I was in London yesterday at Japan House in Kensington at the invitation of the Japan Foundation to deliver a lecture entitled ‘Seeds in the Heart and Leaves of Words: Traditional Japanese Poetry Beyond the Haiku’.

I enjoy talking about waka, of course, but it’s always nerve-wracking speaking before an unfamiliar audience in public. There were a total of sixty-five attendees, who listened politely to what I had to say, and asked a number of good questions at the end.

Abstract

Poetry has been a part of Japanese life for more than a millennium, with the first major anthology of waka – poems in Japanese – compiled in the late eighth century. Later, it was to become an essential part of life for the aristocrats of the new capital city of Heian-kyō – modern Kyoto – and through their production and patronage exert a profound influence on almost all aspects of Japan’s cultural life, as warlords, warriors and merchants sought the social status and approval that came with the composition of poetry. Images from waka were used in painting, on clothing, and utensils of various kinds. Waka topics influenced which plants and animals were cherished, and which were not and subtly shaped Japan’s ideas of itself as a nation and people. Indeed, the influence of waka has been so pervasive and enduring that it’s possible to say without an understanding of waka, you don’t really understand Japan.

This lecture traces the development of waka from its early beginnings as a tool for communication and social relationships among the elite nobility, through its role in providing a ritual underpinning to the aristocratic state, and its development into an arena of critical and literary conflict between factions determined to maintain and promote their views of appropriate poetic style, leading eventually to the development of new poetic form such as the haiku. It reveals how and why waka thrived, and how its topics and the emotions associated with them came to express many of the attitudes which are considered quintessentially Japanese.