Poetry and Culture of Travel: A Journey through the Classical Japanese Period

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the culture of travel that emerged in the classical period of Japan, specifically, during the Asuka and Nara period, while the socio-political process of the country was rapidly consolidating to establish an infrastructure of maritime and terrestrial routes. The reasons and consequences of these leisure trips, or “tourism”, that took place between the sixth and eighth centuries do not differ much from what we could understand today. However, there existed also forced journeys that took the helpless traveler to unknown territories, far from home. Emotion and vulnerability went hand in hand in these journeys, which were captured in poetry. The most relevant testimonies can be found in the poems of the Man’yōshū, an anthology that has been capable of generating twelve centuries later another type of journey in reverse: the tourist visitors who travel to the places mentioned in the poems in the anthology.