Donald Keene

SOURCE: "The Creation of Modern Japanese Poetry," in Landscapes and Portraits: Appreciations of Japanese Culture, Kodansha International Ltd., 1971, pp. 131-56.

[In the following essay, Keene charts the transition of Japanese poetry during the Meiji era from traditional tanka and haiku forms to shintaishi, or "new-style poems," and also surveys later innovations in Japanese poetic techniques and themes.]

Modern Japanese poetry, like everything else modern in Japan, is generally traced back to the accession to undisputed authority of the Emperor Meiji in 1868. This political event did not immediately inspire floods of poetic composition; in fact, as far as I can determine, not a single poet sang the glories of the new reign, and no book of poetry of consequence was published for some years afterwards. But the new Emperor was to show himself conspicuously unlike many generations of his ancestors, rulers whose arrivals, activities and departures had been of little concern to poets. Though the Emperor's direct role in the movement of modernization was minor, he set the spirit of the new age in his oath taken in 1868, when he promised, among other things, to end old ignorance and to seek learning throughout the world. Poets were soon to call themselves proudly "Meiji men," meaning that they belonged to the new, enlightened generation.

Eighteen sixty-eight is of interest in the history of Japanese poetry for another reason. In that year two poets died whose works, though in the classical tanka form, suggest that they might ultimately have found a way out of the impasse in which Japanese poetry was trapped. The first, Okuma Kotomichi, sounded a new note in his book of poetic criticism Hitorigochi (1857): "The poets of the past are my teachers, but they are not myself. l am a son of my time and not of the past. Were I to follow blindly the poets of former times, I should forget my own humble identity. The poems I wrote might seem impressive, but their excellence would be entirely on the surface; they would be merchants in princes' raiment. My art would be pure deceit, like a performance of Kabuki." Despite his insistence that poetry reflect its time, however, Kotomichi's works are scarcely revolutionary: in diction and structure they are sometimes barely distinguishable from the poems in the Kokinshu written nine hundred years earlier. It would be hard to conceive of an English poet writing in 1850, with no intention of fraud, verses which might have antedated Chaucer, but in the Japan of the nineteenth century the language of the tanka was with few exceptions a thousand years old. Words of other than pure Japanese origin were not tolerated; it was as if the English poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been obliged to confine themselves to words of Anglo-Saxon derivation, and Coleridge had therefore written "The Hoary Seafarer" instead of "The Ancient Mariner."

The subjects of poetry were also prescribed with minute exactness. There were, for example, twenty-five varieties of flowers which might properly be mentioned in a tanka: cherry blossoms, plum blossoms, wisteria, azalea, etc. Other flowers could be mentioned only at the risk of the poet being denounced as an eccentric or a revolutionary. The standard collections of poetry were known by heart, and the critical works of poetic dicta, most of them dating back to the thirteenth century, were not so much helpful guides as absolute prescriptions. The poet was encouraged to demonstrate originality of conception, while restricting himself to the language of the tenth-century collections, but what this meant in practice was merely minor variation. Perfection of classical diction, successful evocation of the poetry of the past, were the aims of centuries of poets. Of course an expert can trace currents even within this seemingly static poetic: the proportion of nouns might show a tendency to increase in certain periods, or there might be a greater use of metaphor in the love poems. But no self-respecting poet in 1850 would have said, "I enjoyed a quiet smoke," though people had been smoking for two hundred years. That is why Kotomichi's declaration seems so important for its day. Poets of the time reconciled their seemingly contradictory beliefs in the necessity for contemporary expression, and in the desirability of preserving the language and mood of the Kokinshu poetry, by writing chiefly about subjects which had not changed much in nine hundred years. "Fragrance alone, I thought, was in the wind, but since this morning the plum garden sends me blossoms too" is a poem which might have been written at any time over the centuries, and could still be composed today; indeed, such relatively static elements in Japanese life as the quiet appreciation of nature within one's own garden contributed to the preservation of the old poetic traditions.

The second of the poets who died in 1868, Tachibana Akemi, is a more striking figure. He was involved in the patriotic movements which resulted in the restoration of power to the Imperial Family, and his poetry reflects his activities far more vividly than Kotomichi's. He wrote, for example, a series of fifty tanka on the theme "Solitary Pleasures" including: "It is a pleasure when, a most infrequent treat, we've fish for dinner, and my children cry with joy, 'Yum-yum!' and gobble it down"; or, "It is a pleasure when, in a book which by chance I am perusing, I come on a character who is exactly like me"; or, "It is a pleasure when, in these days of delight in all things foreign, I come across a man who does not forget our Empire." These tanka have almost none of the traditional virtues of the form: they lack elegance, tone, depth, melody and so on. But in their different ways they point to possibilities of poetic expression which had largely been ignored: the pleasures (or sorrows) of ordinary life, the pleasures of the intellect, and the involvement of the poet in political activity. Tachibana Akemi's tanka, however, barely touched on these larger issues. It remained the task of the specifically modern poets to explore them.

