It has been announced that the characters for the new era name of “Reiwa” (beautiful harmony) were selected from poems found in the Manyoshu. In accordance with this, many bookstores have set aside a special display area for Manyoshu and related texts which are selling well. Containing poems created between the early seventh century and the early eighth century, Manyoshu is the oldest poetry anthology in Japan. This anthology contains approximately 4,500 poems created by people in many different fields, from Emperors and aristocrats, to bureaucrats and farmers, and in it you can get a sense of how ancient Japanese people were.