Usono Shisho

Usono Shisho (c.1545?–1610?) was a Japanese librarian in Edo (now Tokyo). He served as librarian to the samurai Oda Nobunaga until Nobunaga’s assassination in 1582, and then was an advisor to Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Shisho is best known for a series of haiku poems he wrote related to libraries. These poems typically reflected on issues of scholarship, scroll preservation, research, and a general love of old poems and histories. One example follows: