Interpretation of the title of the Man'yōshū
The meaning title of the "Man'yōshū", an eighth-century Japanese anthology of "waka" poetry, has been the subject of speculation and debate. The characters literally mean "ten thousand — leaves — collection", but more likely refer to a collection of a great many poems, or a collection to last for a very long time. Overview. The literal translation of the kanji that make up the title "Man'yōshū" (万 — 葉 — 集) is "ten thousand — leaves — collection". The principal interpretations, according to the twentieth-century scholar , are (i) a book that collects a great many poems, (ii ) a book for all generations, and (iii) a poetry collection that uses a large volume of paper. Of these, supporters of (i) can be further divided into (a) those who interpret the middle character as "words" ("koto no ha", lit. "leaves of speech"), thus giving "ten thousand words", i.e. "many "waka"", including Sengaku, , Kada no Azumamaro and Kamo no Mabuchi, and (b) those who interpret the middle character as literally referring to leaves of a tree, but as a metaphor for poems, including Ueda Akinari, , Masayuki Okada (岡田正之), , and Susumu Nakanishi. Furthermore, (ii) can be divided into: (a) it was  meant to express the intention that the work should last for all time (proposed by Keichū, and supported by , , Yoshio Yamada, and ); (b) it was meant to wish for long life for the emperor and empress (Shinobu Origuchi); and (c) it was meant to indicate that the collection included poems from all ages (proposed by Yamada). (iii) was proposed by Yūkichi Takeda in his "Man'yōshū Shinkai jō" (萬葉集新解上), but Takeda also accepted (ii); his theory that the title refers to the large volume of paper used in the collection has also not gained much traction among other scholars. Keichū. The  reason for this ambiguity was elaborated on (with reference to classical Chinese sources) by Keichū in his work "Man'yō Daishōki" (萬葉代匠記): In a later edition of the same work, Keichū repeated the above dual explanation, further interpreting the meaning of "poem" as an elaboration on the meaning "word" (as in "koto no ha"), and speculating that the titles of the later "Kin'yōshū", "Gyokuyōshū" and "Shin'yōshū" as utilizing this meaning. He suggested that the title might be meant to express a desire that this collection would last for all time, comparing the title of the later "Senzaishū". He appears to have  shown more support for (ii), but was not certain. No other early Edo period scholar cited as many Chinese precedents in support of their interpretation as did Keichū. Modern scholars. Yoshio Yamada, in his work ""Man'yōshū" Meigi Kō" (萬葉集名義考) advanced the "ten thousand ages" hypothesis believing it to be the stronger, but the Chinese literature scholar Masayuki Okada in his 1929 work "Ōmi-Nara-chō no Kan-bungaku" (近江奈良朝の漢文学) preferred the "ten thousand poems" interpretation, based on the titles of other works of the period comparing poems to trees or leaves in a forest (詩林 "shirin", 歌林 "karin"). Torao Suzuki , another Chinese scholar, followed Okada in his paper ""Man'yōshū" Shomei no Igi" (万葉集書名の意義, 1951, published in the first volume of the journal "Man'yō"), noting particularly the title of the (now lost) work "Ruijū Karin" (類聚歌林). Suzuki took the "leaves" of the title to be the leaves covering the trees in a forest of poetry ("karin"). Another Sinologist, Kiyotaka Hoshikawa, went further in his 1952 paper "Man'yō Meigi Ronkō" (万葉名義論考, published in the 29th volume of "Kokugo to Kokubungaku"), citing a Tang-era Chinese work that actually used the phrase "man'yō" ("wànyè" in modern Mandarin) in this sense. Following the work  of these Chinese scholars, the "ten thousand poems" hypothesis became more widely accepted. Susumu Nakanishi, in his 1963 book "Man'yōshū no Hikakubungakuteki Kenkyū" (万葉集の比較文学的研究), also expressed support for the idea that the title referred to the great number of poems included in the work. Noriyuki Kojima, in the second volume of his 1964 book "Jōdai Nihon Bungaku to Chūgoku Bungaku" (上代日本文学と中国文学), sided with the "ten thousand ages" hypothesis, though, gathering all the Chinese sources he could find for both sides and weighing them against each other. Kojima determined that while the majority of the textual references in Chinese sources favoured  the "ten thousand ages" interpretation, this evidence was not strong enough to base one's view purely on the surviving Chinese sources; he instead concluded that "ten thousand ages" was the better interpretation based on the more likely reasoning of the compiler(s): that they intended for the collection to last for all time. He cited Chinese sources such as the "Wen Xuan" and the "" that use the character 葉 in the sense of "age", as well as texts that use it to mean "leaf", in the same contexts where literature is compared to forests and flowers. In his 1972 book  Man'yōshū Seiritsu Kō (万葉集成立考), Matsuo Itami (伊丹末雄) suggested that the title was provided by Tachibana no Moroe, one of the compilers, to mean "ten thousand ages", and cited in support of this a passage about Moroe in the "Shoku Nihongi" that reads "ten thousand years immortal, one thousand leaves inheritance" (万歳無窮、千葉相伝).