Man'yoshu and Kokinshuu are some of the first anthologies of Japanese poetry to be considered literary canon. The Man'yoshu dates back to the 8th century and contains 4,516 poems. Man'yoshu, which translates as “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves,” was compiled by a wide range of Japanese companies, where many of the authors remained anonymous. The Kokinshuu appears later in the history of Japan and is an anthology from 905 AD containing a total of 1,111 poems. The compilers of the Kokinshuu are Ki no Tsurayuki, Ki no Tomonori, Oshikochi no Mitsune, and Mibu no Tadamine. Ki no Tsurayuki was the compiler who wrote the preface of the Kokinshuu, which predicted the canonization of the Kokinshuu for Japanese poetry. Man'yoshu and Kokinshuu were compiled in the Heian era, which was a relatively calm period in Japanese history, however it was a time when the society had not acquired a complete literary tradition to call its own. The significance of Man'yoshu and Kokinshuu in Japanese literature is that their poetic tools would become canon for hundreds of years from that historical moment and would become more enduring than the emperors, who required their compilation. Before the development of hiragana and katakana, Japanese poets used Chinese kanji during the Heian period from which Man'yoshu was recorded. Furthermore, they were also written in a writing language known as man'yogana, which is assumed to be an intermediate language between Chinese and Chinese. creation of the Japanese hiragana. Previous literary examples from this era are the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki. However, Man'yoshu did not want to remain faithful to the directionless poetic style of Chinese prose. One of Man'yoshu's primary roles was to develop the liter......middle of paper......kotoba or kokoro. These qualities mentioned in Kana's preface of Ki no Tsurayuki are a top-down decision of Japan's political formation as well as his personal aesthetic preferences which, in his opinion, Chinese poetry was lacking. However, when a society decides on literary canons, it creates literary traditions with which it is able to identify. The roles and meaning of the canon, which derives from the top-down decision-making of the nobles, still depends on works of merit that survive the tribulations it may face in the future. Works Cited Keene, Donald. Anthology of Japanese literature, from the early to the mid-19th century. New York: Grove, 1955. Print.McCullough, Helen Craig. and Tsurayuki Ki. Kokin Wakashū: the first imperial anthology of Japanese poetry: with Tosa Nikki and Shinsen Waka. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1985. Print.