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This paper analyzes a set of 9,035 salaryman senryū poems over an eighteen-year period (1990-2007) in order to track salaryman reactions to workplace transition from an organizational behavioralist perspective. Major findings include: (i) the number of submissions and votes for the major poetry competition, Salaryman Senryū, have been falling since 1994, suggesting a decline in shared salaryman mentality; (ii) there has been a shift in the relative importance of broad themes, so that the workplace as a category of senryū poems is of less centrality in 2007 than it was in 1990; (iii) within the workplace category, (negative) interpersonal relations, especially with supervisors, still dominate; and (iv) workstyle is also a strong subtheme, with workers showing more interest in work processes than actual work conditions. The analysis also shows that the years 1996 and 1997 are a watershed where poems shift from a more jocular to strident tone. The overall implication of the study is a potential breach of the social contract between Japanese employers and regular employees, which will require the assiduous application of supportive employment practices (SEP) in order to ensure a high level of employee performance and engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The corpus of haikai (haiku) poetic material produced from the early until the latter part of the nineteenth century in Japan has been largely dismissed as unliterary since Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). In particular scholars have avoided the study of the poetic practice known as tsukinami haikai, a form of poetic competition. By examining a specific tsukinami haikai text as well as looking at the process of tsukinami haikai competitions, I argue that they had an important pedagogical and cultural value. The poets who composed poems for tsukinami haikai competitions gained the education necessary to read Masaoka Shiki's arguments in favor of a 'literary poetry'. In addition the vocabulary that they learned from tsukinami haikai was 'universal' and thus transcended local identities. Tsukinami haikai is important for understanding the cultural history of nineteenth century Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]