was a bestselling Japanese poet; her first

anthology In book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs, or related fiction/non-fiction excerpts by different authors. There are also thematic and g ...

''Kujikenaide'' (″Don't lose heart″), published in 2009, sold 1.58 million copies. In comparison, poetry book sales of 10,000 are considered successful in Japan. Her anthology also topped Japan's

Oricon , established in 1999, is the holding company at the head of a Japanese corporate group that supplies statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that ...

bestseller chart. It was originally self-published, but upon seeing its success the publisher

Asuka Shinsha Asuka Shinsha is a Japanese publishing, bookstore, and advertising company founded in 1979. Several of its manga have been made into anime is a Traditional animation, hand-drawn and computer animation, computer-generated animation orig ...

reissued it, with new artwork, in 2010. It contains 42 poems. After back pain forced Shibata to give up her hobby of classical Japanese dance, she turned to writing poetry at the age of 92, at the suggestion of her son Kenichi. As of 2011 she was writing poems for a second anthology, lived alone in the Tokyo suburbs, and was a widow. In December 2010, a TV documentary about Shibata was aired. Shibata died on January 20, 2013, at the age of 101. She died in a nursing home located in

Utsunomiya is the capital and largest city of Tochigi Prefecture in the northern Kantō region of Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 513,584, and a population density of . The total area of the city is . Utsunomiya is famous for its ''gyoza'' ...

, a city north of

Tokyo Tokyo, officially the Tokyo Metropolis, is the capital of Japan, capital and List of cities in Japan, most populous city in Japan. With a population of over 14 million in the city proper in 2023, it is List of largest cities, one of the most ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Shibata, Toyo 1911 births 2013 deaths Japanese women centenarians 21st-century Japanese poets