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Encyclopedic overview
The Kokin Wakashū is an early (c. 900) anthology of waka poetry which fixed the form of Japanese poetry. Waka (和歌; 'Japanese poem') is a type of poetry in classical Japanese literature. Although waka in modern Japanese is written as 和歌, in the past it was also written as 倭歌 (see Wa, an old name for Japan), and a variant name is yamato-uta (大和歌).
Etymology
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “waka” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.