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Allusion skips a generation
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
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).
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture has been linked to the following subject pages on Inferpedia — an encyclopedia of the missing, now in limited preview.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries; single packet Write was the only tool use); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen (sidecar docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_titlelist_20260708.md); prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W01 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The two-generation avoidance is prescribed in Teika's own poetics (take honka from the old anthologies, avoid recent poets) and is standard in honkadori scholarship, so the direction is fully anticipated; but whether practice was near-categorical has never been tested by tabulating identified honka sources across the Shinkokinshu. The 70/10-percent distributional census is un-run.
- Robert Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (1961), on Teika's honkadori rules
- David T. Bialock, 'Voice, Text, and the Question of Poetic Borrowing in Late Classical Japanese Poetry' (1994)
Predictions
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