are most familiar to modern readers in the , and when they are included in later poetry, it is to make allusions to poems in the . The exact origin of remains contested to this day, though both the and the , two of Japan's earliest chronicles, use it as a literary technique. In terms of usage, are often used at the beginning of a poem. The is a similar figure of speech used in poetry, used to introduce a poem. In fact, the 17th-century Buddhist priest and scholar
Keichū wrote that "if one says , one speaks of long " in his . Japanese scholar
Shinobu Orikuchi also echoes this statement, claiming that are that have been compressed. While some still have meanings that add to the meaning of the following word, many others have lost their meanings. As became standardized and used as a way to follow Japanese poetic traditions, many were used only as decorative phrases in poems and not for their meanings. Many translators of poems face difficulty when translating , because although they make up the first line, many have no substantial meaning, and it is impossible to discard the whole first line of a . It is said that
Sei Shōnagon often used this technique in
The Pillow Book, and some earlier scholars thought that they were named after the book, but most agree now that the practice was fairly common at the time she wrote the Pillow Book. == Examples ==