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How wonderfully lovely it is that lovers exchange poems by mobile phone. I am enraptured.
(Floating Island 2004/11/28)

Exactly. Mobile phones are often treated as enemies, but from my perspective they are tools for reviving Japanese traditions in the present day.

Still, when one has complete freedom, it is surprisingly hard to write.

And because it is a means of communication, writing while discarding self-consciousness is also difficult without establishing some rules. When I try to write something proper, I cannot write at all. That is why I set rules for wordplay and write within them.

For example, I might weave the other person’s name into the poem phonetically, or entrust a message to the initials or final letters of each line. That way, I can make excuses to myself: “It may be silly as a tanka poem, but it is wordplay.” Instead of saying “come quickly,” I might send a poem like this by mobile phone:

On Mount Haku,
in the shrine forest,
darkly,
the moon of February
shines.

The initial syllables form hayaku kite, meaning “come quickly.” I just improvised this one in about 1 minute. With this kind of approach, could not almost anyone compose something casually?

The best-known example of this sort of thing is the Iroha poem. If the Iroha poem is written in kana and arranged in groups of 7 characters, it looks like this:

Iroha nihoheto
Chirinuru owaka
Yotare sotsunena
Ramu ui no oku
Yamakefu koete
Asaki yumemishi
Ehimo sesu

Reading the last character of each line gives toganakute shisu, meaning “to die without fault.”

Would it not be wonderful if everyone exchanged messages by mobile phone in this way? Let us play with words more and more.

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