The Japan Forum > Click Nippon > Creative Lesson Planning

Since I was a child I loved reading poetry. The first poem compilation I got during my early primary years was called Mother by Hachiro Sato. I also liked trying to write poems. By the time I was in high school, I enjoyed reciting poems by Charles Baudelaire and Tatsuji Miyoshi, without really caring whether I understood or not.

Speaking of reciting, I think it must have been when I was in junior high school, when we had to memorize the "Ogura HyakuninIsshu" ("One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets") over the winter holidays for homework. I remember memorizing the poems just by sound without understanding their meanings. It wasn't until decades later that I found out about the form of marriage, the status of women in society and the kind of lives poets led in the Heian era; and for the first time, the poems I had memorized just by sound moved me with an intense power. The power of the words that were passed down over more than a thousand years was unchanging human emotion.

When I saw the poem "Dear Fukushima"in Click Nippon, I was instantly inspired and I remember thinking 'This is it!!' I was in charge of a Grade 12 Japanese Heritage class and I was looking for ideas and materials I could use to design a unit on the theme of  'An individual as a global citizen'