Man'yōshū

Man'yōshū (万葉集, man'yōshū^?, "Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves") is the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry, compiled some time around 759 A.D. during the Nara period. Sections of this are preserved in Columbia University's Low Library. The anthology is one of the most revered of Japan's poetic compilations. The compiler, or the final in a series of compilers, is believed to be Ōtomo no Yakamochi. The collection contains poems ranging from A.D. 347 (poems #85-89)^[1] through 759 (#4516),^[2] the bulk of them representing the period after 600. The precise significance of the title is not known with certainty.

The collection is divided into twenty parts or books, mirroring a similar practice in collections of Chinese poems of the time; this number was followed in most later collections. Unlike later collections, however, the parts of the Man'yōshū are not organized into topics or ordered chronologically. The collection contains 265 chōka (long poems), 4,207 tanka (short poems), one tanrenga (short connecting poem), one bussokusekika (poems on the Buddha's footprints at Yakushi-ji in Nara), four kanshi (Chinese poems), and 22 Chinese prose passages. There is no preface: the format of prefacing official collections, such as the Kokin Wakashū, developed later.

It is standard to regard the Man'yōshū as a particularly 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:

[T]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 [pillow words (枕詞, 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.^[3]

The collection is customarily divided into four periods. The earliest dates to prehistoric or legendary pasts, from the time of Yūryaku (r.?456–?479) to those of the little documented 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. Akahito chiefly among them is resolutely Japanese; the rest freely incorporate and adapt Continental elements. 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.

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 ideographic or logographic senses; 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.

Julius Klaproth was the first to publish any translation of Taika era Japanese poetry in the West.^[4] 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, fisherman, hardly ideal mentors for the study of 8th century poetry. Not surprisingly, his translation was anything but accurate."^[5]

The Man'yōshū has been accepted in the Japanese Translation Series of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).^[6]

Contents 1 Mokkan 2 Poetry excerpt 3 Others 4 Notes 5 References 6 External links

Mokkan

A total of three wooden fragments known as mokkan (木簡^?) containing text from the Man'yōshū have been excavated: ^{[7][8][9][10]}

• From the archaeological site in Kizugawa, Kyoto. A 23.4 cm long, 2.4 cm wide, 1.2 cm deep fragment. Dated between 750 and 780, it contains the first eleven characters of poem #2205 (volume 10) written in Man'yōgana. Inspection with an infrared camera indicates other characters suggesting that it was used for writing practice
• From the Miyamachi archaeological site in Kōka, Shiga. A 2 cm wide, 1 mm deep fragment was discovered in 1997 and is dated to mid 8th century. It contains poem #3807 (volume 16).
• From the Ishigami archaeological site in Asuka, Nara. A 9.1 cm long, 5.5 cm wide, 6 mm deep fragment was found. Dated to the late 7th century, it is the oldest of the known Man'yōshū fragments. It contains the first 14 characters of poem #1391 (volume 7) written in Man'yōgana.

Poetry excerpt

In 673, Emperor Temmu moved the capital back to Yamato province on the Kiyomihara plain, naming his new capital Asuka. The Man'yōshū includes a poem written after the Jinshin conflict of 672 had ended:

Our Sovereign, a god,

Has made his Imperial City^[11]

Out of the stretch of swamps,

Where chestnut horses sank

To their bellies.

-- Ōtomo Miyuki^[12]

Temmu was enthroned at Asuka; and he reigned from this capital until his death in 686.

Others

More than 150 species of grasses and trees are included in 1500 entries of Man'yōshū. More than 30 Man'yō Botanical Garden (万葉植物園, Manyō shokubutsu-en^?) in Japan, where collectively plants these species with name and with or without tanka for visitor to enjoy, observe or even to remind person and ancient time. The first Manyo shokubutsu-en opened in Kasuga Shrine in 1932.^[13][14]

Notes

References

• Cranston, Edwin A. (1993). A Waka Anthology: Volume One: The Gem-Glistening Cup. Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-3157-8. 
• Honda, H. H. (tr.) (1967). The Manyoshu: A New and Complete Translation. The Hokuseido Press, Tokyo. 
• Kodansha (1983). "Man'yoshu". Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Kodansha. 
• Levy, Ian Hideo (1987). The Ten Thousand Leaves: A Translation of the Man'yoshu. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-00029-8. 
• Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai (2005). 1000 Poems From The Manyoshu: The Complete Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai Translation. Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-43959-3. 
• "Online edition of the Man'yōshū". University of Virginia Library Japanese Text Initiative. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/manyoshu/index.html. Retrieved 2006-07-10. 
• Satake, Akihiro; Hideo Yamada, Rikio Kudō, Masao Ōtani, Yoshiyuki Yamazaki (2004) (in Japanese). Shin Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei, Bekkan: Man'yōshū Sakuin. Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten. ISBN 4-00-240105-7. 
• Titsingh, Isaac, ed. (1834). [Siyun-sai Rin-siyo/Hayashi Gahō, 1652], Nipon o daï itsi ran; ou, Annales des empereurs du Japon. Paris: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland

External links

• Kanji Haitani's Man'yoshu Best 100, with explanations and translation.
• 2001 Waka: The Man'yôshû
• (Japanese)日本古代史料本文データ Downloadable LZH compressed file of text of the Man'yōshū.
• Manuscript scans at Waseda University Library: 1709, 1858, unknown