Allusion skips a generation

Claim (verbatim)

Allusion skips a generation. Connects honkadori — the Shinkokin-era technique of allusive variation — to the etiquette of poetic property: borrowing from an ancient poem was homage flattering a shared education, but borrowing from a recent poet was theft from a living rival's house. The conjecture is that the practice was near-categorical, leaving a measurable void of roughly two generations: the foundation poems behind Shinkokinshu compositions should cluster in the first imperial anthologies and shun the century immediately preceding the compilers.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Tabulate the identified honka for Shinkokinshu poems in a standard annotated edition. Primary clause: at least 70 percent of identified foundation poems come from sources composed or compiled before 1000 (the Man'yoshu, Kokinshu, Gosenshu, Shuishu stratum). Secondary: under 10 percent come from 1100-1180, the two generations before compilation. The verdict follows the 70 percent clause, with the under-10 clause subordinate.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the honka identifications printed poem by poem in the Shin Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei edition of Shinkokinshu (Iwanami).

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Leaked (already exists in the literature).

The connection is the codified norm itself. Teika's poetic treatises (Kindai Shuka, Eiga no Taigai) prescribe that a honka be drawn from the older canonical anthologies -- the Sandaishu (Kokinshu, Gosenshu, Shuishu) and the Man'yoshu stratum -- and explicitly not from recent or living poets, and the Brower & Miner standard account of honkadori describes exactly this etiquette of borrowing from the flattering shared past while avoiding a living rival's house. So the roughly two-generation void is a published prescription. The only genuinely open question -- which the item's kill-test addresses -- is whether measured honka identifications in Shinkokinshu match the prescription in practice (>=70% pre-1000, <10% from 1100-1180).

• Robert H. Brower & Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford University Press, 1961) — Classic account of honkadori rules: allusion to the classical past, not to recent poets
• 'Honkadori' (allusive variation) -- Teika-era codification; obvious borrowing from recent writers frowned upon — The prescriptive norm; practice-vs-prescription is the open empirical question

Predictions

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