（貧窮問答歌の真実）
For more than a thousand years, Yamanoue no Okura’s Hinkyū Mondōka has been read as a lament of domestic poverty in ancient Japan. But when we place the poem back into its true historical landscape, a very different picture emerges—one that reveals not Japanese peasants, but the devastated lives of former Japanese subjects in Kaya under Silla rule.This essay re-examines the poem through history, daily life, and moral philosophy to uncover the warning Okura left for all future generations.
A classical Japanese manuscript page of Hinkyū Mondōka, symbolizing ancient poetry and the historical context of Yamanoue no Okura’s work.
Ⅰ. Introduction: Rethinking a Famous Japanese Poem
In recent years, scholars around the world have begun raising an important question:
Have many classical texts been intentionally reinterpreted—or even distorted—for political purposes?
Japan is no exception. Similar concerns have been voiced across various fields of study.
This essay re-examines a widely misunderstood poem.
About 1,300 years ago, Yamanoe no Okura—who served as the Governor of Chikuzen Province, a role comparable to a modern prefectural governor—composed a long poem titled Hinkyū Mondōka, “A Dialogue on Poverty.”
In postwar Japan, this poem has often been presented as:
“Proof that ancient Japan oppressed its peasants through harsh taxation.”
But is that interpretation truly grounded in historical reality?
When we closely examine the world portrayed in the poem—
collapsing houses, families shivering on straw laid directly upon the earth,
a life without proper food, clothing, or shelter—
we find that these details do not match what is known about Japan’s climate, housing structures, agricultural practices, or social conditions of the era.
So whose suffering does this poem actually describe?
And what message was Okura truly seeking to convey?
By viewing Hinkyū Mondōka through the lenses of historical context, daily life, and Japan’s unique moral culture,
a very different picture emerges—one that restores the poem’s original meaning and invites us to rediscover a deeper dimension of Japanese civilization.
Ⅱ. Historical Background: Okura, Chikuzen, and the Post–Hakusukinoe Era
To understand the true meaning of Hinkyū Mondōka, it is essential to first consider the world in which Yamanoe no Okura lived.
Okura as a Statesman and Scholar
Okura was not a wandering poet nor a marginal figure.
He was a highly educated statesman who served the imperial government in several important roles, eventually becoming the Governor of Chikuzen Province (modern Fukuoka).
He was well-versed in Chinese classics, traveled to Tang China in 702 CE, and enjoyed close ties with influential figures such as Ōtomo no Tabito, the head of the Dazaifu regional administration.
His poetry reflects a rare blend of governmental responsibility, international awareness, and deep human sensitivity.
Chikuzen and Dazaifu: Japan’s Defensive Frontier
Chikuzen, where Okura served, was not an ordinary province.
It was home to Dazaifu, Japan’s most critical defensive and diplomatic outpost in the early 8th century.
Facing the Korean Peninsula across a narrow strait, Dazaifu functioned as
• a military command center,
• a point of contact with foreign envoys, and
• a quarantine station to protect the country from continental epidemics.
Because of ongoing tensions with the Tang–Silla alliance, the region demanded strong leadership, strict border control, and constant vigilance.
Aftermath of the Battle of Hakusukinoe
Okura lived only a few decades after the catastrophic Battle of Hakusukinoe (663 CE), in which Japan lost all political footholds on the Korean Peninsula.
The aftermath was dramatic:
• The Japanese-controlled region of Mimana (Imna) disappeared.
• The once prosperous Kaya confederation collapsed.
• The southern peninsula fell under the centralized rule of Silla, whose taxation and governance were historically described as harsh and extractive.
By the time Okura became governor in 726 CE,
the former Japanese-affiliated communities in Kaya had suffered more than sixty years of decline, having shifted from wealthy rice-growing societies to regions marked by poverty and instability.
Climate, Housing, and Agricultural Realities
Here it becomes important to compare the poem with the actual conditions of ancient Japan:
• Japan is a disaster-prone archipelago, subject to frequent earthquakes.
• Rice agriculture required high-floor (raised) buildings to keep dwellings dry and stable.
• Families did not sleep directly on bare earth; doing so would have been unhealthy, unsafe, and impractical.
• Even poorer communities had sturdy wooden structures because collapsing houses posed fatal risks in an earthquake zone.
