Escape. This is an essential theme for my tanka. Feelings of wanting to escape. What I am talking about here is different from feelings of wanting to run away when being chased. It refers to a state of mind in which one feels like a bird in a cage. A bird with its wings clipped lives a miserable existence, in that cage. What drives my tanka poetry is often the despair of no escape. At other times, I also feel hope that I might be able to escape. I constantly sway between hope and despair. Those must be my honest feelings. I was once told that I had at most ten years of vision remaining. But...

Since I joined academia in the United States, I have taken every opportunity to provide lectures on tanka. I have presented my tanka poems at professional conferences and workshops, because of my belief that "emotions" are a universal language. Living, studying, and teaching in Japan, the U.S. mainland, and Guam (American territory) have provided me with many experiences that led me to think about the components of my daily life. During this time, writing tanka and short essays has become an important part of my life, just like writing a journal or keeping a diary. I am fond of both tanka...

Tanka stresses love, beauty, and hope, in parallels between human life and nature. What is sought within the very simple form (five lines in English) is to express the essence of a yearning with a depth in which all the emotions are intermingled. The vivid expression of that which has touched the heart has the power to evoke a wealth of associations. Tanka is a wonderful medium of expression. Because of its brevity, it is a form in which poets can produce highly "memorable" and "memoizable" works. Like haiku, tanka often employs natural imagery and settings to evoke thoughts or feelings....

I sat in a cold room in a college dormitory, making slow progress on my doctoral dissertation. I felt like I was groping my way through a pitch-black tunnel with no end in sight. But I knew that it was far too late to go back the way I came. In the days and years of intense solitude during my long-term study abroad, tanka helped me to keep going. Since I joined academia as a faculty member, I have taken every opportunity to provide lectures on tanka, simply because of my profound belief that "emotions" are a universal language. Without writing tanka poems, I probably could not have survived...