Uta-awase

Uta-awase (歌合 or 歌合せ, sometimes romanized utaawase), poetry contests or waka matches, are a distinctive feature of the Japanese literary landscape from the Heian period. Significant to the development of Japanese poetics, the origin of group composition such as renga, and a stimulus to approaching waka as a unified sequence and not only as individual units, the lasting importance of the poetic output of these occasions may be measured also from their contribution to the imperial anthologies: 92 poems of the Kokinshū and 373 of the Shin Kokinshū were drawn from uta-awase.

Mono-awase (物合), the matching of pairs of things by two sides, was one of the pastimes of the Heian court. The items matched might be paintings (絵合, e-awase), shells (貝合, kai-awase), sweet flag or iris roots, flowers, or poems. The last took on new seriousness at the end of the ninth century with the Poetry Contest held by the Empress in the Kampyō era (寛平御時后宮歌合), the source of over fifty poems in the Kokinshū.

The twenty-eight line diary of the Teijiin Poetry Contest (亭子院歌合) devotes two of its lines to the musical accompaniments, gagaku and saibara, and four to the costumes worn by the former emperor, other participants and the attendants who carried in the suhama (州浜), the trays with low miniature "sand-bar beach" coastal landscapes used in mono-awase. At the end of the contest, the poems were arranged around the suhama, those about mist being placed in the hills, those on the bush-warbler upon a blossoming bough, those on the cuckoo upon sprigs of unohana, and the remainder onto braziers hanging from miniature cormorant-fishing boats.

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