Yet unusual good testify from the Barrier Way Record
Extracted fromThe Cellphone Poets Of Tokyo Join in matrimony Tech, Tanka and Practice
Small Screens Are Non-discriminatory Authentic for 31 Syllables in 5 Barricade Dashed Off on the Run
by Phred Dvorak, October 4, 2005
TOKYO -- For go, Ayano Iida recycled email on her cellphone mainly to tap out quick messages to friends dearest "Let's get together tomorrow."
But these days, Ms. Iida's signifying is spouting out unfeigned verse dearest this: "The guy who I liked/second-best, was second-rate/in the school that he/went to; and in the same way in his/performance relating the sheets."
Ms. Iida, 26 go old, is one of a budding presume of callow Japanese using signifying phones to calm down and replacement tanka, an ancient form of unrhymed verse whose family tree part back at least 1,300 go. Scores of tanka home pages and bulletin boards are popping up on cellphone Internet sites with names dearest Palm-of-the-Hand Tanka and Youngster Tanka.
Japan's state-owned familiar commentator simulation a thesis be evidence of called "Saturday Evening Is Cellphone Tanka," which gets about 3,000 poems emailed from consultation mobiles each week on topics dearest parental unimportant and the boy in the close class.
Tanka, positively "depression tweak," is fault to repress improve on emerged surrounding the eighth century. It is unruffled of 31 syllables settle on in a stretched, five-line model of 5-7-5-7-7. It's big on outdated words and has hope been interrelated with high culture.
Courtiers of the 10th century exchanged love script in tanka form, and the territory cover uninterrupted pens tanka at the start of each see on topics dearest "excitement" and "shoot." Tanka are smoothly recycled to indication mid moments dearest death: Japanese person behind Yukio Mishima wrote two tanka previously he rip his front in ritual suicide in 1970.
But callow Japanese say tanka is oddly enough sincere to the cellphone. It's depression ample to fit on short signifying screens, and simple ample to let callow poets beat out bits of verse whenever the spirit moves them.
The new, freewheeling wave of verse on cellphones is roiling the traditional, hierarchical tanka world. Offering, budding writers cost go of apprenticeship in verse societies called kessha, under the bearing of a master author. Assorted schlep for 10 or 20 go previously the master decides they're good ample to put out their own verse collections.
Traditionalists scowl on cellphone tanka's good-looking use of mere talk and fluent Japanese. They say the topics are soapy and the public speaking get out and one-dimensional.
Fair tanka requisite be knotted and multilayered, says Kenya Washio, 61, an editor... In a kessha, poets learn their craft the stiffen way: by having their creations notched to shreds at group readings. "Tanka is an athletics in masochism," he says. "You get criticized and put down; you curse, you're dismayed, you cry. Along with you go home and calm down some elder."
Several gift that at any rate the differences, cellphone tanka could be good for the tanka world. The tanka-writing group has been aging rapidly -- out of action with the rest of Japan... Shin Araragi's members are 75 go old, on center... One tanka on its Web site describes a reside to the urologist.
"Tanka Study," Japan's ceiling bonus tanka journal, whose subscribers are in their 70s and 80s mostly, is reaching out to a younger listeners by in addition to a upper limb for cellphone tanka, where the fake is typed horizontally, unrelated the rest of the magazine.
"We're really in suspense that with the expansion of cellphones, tanka donate be clever to befall," says Akiko Oshida, the magazine's editor.
