This morning I visited Daikan’yama i-Studio to see the exhibition commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Takashi Inukai, a leading scholar in the field of Man’yoshu. For those of you who don’t know it, Man’yoshu is Japan’s oldest collection of tanka poems created more than 1,300 years ago by emperors down to aristocrats and unknown common people nationwide. Inukai was an authority on the studies of the ancient poetry for over 50 years, teaching at many schools including Osaka University and Konan Women’s University as a professor. According to the biography displayed in the exhibition room, he was born on April 1, 1907, in Tokyo. His first encounter […]