Haiku Anthology of Poems and Poets from Bashô to Shiki" by Harold G. Henderson was published by Doubleday Anchor Books. This book was a revision of Henderson's earlier book titled "The Bamboo Broom" (Houghton Mifflin, 1934). After World War II, Henderson and Blyth worked for the American Occupation in Japan and for the Imperial Household, respectively, and their shared appreciation of haiku helped form a bond between the two. Henderson translated every hokku and haiku into a rhymed tercet (a-b-a), whereas the Japanese originals never used rhyme. Unlike Yasuda, however, he recognized that 17 syllables in English are generally longer than
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