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Paper short abstract

A reexamination of the Tōhoku-in shokunin utaawase (1214?), a craftspeople's poetry contest often read as a social document, to argue this work is a sophisticated experiment in medieval poetic pedagogy for a readership of emerging cultural and linguistic literacy.

Paper long abstract

The shokunin utaawase (poetry contest among craftspeople) is a genre crucial for understanding medieval poetics in relation to commoners, craft, and cultural knowledge. This presentation examines the earliest shokunin utaawase, set in 1214 at the Tōhoku-in temple in the capital. This five-round contest gathered a diverse group of poets—including a diviner (onmyōji), a carpenter (banjō), and a shaman (miko)—to compose waka using the specific lexicon of their trades. Consequently, scholars have long treated the work as a historical document of little literary merit, mining it instead for insights into medieval society, gender, and sexuality. My analysis, however, foregrounds the work’s integrated design, in which poetic complexity escalates gradually, moving from straightforward verses to learned allusion and parody. The carefully wrought interplay between the poems, the judge’s critiques, and the accompanying illustrations suggests a pedagogic goal, in which the tools that appear next to each poet index the poem’s rhetoric for a reader with only emerging waka literacy. I reinterpret this work not merely as a source for social history, but as a sophisticated literary experiment: a reworking of the aristocratic utaawase for a readership still learning the poetry of the court.