Haiku in English with the one-line vertical column in which Japanese haiku are often printed, was lent legitimacy principally by three people: The single-line haiku usually contains fewer than seventeen syllables. A caesura (pause) may be appropriate, dictated by sense or speech rhythm (following the traditional Japanese tradition of a break, marked by the Kireji), and usually little or no punctuation. This form was used by John Wills and, more recently, has been practiced by poets such as M. Kettner, Janice Bostok, Jim Kacian, Chris Gordon, Scott Metz, Stuart Quine, John Barlow, and many others. As the last two examples in particular illustrate,
Old Japanese line of the first poem in the "Kojiki" was written with five characters: This method of writing Japanese syllables by using characters for their Chinese sounds ("ongana") was supplemented with indirect methods in the complex mixed script of the "Man'yōshū" (c. 759). In "man'yōgana", each Old Japanese syllable was represented by a Chinese character. Although any one of several characters could be used for a given syllable, a careful analysis revealed that 88 syllables were distinguished in the "Kojiki": The system has the same gaps of "yi" and "wu" found in later forms of Japanese. However, many syllables that have