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Updated: June 15, 2025
This marked the commencement of a vigorous revival of Japanese literature in the Bakufu capital. Moreover, in Osaka a scholar named Keichu Ajari published striking annotations of the celebrated anthologies, the Manyo-shu and the Kokin-shu, which attracted the admiration of Tokugawa Mitsukuni, baron of Mito. He invited Keichu to his castle and treated him with marked consideration.
Anyone who desires to study Japanese literature should first acquire a good knowledge of Chinese, and then pass over to the Manyo-shu, from which he may discover the ancient principles of the divine age. If he resolve bravely to love and admire antiquity, there is no reason why he should fail to acquire the ancient style in poetry as well as in other things.
Some make love their theme; some deal with sorrow; some are allegorical; some draw their inspiration from nature's beauties, and some have miscellaneous motives. To the same century the eighth as the Manyo-shu, belongs the Kiraifu-so, & volume containing 120 poems in Chinese style, composed by sixty-four poets during the reigns of Temmu, Jito, and Mommu, that is to say, between 673 and 707.
That in itself was no insignificant task, for during the five centuries that separated the Gen-Hei struggle from the establishment of the Tokugawa family, Japanese books had shared the destruction that overtook everything in this period of wasting warfare, and the Japanese language itself had undergone such change that to read and understand ancient books, like the Kojiki and the Manyo-shu, demanded a special course of study.
The earliest type of the Yamato race having thus been military, it becomes important to inquire what tenets constituted the soldier's code in old Japan. Our first guide is the celebrated anthology, Manyo-shu, compiled in the ninth century and containing some poems that date from the sixth.
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