In other words,
the scenes described in the poem—a collapsing hut, straw on bare ground, and a household unable to stay warm—do not match the lived reality of rice-growing Japanese communities.
Instead, these details align much more closely with conditions found on the Korean Peninsula during the decades after Silla’s conquest.
This historical and environmental context provides an essential foundation for understanding why Hinkyū Mondōka cannot be a simple depiction of Japanese peasants suffering under domestic oppression.
Ⅲ. Re-reading the Poem: Whose Poverty Is This?
In this chapter, we revisit the poem itself before examining the historical evidence that reveals its true background.
Before we begin the analysis, I will first present the full text of Yamanoue no Okura’s Hinkyū Mondōka — the poem on poverty that we will be examining today.
[Hinkyū Mondōka – Modern English Rendering]
The Dialogue on Poverty — by Yamanoue no Okura
On nights when wind mixes with rain,
on nights when snow falls mixed with rain,
the cold pierces everything.
I lick a pinch of salt
and sip thin dregs of wine,
coughing, sniffling in the dark.
I stroke the small beard on my chin
and tell myself no one surpasses me—
a foolish pride.
Yet the night is so bitterly cold
that I pull a coarse hemp quilt over my head
and layer rough hemp robes,
but still the cold will not leave.
If I, in this condition, suffer so much,
how must the truly poor fare?
Their parents must be starving and freezing;
their wives and children surely crying.
How, in such a time as this,
do they manage to live at all?
Heaven and earth are said to be vast,
yet for me they feel so narrow.
The sun and moon are said to shine brightly,
yet for us, they give no light.
Is everyone living like this?
Or is it only us?
Though born as human beings
and working as any person should,
we wear clothes without cotton,
tattered like seaweed,
and in our collapsing, crooked house
we lay straw directly on the bare earth.
Parents lie at the head,
wife and children at the feet,
all of them surrounding me,
sighing in misery.
The hearth holds no fire;
the cooking pot is covered in webs;
it is as if we have forgotten
how to cook rice at all.
Our voices are as thin as the cry of a nue-bird.
Then, slicing the air like the sound
of cutting the end off a short stick,
the village headman’s voice—
whip in hand—
reaches even our sleeping place.
Can the world truly be
so cruel, so unbearable?
This world is harsh;
my body wastes away.
I long to escape,
yet I cannot fly—
for I am no bird.
When we examine Hinkyū Mondōka closely, the scenes described are strikingly bleak—families shivering in collapsing houses, parents and children lying directly on straw spread over the bare earth, cooking pots covered in spiderwebs, and village officials shouting orders with whips in hand.
For decades, the standard postwar interpretation in Japan has been:
“This is the misery of the Japanese common people living in Chikuzen.”
But this explanation collapses the moment we examine the details.
1. The Lifestyle Depicted Does Not Match Ancient Japan
The poem describes people sleeping on straw laid directly on the ground inside a “crushed, crooked house.”
But in ancient Japan—
a rice-farming, disaster-prone society—
such a living environment was practically impossible.
• Rice cultivation produces straw → therefore people lived where rice farming existed
• Rice-farming peoples do not build earth-floor houses
• Japan is an earthquake archipelago → flimsy, crooked homes cannot survive
Ancient Japanese homes were elevated, sturdy, and communal, designed to survive humidity and earthquakes.
The world described in the poem does not match these living conditions.
2. The Speaker Is Not a Poor Peasant
The man in the poem strokes his beard and says:
“I doubt there is anyone superior to me.”
This is clearly not a depiction of the lowest class.
It reflects someone of a higher status who nonetheless lives in extreme hardship—again, inconsistent with conditions in Chikuzen under a responsible provincial governor.
3. The Missing Historical Context: The Fall of Kaya
Until around the sixth century, many polities on the Korean Peninsula were tributary to Japan.
The southern region—Kaya (Gaya)—functioned as a Japanese-administered territory, and its inhabitants were essentially the same ethnic Japanese (倭人 / Wa people) as those in the archipelago.
But toward the end of the seventh century, the kingdom of Silla unified the entire peninsula and imposed severe taxation and oppressive rule on former Kaya regions.
Within only a few decades, an area once known for prosperity and dignity had fallen into ruin.
