天の原ふりさけ見れば春日なる 三笠の山に出でし月かも ama no hara furisake mireba kasuga naru mikasa no yama ni ideshi tsuki kamo Looking up far across the sky, The moon that rose over Mount Mikasa at Kasuga

天の原ふりさけ見れば春日なる三笠の山に出でし月かも (ama no hara furisake mireba kasuga naru mikasa no yama ni ideshi tsuki kamo): a waka of the moon attributed to Abe no Nakamaro, looking up far across the sky to the moon that rose over Mount Mikasa at Kasuga.

天の原 is the wide expanse of the sky in デジタル大辞泉, and the sky or the heavens in JMdict; its words are, literally, the plain of heaven. ふりさけ見る is to look up far into the distance, and the 日本国語大辞典 quotes this poem for it. Mount Mikasa stands in the east of Nara city, behind Nara Park, with the Kasuga Shrine at its foot. In 出でし, the moon that rose, the past form き marks what the speaker saw or heard directly, in the 日本国語大辞典's definition.

The Kokinshū, ordered by imperial command, opens its book of travel poems with this waka. The poem stands under the heading composed on seeing the moon in China and the name of Abe no Nakamaro.

A note under the poem in the Kokinshū tells that Nakamaro, sent to China to study, could not come home for many years. In the note, when envoys went there again from Japan, he set out home with them. The people of that country gave him a farewell on the shore at a place the note calls Meishū. The note says that when night came he saw the moon rise, very lovely, and made the poem: so it is told.

Ki no Tsurayuki's Tosa nikki of 935 tells the story again, with a different opening line in its 1892 typeset: 青海原, literally the blue sea plain. Nakamaro writes out the poem's sense in what the diary calls men's letters, and tells it to one who carried the Japanese language. The diary's 1892 editor reads the men's letters as Chinese characters, and the listener as an interpreter. In the diary the people of China praise the poem far beyond what he expected. The diary adds: China and this land are different, but the moon's light must be the same, and so perhaps people's hearts are the same too.

Abe no Nakamaro served the Tang emperor Xuanzong under a Chinese name, 朝衡 in the 日本国語大辞典. The reference works read for the poem's history differ on the year and the port of his voyage home. The 世界大百科事典 gives three views: made on leaving Tang in 752, made in Chang'an from homesickness, or an old poem attached to him later.

The last word, かも, can ask with wonder or can exclaim, and the English has gone both ways. Clay MacCauley's version of 1899 asks: Is the moon the same / That on Mount Mikasa rose, / In the land of Kasuga? Helen Craig McCullough's of 1985 affirms: I see the same moon / that came up over the hill / of Mikasa at Kasuga. デジタル大辞泉 sets this poem under the かも of exclamation; the 日本国語大辞典 gives the word both senses.

The same is in both verse renderings, and the poem has no word for it. It is the Tosa nikki that says the moon's light must be the same.

The poem is the seventh of the Hyakunin isshu, the anthology of one poem each by a hundred poets.

Whether you take the poem's last word as a question or as an exclamation is yours.

Abe no Nakamaro, a Japanese student who went to Tang China in 717 and died there in 770; the Kokinshū (905–914) gives it to him and tells, as a story handed down, that he made it at his farewell on the shore before sailing home.