| Sasaki Nobutsuna | |
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Sasaki Nobutsuna |
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| Born | 8 July 1872 Suzuka, Mie Prefecture, Japan |
| Died | 2 December 1963 (aged 91) Kamakura, Kanagawa Japan |
| Occupation | Japanese poet and literary scholar |
| Genres | tanka poetry |
| Literary movement | Chikuhakukai |
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Sasaki Nobutsuna (佐佐木 信綱, 8 July 1872 – 2 December 1963) was a tanka poet and scholar of the Nara and Heian periods of Japanese literature. He was active during the Shōwa period of Japan.
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Sasaki was born in what is now part of Suzuka city, Mie prefecture. His father, Sasaki Hirotsuna, taught him the basics of poetry composition and encouraged him to memorize classical tanka verses. After graduation from the Classics Department of Tokyo Imperial University, he followed his father's wish and decided to devote his life to waka poetry, both by researching old verses and by composing new verses himself.
Sasaki founded a literary society called the Chikuhakukai (from his father's pen-name), which published a literary journal, Kokoro no Hana (“Flower of the Heart”) from 1898. Using the journal as a medium, he was able to popularize his own philosophy of waka, publish his research on the history and development of Japanese poetry, and to nurturing a next generation of poets. Among his many disciples were Kawada Jun, Kinoshita Rigen and Katayama Hiroko. The magazine is still in existence today as Japan's oldest poetry monthly.
Although some of his earliest works were influenced by Mori Ōgai, together with Masaoka Shiki and Yosano Tekkan, Sasaki took part in a movement to revolutionize tanka and brought out his first collection of tanka Omoigusa (“Grasses of Thoughts”) in 1903. He eventually published an additional eleven collections of tanka, which included Shingetsu (“New Moon”, 1912), Toyohata gumo (“Clouds Streaming in the Wind”, 1929), and Yama to mizu to (“Mountains and Water”, 1951).
In recognition of these efforts, Sasaki was offered the post of lecturer at Tokyo Imperial University in 1905, and was officially commissioned by the Ministry of Education to work on a modern commentary to the Man'yōshū .
Sasaki worked together with his father on these efforts, and published a comprehensive survey of medieval waka (Wakashi no kenkyu, “Studies in Japanese Poetry”, 1915) and a study of the Man'yōshū (“Kohan Man'yōshū”, 1924–1925).
Sasaki relocated from Tokyo to Kamakura, Kanagawa prefecture in 1921, where he lived to his death in 1963. He was awarded the Order of Culture by the Japanese government in 1963. His grave is at the Tama Reien, in the outskirts of Tokyo.