Tanka is the oldest Japanese poetry form still in common use. Poems in its five-line, thirty-one syllable shape fill the earliest surviving anthology of Japanese verse, compiled in the eighth century, and every January the Imperial Palace in Tokyo still holds a public reading of new ones. Thirteen hundred years, one form. Here is how that happened.
Waka and the Man’yōshū (8th century)
The earliest Japanese poems were called waka, “Japanese poem,” a name chosen to set them apart from the Chinese verse that educated Japanese also wrote. The great record of this first period is the Man’yōshū, the “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves,” compiled sometime after 759 CE. It holds around 4,500 poems, and its authors range from emperors and empresses to frontier guards posted far from home.
Waka came in more than one shape, and the anthology’s own vocabulary tells you which shape won. Long poems were chōka. Short poems, five phrases of 5-7-5-7-7 sound units, were tanka. The vast majority of the Man’yōshū is tanka, and within a couple of centuries the chōka had gone quiet, so that “waka” came to mean, in practice, the thirty-one sound-unit short poem. The form that Kakinomoto no Hitomaro was using in the seventh century is the same one described on our What Is Tanka? page. Its shape has not changed since.
The Kokinshū and the Heian court
In about 905 the court commissioned the Kokin Wakashū, the “Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems,” the first waka anthology assembled by imperial order. Its lead compiler, Ki no Tsurayuki, opened it with a preface written in Japanese rather than Chinese, itself a declaration, which begins: Japanese poetry has the human heart as its seed, and grows from it into countless leaves of words.
At the Heian court (794–1185), waka was not a specialist’s art. It was a social skill, like a good speaking voice. Courtship ran on poems. A suitor sent a waka; the lady judged the verse and the handwriting and replied in kind; and after a night together a morning-after poem was expected before almost anything else. The Tale of Genji, written around the year 1000 by Murasaki Shikibu, contains nearly eight hundred waka doing exactly this work. Poets also fought formal matches, uta-awase, with judges and recorded verdicts. Two of the era’s most admired poets, Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, were women.
This is why so much classical tanka is love poetry, and why the form still leans toward address: someone speaking to someone. Our What Is Tanka? page teaches the form the way the Heian court used it, as a short message with a person behind it.
Teika and the imperial anthologies
The Kokinshū began a series. Twenty-one imperial anthologies followed over roughly five hundred years, and the figure who dominates the middle of that run is Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241), co-compiler of the eighth and most admired of them, the Shin Kokinshū. Teika’s critical opinions were copied, fought over, and obeyed for centuries after his death. He also compiled the Hyakunin Isshu, one hundred poems by one hundred poets, which Japanese families still memorize through the card game karuta. His ten tanka styles, with a classical example of each, are laid out on our Techniques page.
Renga, hokku, haiku
After the court’s great age, poetic energy moved into linked verse, renga: one poet wrote the 5-7-5 upper phrase, another answered with the 7-7 lower phrase, and long chains grew. The opening verse of a chain, the hokku, carried special prestige, and in time poets began writing hokku that stood alone. In the 1890s Masaoka Shiki gave the free-standing hokku its modern name, haiku.
Haiku is, in other words, tanka’s upper phrase set loose. Our Tanka vs Haiku page compares the two forms, and the History of Haiku at our sister journal, Haiku Journal, tells that branch of the story in full.
Shiki and the modern tanka
Shiki cut in the other direction too. By the late nineteenth century, court-style waka had spent hundreds of years recycling the same approved images in the same approved diction. In 1898 Shiki published a series of newspaper essays, “Letters to a Tanka Poet,” attacking the Kokinshū tradition as worn out and pointing poets back to the plain force of the Man’yōshū. Write what is in front of you, he argued; he called the approach shasei, sketching from life. And he favored the old, precise name for the short poem: tanka. His reform is the reason English speakers say tanka today rather than waka.
The reform took hold fast. Yosano Akiko’s Midaregami (“Tangled Hair,” 1901) put frank personal passion into the classical shape and made her famous overnight. Ishikawa Takuboku’s A Handful of Sand (1910) filled it with ordinary city life, money troubles included. Within a generation, tanka was a modern poem.
Tanka in English
Tanka crossed into English mostly through Japanese immigrants. Jun Fujita, a Japanese-born photographer working in Chicago, published Tanka: Poems in Exile there in 1923, one of the first collections of original English-language tanka. Japanese-American communities kept tanka circles alive through the twentieth century, including through the wartime internment years. In 1957 Lucille Nixon, a California educator who studied the form with the poet Tomoe Tana, became the first non-Japanese poet chosen to read at the Utakai Hajime, the imperial New Year poetry ceremony; Nixon and Tana went on to translate Sounds from the Unknown, an anthology of tanka written by Japanese Americans.
English-language tanka built its own institutions from the 1990s on. The Tanka Splendor Awards ran from 1990 to 2009, and several winning poems appear, with their poets’ names, in the examples on this site. The Tanka Society of America was founded in 2000 and publishes the journal Ribbons. If you want to try the form yourself, our step-by-step guide, How to Write a Tanka, is the place to start, and our resources page lists the books and journals worth your time.
And the Utakai Hajime goes on. Every January the palace announces a theme, poems arrive from the public, including from overseas, and a chosen few are chanted aloud before the emperor. The form the Man’yōshū poets used is still taking submissions.
Keep reading
- What Is Tanka? — the form, the 5-7-5-7-7 pattern, the Tanka Recipe, and examples.
- How to Write a Tanka — a step-by-step guide to drafting and revising one.
- Tanka Techniques — Teika’s ten tanka styles, with an example of each.
- Tanka vs Haiku — the two forms side by side.
- More Reading — books, journals, and organizations for tanka poets.