SOURCE: "Contemporary Japanese Poetry," translated by James O'Brien, in World Literature Today, Vol. 62, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 414-17.

In the following essay, Ooka examines various characteristics that have emerged in Japanese poetry since 1970.

About three years ago the Japan Foundation organized an exhibition of photographs. More than two hundred representative works were selected from photographs of nature and society which had been taken in our country over the course of almost fifteen years. Based on the theme "Japan, Its Life and Ways: 1971-1984," this exhibition traveled to various parts of the world. The selection of works was done in two stages. Representatives of the Japan Professional Photographers Society, after much debate, chose three hundred prints from a group of more than six thousand amateur and professional works which had appeared in newspapers, magazines, and other publications. In order to reduce the number to almost two hundred, a group of...