The themes found in a newly uncovered collection of traditional Japanese verse would be familiar to any reader here: the melancholy passing of the seasons, fleeting beauty, the inevitability of death.
The poets, however, are an unlikely bunch -- they were imprisoned as war criminals for Japan's wartime atrocities.
The 30 poems are assembled in two booklets that came to light this month after a historian obtained them from the family of a prisoner who served with other suspected war criminals held by U.S. Occupation authorities in the 1940s and early 1950s.