A musubidai or ‘combined topic’ was one which was combined two or more elements and was written with three, four, or more Chinese characters, like for example, ‘the full moon over the sea’ (kaijô meigetsu 海上明月),or ‘cuckoos calling from between the clouds’ (kumoma hototogisu 雲間郭公). In topics like these, there were some characters which were considered less central than others, for example, 上 (‘above’) and 間 (‘between’) – these were termed mawasu moji, and including them in a poem on the topic was intended as an indirect reference to the topic as a whole.

In his judgement, Shunzei has deliberately misunderstood the nature of the Right’s criticism of the Left’s poem. The Right essentially say that the reference to ‘spring dawn’ comes as an afterthought in a poem which is more about a Buddhist desire to free oneself from wordly attachments, and the focus should be more strongly on the topic, which is a fair enough criticism – they are not querying why it’s there at all, which is what he responds to.