Noriko Ibaragi

Noriko Ibaragi (茨木 のり子, Ibaragi Noriko) was a Japanese poet, playwright, essayist, children's literature writer, and translator. She is most well known for her poem, Watashi ga ichiban kirei datta toki (わたしが一番きれいだったとき, "When my beauty shone"), written twelve years after the Japanese defeat in WWII. In 1953, she co-founded the literary journal Kai ("Oars"). She began to learn Korean as a second language at the age of fifty, going on to publish her own translations of poetry by her Korean contemporaries.