After graduation, Tawara began teaching at Kanagawa Prefecture's Hashimoto High School, and she taught there until 1989.
[4] She wrote a 50 poem sequence, August Morning (八月の朝), which received the 32nd Kadokawa Tanka Prize.
Tawara became a celebrity, and hosted television and radio shows where she extolled the virtues of tanka, and encouraged everyone to write them.
She deftly combines modern Japanese subjects with classical poetic forms and grammatical constructions, which both hearken back to the classical days but also makes the tanka more accessible to Japan's modern youth.
Also, as opposed to the tanka of the classical era, Tawara's poems possess a lighter attitude and a crisp tone, as well as a universality that helps to make her poetry understood by all.