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 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 ...

After months of wearing masks as a matter of habit, we were told the other day that it’s now a “matter of personal choice.” This is certainly a milestone of sorts, but we’d be wise to not let our ...

A family’s experience with internment during World War II and how traditional Japanese poetry helped them through it will be presented later this month in Oak Park. Writer and editor Nancy Matsumoto ...