At just 31 syllables in Japanese, the tanka (literally, “short poem”) spread quickly — reshared and rewritten as others swapped out Okamoto’s umbrellas for their own accumulations: “all these open ...

"Even major nuclear powers/ Have been completely flustered/ By an enemy as small as 0.1 micron." Tanka poems composed by Dokuho Okada, a Buddhist monk in Mihara, Hiroshima Prefecture, had a grain of ...

“I tilt the bottle/ wanting to trap/ the sparkling fireworks/ inside the glass marble of/ my 'ramune' soda.” Minami Towada, a junior high school first-year student, composed this tanka, beautifully ...

I recently read a book titled “Manyoshu was Hyangga” written by Kim Young-hoi. The book portrays a majority of ancient Japanese poems in “Manyoshu” ― a collection of a certain type of Japanese poetry ...

Food and poetry are like two friends who come together to create a delightful experience. Food inspires poets to describe its flavors, textures, and emotions it evokes, while poetry adds a touch of ...