Recent development of information technologies has brought us new possibilities for teaching and learning classical art and humanities in several different ways. Image plays a key role here. In learning classical Japanese poetry, it is quite important to examine original books and manuscripts because even the published books were printed from the wood blocks of engraved words which were written with brush by, in many cases, the authors themselves. Not only the visual art works, but also the literary materials as such pose the problem of authenticity, and this problem itself is closely linked to the interpretation of the literary works and the life history of the authors. Yosa Buson (1716-84), a poet-painter, and his followers best represent this type of artists and must be studied with both texts and images they created.



Buson was a leading haiku poet of the 18th century and, with Basho and Issa, one of the great names in haiku. He was also a distinguished BUNJINGA (literati-style) painter, and perfected haiga or cursive sketch with poems as a branch of Japanese pictorial art. Buson read classics extensively and studied different styles of Chinese and Japanese paintings. Poetry and painting affected each other in his art. His poems were, diversely enough, rich in imagery, clearly depicting fine movements and sensual appearances of things, dynamic with wider landscapes, lyrical, sensitive to human affairs, romantic with hidden stories, graceful, and longingly time-conscious. Buson completed his own style of painting in his later years when he was using the name of Sha-In. Freed from the influence of China, he created genuine Japanese landscapes.

Creation of the Site

The web site for the study of Buson and his group has thus been created at http://www.nime.ac.jp/~saga/buson.html. This site has three major areas: articles on Buson, bibliographic resources on Buson, and pictorial catalogue of haiku and painting works of Buson and his group. Pages are hyper-linked within the site and some pages contain links to other related web sites. Most pages are written in both Japanese and English to attract the learners internationally. The first area contains the author's original papers and essays such as "Poetry as an open space for lightening of Being". To quote only a few paragraphs from there;

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