Almost a thousand years ago, the country we now know as Japan was in the early stages of development. At that time China was considered the “center of the world,” so many other countries, including Japan, envied China's power and wanted to borrow elements of their culture to become more like China. One of the many things that Japan “borrowed” from China was the high art of poetry. In this article I will discuss elements of two important works of Japanese poetry: Man'yōshū and Kokinshū. By examining the literary components of both anthologies I intend to make plausible inferences about the roles they played in the time period in which they were compiled. Man'yōshū is thought to have been compiled by Otomo no Ya, an accomplished poet who also wrote four of the twenty books. of Man'yōshū. There is some controversy that Otomo was not the sole compiler, but it is generally accepted that it is at least a major compiler. Although Man'yōshū was completed in the late 700s, some of the poems date back to the 5th century. Consisting of 4,516 poems, Man'yōshū displayed a variety of poetic forms (different syllable counts), topics, and authors from different backgrounds, as well as some rather explicit political opinions, but unlike Kokinshū, Man'yōshū has no prefaces or proof whether or not it was an imperial anthology (Handout 2). The topics have been organized into three different categories: zōka (Miscellaneous), sōmon (love) and banka (death) (Handout 2). During the time Man'yōshū was respected, Japan was heavily influenced by mainland Asian countries, so Man'yōshū played a role in showing other countries that Japan was making progress in the literary field even though poetry is not originally a form of Japanese writing. The......center of the card......is like the “big brother” China, the creator of poetry. Kokinshū was written almost entirely in Japanese, and the preface set the standard for waka, Japanese poetry. Japan was beginning to move away from mainland Asian ideas and demonstrate its own capabilities, even if those ideas were initially based on other countries. The influence exerted by other countries will never disappear in Japanese culture, and some may say that the Japanese are basically Chinese on a separate island, but the Japanese have embodied such ideas and made them their own. Works Cited "Chapter 4-5". History of UH Manoa 151 . University of Hawaii Manoa, nd Web. May 30, 2011. .Keene, Donald. Anthology of Japanese literature, from the most ancient era to the mid-nineteenth century. Grove Pr, 1955. Print.EALL 271 Handouts 2, 3, & 4