The One Hundred Poets Project is online and ready to be explored!
Originating from the personal collection of Professor Joshua Mostow from the UBC Asian Studies department, this project was made possible through generous funding from the Toshiba International Foundation (TIFO) and collaboration between the UBC Asian Studies department, Asian Library, Digitization Centre, Rare Books and Special Collections and Technical Services.
The digital collection consists at present of 55 books and 13 different card sets relating to the poetry anthology Hyakunin Isshu 百人一首 (One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each, hereafter HNIS), edited by the famous poet and scholar, Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) in the 1230s for his son-in-law. It is unquestionably the most famous poetry anthology in the Japanese tradition.
Each of the poems, by 100 different poets, is referred to as waka, or classical Japanese poetry. The anthology proved so popular that a card game, called Uta-garuta, was based on it. Parts of the poems written on each of the cards and players match the sections of the poems together.
The items in this collection originate many years after the original, circa 1615-1868 during the Japanese Edo period, thus proving the enduring interest in the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu.
When you explore the collection take a look at the surprising and amazing items to discover. One of the exciting benefits of this collection is that it is also searchable in Japanese!
Check out the beautiful artwork that accompanies much of the text…
Or take a look at the hand painted art in the front of many of the books…
Or examine the cool wooden cards that make up this collection!
Want to learn more?
You can check out more about the digitizing of this project here in an earlier blog post!
This is just Phase I! The digital collection was created as part of Phase I of a larger project and is centered around a collection of largely Edo period (1615-1868) material focusing on HNIS. Upcoming work on this project (Phase II) includes more items lined up for digitization and more information being added to our digitized card sets. So don’t go away, stay tuned for more!
We’ve got a lot of related material in digital collections of UBC! These works will complement the library’s other major Japanese digital collection, the Beans Tokugawa Map Collection—one of the three most important collections of Edo-period Japanese maps in the world.