Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how Japanese poetry, waka, was defined by medieval Japanese poets and intellectuals. I will argue that Japanese poetry was not conceptualized in the same terms that Chinese poetry was. Instead, Japanese poetry was conceived as the presence of a voice, rather than of writing.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will investigate how Japanese poetry, waka, was defined in poetry treatises written by medieval Japanese poets and intellectuals. My main argument is that in medieval Japan (12th-15th c.) Japanese poetry was not conceptualized in the same terms that Chinese poetry was (that is, it was not simply thought of as the Japanese-language version of the same kind of "poetry" that existed in Chinese). Instead, Japanese poetry was conceived as the presence of a voice, rather than of writing.

I will introduce three examples that would demonstrate how medieval Japanese poetry privileged the phonetic element of poetry. The first example is the argument put forward by medieval poets and intellectuals such as the author of Notes on Three Streams (Sanryû-shô, 1286), who described Japanese poetry as a "softened poetry" (yawarage-uta), that Japanese poetry could deliver the Buddha's voice to readers in a more direct and approachable way than Chinese poetry did. I will then describe how some medieval poets and monks such as Jien (1155-1225) and Ryôyo Shôgei (1341-1420) developed a particular Waka-Dharani theory, which claimed that a person could attain a Buddha's voice by composing Japanese poetry, because Japanese and Sanskrit shared the same pronunciations and vocabulary. Lastly, I will show how medieval poets such as Fujiwara Toshinari (1114-1204) focused on the phonetic component of Japanese poetry by describing it as a genre of folk songs.

Through a discussion of these examples, I will highlight how medieval Japanese poetics developed a metaphysics of presence in which writing comes after voice. That argument enabled medieval poets and intellectuals to draw a narrative of the history of Japanese poetry that did not need to mention the influence of Chinese poetry or Chinese writing. Previous studies on medieval Japanese poetry and poetics have mainly focused on the specific details of the relationships between different authors, or the various influences of Buddhism or Shintoism over particular poems and poetry treatises. Instead of zeroing in on granular questions such as those, this paper will try to provide a holistic and critical understanding of the overall characteristics of medieval Japanese poetics.