In the last article, Itemization with Two Different Orders, I mentioned Japanese famous poem called “Iroha Uta いろは歌(いろはうた)”, but explained nothing in detail there, so I’d like to show you the meaning of the poem and some related things.

First, let me show you the poem again. First in alphabets:

i ro ha ni ho he to chi ri nu ru wo

wa ka yo ta re so tsu ne na ra mu

u wi no o ku ya ma ke fu ko e te

a sa ki yu me mi shi we i mo se su

And then in Hiragana:

いろはにほへと　ちりぬるを

わかよたれそ　つねならむ

うゐのおくやま　けふこえて

あさきゆめみし　ゑいもせす

Finally in Hiragana and Kanji:

色は匂えど　散りぬるを

我が世誰そ　常ならむ

有為の奥山　今日越えて

浅き夢見じ　酔いもせず

The third one, the one written in Hiragana and Kanji, has some voiced consonants. The use of them aims to make our reading more natural and the meaning more clear.

Before getting into explanations of its meaning, I’d like to talk about its unicursality* again, in other words, its characteristic which allows us to make the poem using every Hiragana characters without any duplication. The poem “iroha uta いろは歌(いろはうた)” is a pangram. I strongly believe that the characteristic is incredibly interesting. Actually, also in English, we can make a pangram using all alphabets and some symbolic characters like ” : ” and ” ‘ “, but the number of alphabets is 26. In Japanese, we have 21 more characters. What makes it possible to make the poem using 47 Hiragana characters?

In my opinion, the reason why 47 characters can be put into one poem is highly related to the fact that in Japanese we don’t have to consider how to make vowel sounds. In English, we can connect some consonants in a row, but at longest, three consonants. Then we have to make a vowel sound and add it after consonants. This means, in English, we have to consider how to use characters expressing vowel sounds effectively, and also how to consume characters corresponding to consonants efficiently. On the other hand, all Japanese sounds expressed by 47 characters contain at least one of vowel sounds, so basically, we don’t have to think how to make vowel sounds effectively. We can focus only on a way to make meaningful sentences.

On its unicursality, we still have another room for discussion. It is said that the poem, “iroha uta いろは歌(いろはうた)”, was created during the Heian era (794-1192). So, it is more or less the same age as Hiragana characters. Can we consider that the poem was created in order to realize its unicursality? In other words, can we consider that the number of Hiragana characters at that time was also 47? If we can’t, this means that its unicursality was not achieved when the poem was created, and also that the poem was created by using some of Hiragana characters at that time. In actual, unfortunately, we can’t. I cannot say how many Hiragana characters were used during the era because a lot of characters were created by simplifying corresponding Kanji characters, but in general, the number was much larger than 47. Therefore, its unicursality was found afterwards or otherwise the poem itself was not created in the Heian era.

I would like to say, “then let’s jump into explanations of its meaning”, but the article is already long enough. So, I will talk about it in the upcoming article.

*I’m not sure we have the word “unicursality”, but let me use it as a noun form of the adjective, “unicursal”.