The devastation described in the poem—
collapsing homes, starvation, overbearing officials—
aligns far more precisely with the historical records of post-conquest Kaya under Silla rule than with conditions in Kyushu.
4. A Different Conclusion Emerges
When we combine
生活描写（living conditions）＋階層描写（social status）＋地政学（historical context）,
the picture becomes unmistakable:
The poem is not about Japanese peasants.
It is about former Japanese subjects living in Kaya who suffered severe oppression after Silla’s unification of the peninsula.
Okura, stationed in Chikuzen—the point closest to the peninsula and home to the Dazaifu (Japan’s national defense outpost)—would have been acutely aware of their suffering.
His poem reads not as a complaint about his own province, but as a warning:
“This is what happens when governance collapses.
Never allow Japan to become like this.”
And the final tanka’s cry—
“I would fly away, were I a bird.”
—makes perfect sense when read as the lament of people trapped across a sea they were forbidden to cross.
Ⅳ. The Moral Message: What Okura Wanted to Warn Japan
Yamanoue no Okura was not a cold administrator recording social misery.
He was a poet who loved the people of Chikuzen — their dignity, their everyday beauty, and the quiet strength with which they lived.
Nothing reveals this more clearly than his famous poem on the Seven Flowers of Autumn:
“In the autumn fields I count the blossoms—
seven kinds of flowers blooming in the wild:
bush clover, pampas grass, arrowroot,
pink dianthus, maidenflower,
purple mistflower, and morning-glory.”
This is not botany.
It is affection.
Okura does not describe flowers as objects, but as companions —
living beings whose presence makes the world gentle.
To him, the people of Chikuzen were like those flowers:
diverse, resilient, beautiful in their ordinariness.
Why, then, would such a man write the bleakest poem of poverty in the entire Manyōshū?
Because the poem was not about his people at all.
It was a mirror.
A mirror showing what happens when a nation allows greed to overtake public virtue,
when rulers exploit the people,
when governance becomes coercion instead of care.
This is the core moral message Okura wanted to deliver:
“A nation collapses when greed overtakes public virtue.”
He had seen — just across the sea —
how the once-prosperous people of Kaya
were reduced to starvation, humiliation, and despair
under Silla’s extractive rule.
And Okura understood something profound:
Japan was not magically exempt from this fate.
If the moral foundation of governance eroded,
Japan could one day look exactly like the world described in his poem.
That is why he crafted Hinkyū Mondōka with such brutal honesty.
It was not a lament —
it was a warning.
A warning across time:
“Do not allow this to become Japan.”
For modern readers — whether in Japan or overseas —
Okura’s message remains universal:
A society survives not by power,
nor by wealth,
but by the moral integrity of those who govern
and the compassion they hold for the people.
This is why the poem, though tragic, is ultimately an act of love.
It is the love of a poet who adored his people
and feared for what might one day happen to them
if the nation lost its way.
Ⅴ. Conclusion: A Lesson for Our Time
Hinkyū Mondōka is not merely an ancient tragedy recorded in a distant age.
It is a reminder — quiet but unwavering — of a truth that continues to shape every society on earth:
When individual greed overtakes the greater good,
civilization begins to decay from within.
We see this pattern throughout history,
and we see it again today.
In a world driven by
“now, money, myself,”
communities fracture,
public trust erodes,
and people lose the sense that they belong to something larger than their own desires.
Japan’s older moral tradition offered a different compass.
It taught that one may have desires —
but that desire must be directed toward something beyond the self.
This was called the Greater Self — taiga —
a spirit that acts not only for one’s own benefit,
but for the good of many.
It is the same spirit that allowed Japan, for centuries,
to remain a society where ordinary people lived with dignity,
where rulers were expected to serve,
and where community came before personal gain.
Okura’s poem reminds us that when this Greater Self collapses,
a nation collapses with it.
And when it is alive,
a nation can endure any hardship.
For me, writing this essay has been a way to revisit that ancient wisdom —
not as nostalgia,
but as a guide for the world we are shaping today.
We stand at a turning point,
one where the choice between selfish desire and shared purpose
will define the century ahead.
Okura’s voice reaches us across 1,300 years:
“Do not lose the moral foundation that sustains your people.”
If we can keep that foundation —
if we can choose the path of the Greater Self —
then the future, no matter how turbulent,
will still be a future filled with hope.
