Haiku composition. Shiki's revisionism dealt a severe blow to renku and surviving haikai schools. The term "hokku" is now used chiefly in its original sense of the opening verse of a renku, and rarely to distinguish haiku written before Shiki's time. Haibun is a combination of prose and haiku, often autobiographical or written in the form of a travel journal. Haiga is a style of Japanese painting based on the aesthetics of haikai, and usually including a haiku. Today, haiga artists combine haiku with paintings, photographs and other art. The carving of famous haiku on natural stone to make poem monuments
Japanese abbreviated and contracted words be commonly used, or they may be specific to a particular group of people. For example, the is known as by its employees, but this terminology is not familiar to most Japanese. Japanese words are spelled using characters that represent syllables (morae), rather than individual phonetic units (phonemes) as in the English alphabet. These characters are compiled into two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana. Japanese also makes extensive use of adopted Chinese characters, or kanji, which may be pronounced with one or more syllables. Therefore, when a word or phrase is abbreviated, it does not take the form of initials, but