Kanpyō no ōntoki kisai no miya uta’awase

Shinpen kokka taikan no.	4
Heian-chō uta’awase taisei no.	5
Title	寛平御時后宮歌合
Romanised Title	Kanpyō no ōntoki kisai no miya uta’awase
Translated Title	Poetry Contest held by the Empress Dowager during the Reign of the Kanpyō Emperor
Alternative Title(s)	皇太夫人班子女王歌合 Kōtai fujin hanshi jō uta’wase (‘Poetry Contest held by Princess Nakako, the Empress Dowager’)
Date	Autumn, before 9/Kanpyō 5 [10.893]
Extant Poems	193
Sponsor	Princess Nakako (Hanshi) 班子女王
Identifiable Participants	Ki no Tomonori 紀友則; Minamoto no Masazumi 源当純; Sosei 素性; Fujiwara no Okikaze 藤原興風; (Ki no) Tsurayuki 貫之; Ki no Akimine 紀秋岑; Ariwara no Muneyana 在原棟梁 (850-898); Ono no Yoshiki 小野美材 (?-902); 大江千里; Fujiwara no Sugane 藤原菅根 (856-908); (Ōshikōchi no) Mitsune 躬恒; (Mibu no) Tadamine 忠岑; (Sakanoue no) Korenori 是則 (?-930); (Fujiwara no) Toshiyuki 敏行; Sugano no Tadaōmu 菅野忠臣; Minamoto no Muneyuki 源宗于 (?-940); Ise 伊勢 (872?-938?)
Judgements	N
Topics	Spring; Summer; Autumn; Winter; Love

This competition was a large-scale event conducted to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Empress Dowager Nakako (Hanshi) (833-900), the mother of Emperor Uda. While she was formally the sponsor of the contest, it seems likely that it was her son who arranged it on her behalf. The competition seems to have orginally consisted of one hundred rounds, not all of which survive, broadly organised into poems on the four seasons and love. As there are no records of the performance of this event, and there are no other instances of such large events taking place at this period in uta’awase development, the consensus is that it, too, was a senka awase, like Prince Koresada’s earlier contest. Extant texts of the competition do not record the poets’ names but, in a further similarity to Koresada’s contest, many of the poems made their way into other anthologies (some poems were included in multiple other collections – the poems in Kokinshū and Kokin rokujō, for example, overlap to a great extent) and it is from these that some of the participants’ identities have been discovered.

See below for a list of poems from the competition in other collections, and you can start reading through the contest’s poems here.

Kokinshū