Word: waka
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...indeed because of, his unassuming pacifism, the unworldly scholar was often unable to dominate his nation's ruthless army. In 1941, for example, Japan's leaders turned to Hirohito while deliberating whether to join the war. Without explanation, the poker-faced monarch proceeded to recite a gnomic waka (a traditional 31-syllable poem) composed by his grandfather, the Meiji emperor: "On the seas surrounding all quarters of the globe/ All people are kin to each other/ Why then do winds and waters of conflict/ Disturb peace among us?" He said no more on the subject...
...poetry reading is one of the Japanese imperial household's ancient New Year ceremonies. This year's reading, just held, included poems by Emperor Hirohito, Empress Nagako and ten commoners-all composed in the 31-syllable waka style and dealing with the subject of mountains. An unofficial translation of Hirohito's entry, inspired by a plane ride over the Alps during his recent European tour: "Over the vast sky of Europe/ I soared up and high/ Catching a glimpse of Alpine ridges/ Rising above the sea of clouds...
Hirohito is not a scintillating conversationalist; when he visited Hiroshima for the first time, two years after it was leveled by the atomic bomb, he said: "There seems to have been considerable damage here." But the Emperor is a noted writer of waka, the traditional 31-syllable poems. In 1955, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Japan's surrender, he produced one that read...
...unprecedented show in a Tokyo department store that ended only three weeks ago, he displayed a set of photographs of himself in the nude. Last week the body that he had trained until it became his pride, together with its severed head, was cremated. Yukio Mishima left two farewell waka, the 31-syllable Japanese poems, that he had composed, like a good samurai, on the eve of his death. One of them read...
Because Japan is still very much a country of slowly Cemented consensus, no swift changes are in prospect. Men who are now in their 60s will rule well into the 1970s, and they are cautious and uncertain. "Today's leaders," says Kyoto University Professor Kei Waka-izuma, "resemble mountain climbers who, finding themselves