The Public, the Private, and the In-Between: Poetry Exchanges as Court Diplomacy in Mid-Heian Japan

The paper argues that the well-established distinction between “formal” / “public” (hare) and “informal” / “private” (ke) poetry in waka studies not only fails to describe adequately the styles it purports to illustrate but actively hinders a more accurate understanding of the literary cultures to which it is applied. After briefly reviewing the debate on formal and informal styles in waka scholarship and a brief analysis of the zōtōka (“poetic dialogues”) as a particular kind of poetic communication, I provide close readings of the personal poetry collections of Fujiwara no Morosuke (907–960) and Fujiwara no Kishi (929–985) in order to show that, when viewed against its historical context, so-called “private” poetry was as politically significant and as consequential for the state as its formal counterpart, albeit in a different way. Whereas formal, daiei-style composition reflected and celebrated the vertical, emperor-centric structure of the ritsuryō state, everyday exchanges between court aristocrats were the perfect literary complement to the “privatized,” cooperative, and consensus-based order now known as the “court-centered polity” (ōchō kokka).