshita, Masatoshi; Ōkubo, Tadashi; Hayashi, Tsutomu (1983). "Man'yōshū" 万葉集. Nihon Koten Bungaku Daijiten 日本古典文学大辞典 (in Japanese). Vol. 5. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. pp. 554–571. OCLC 11917421. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

External links

• Manyōshū – from the University of Virginia Japanese Text Initiative website
• Manuscript scans at Waseda University Library: 1709, 1858, unknown
• Manyōshū – Columbia University Press, Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai translation 1940, 1965

• Japanese poetry anthologies
• Man'yōshū
• Old Japanese texts
• Nara-period works
• Asuka period
• Nara period
• 8th-century books