Before 1868 Japanese poets who did not wish to write tanka had two other recognized possibilities open to them. The first was the haiku, a form which had originally allowed much greater freedom, especially in the vocabulary, than the hidebound tanka, but which by this time was even more saddled with hackneyed phraseology. Not one haiku poet of distinction was writing in 1868. The most important poetry was probably not that in Japanese but in Chinese. There was a thousand-year-old tradition of Japanese poets writing in Chinese, and probably the finest of this poetry was composed in the early nineteenth century. Poets who felt their thoughts too large to stuff into the thirty-one syllables of the tanka or into the even more cramped seventeen syllables of the haiku enjoyed the greater amplitude of the Chinese poem, which could run to thirty or more lines. This meant, however, writing in a language as unlike Japanese as Latin is unlike English. But just as English poets at times in the past chose Latin, not only for commemorative addresses but for their most personal poetry, so many Japanese found that certain things could be said easier in Chinese. For them Chinese was not the language of China, a foreign country, so much as a heritage from the Japanese past. Chinese influence was present in almost every variety of Japanese literature prior to 1868. It was only gradually superseded by influences from the West.

Modern Japanese literature was indeed to be distinguished most particularly by the presence of the West. Whether accepted or rejected, the West could not be ignored. The first stage in adapting Western influence was, inevitably, that of imitation. The Japanese have often been taxed with an excessive proclivity towards imitation, but it is difficult to see how they could have achieved the revolution in their literature without translation and imitation. It is surprising in fact how much the poets managed to salvage of the old traditions even when translating. The Japanese preference for alternating lines in five and seven syllables, going back at least to the seventh century, continued to be observed by almost all poets for decades. Even when translating English poetry they adhered to this rhythm, as in the version of "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" done by Yatabe Ryokichi (1852-99):

yamayama kasumi
iriai no
kane wa naritsutsu
no no ushi wa
shizuka ni ayumi
kaeri yuku
tagaesu hito mo
uchitsukare
y oaku sarite
ware hitori
tasogaredoki ni
nokorikeri

The mountains are misty
And, as the evening
Bell sounds,
The oxen on the lea
Slowly walk
Returning home.
The ploughman too
Is weary and
At last departs;
I alone
In the twilight hour
Remain behind.

Sometimes the adaptations were even freer, using Japanese equivalents in the imagery or construction, as in this version of "The Last Rose of Summer":

niwa no chigusa
mushi no ne mo
karete sabishiku
narinikeri
aa shiragiku
aa shiragiku
hitori okurete
sakinikeri

The thousand grasses in the garden
And the cries of insects too
Have dried up.
And turned forlorn.
Ah, the white chrysanthemum
Ah, the white chrysanthemum
Alone, after the others,
Has blossomed.

The rose, a flower without poetic significance for the Japanese, was here transformed into a chrysanthemum, and in place of Moore's "All her lovely companions/are faded and gone," a use of personification unfamiliar to the Japanese, we are told of the "thousand grasses" and "cries of insects" in the garden.

The first collection of modern poetry, Selection of Poems in the New Style (Shintaishi-sho), was published in 1882. It included fourteen translations of English and American poems, one French poem translated from an English version, and five original poems by the compilers. Among the English poems were "The Charge of the Light Brigade," "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and two translations of Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life." The translators were scholars of English who happened to have become interested in poetry, and their versions, like the translations of professors elsewhere, had little poetic grace. The original poems are modelled on Western examples, sometimes with ludicrous results, as in Yatabe Ryokichi's attempt at rhymed Japanese verse:

haru wa monogoto
  yorokobashi
fuku kaze totemo atatakashi
niwa no sakura ya mono no hana
yo ni utsukushiku miyuru
  kana
nobe no hibari wa ito
  takaku
kumoi haruka ni maite naku

In spring everything is full of
  charm,
The blowing wind is really warm.
Cherry and peach, blossoming
  bright,
Make an unusually pretty sight.
The lark of the moors, very high,
Sings as it soars far in the sky.

One compiler wrote disarmingly in the preface, "We are rather pleased with this selection of poems, but for all we know, the public may contemptuously dismiss it as an exceedingly strange and uncouth performance. Good and evil, however, are not eternal. Values change with the age and with what different generations believe. Even if our poems win no favor among people today, it may be that future generations of modern Japanese poets will attain the heights of Homer or Shakespeare. Some great poet, impressed by the new style of this collection, may contribute more talent and write poetry which will move men's hearts and make the very gods and demons weep."

As predicted, the collection was subjected to considerable abuse, part of it justified. We can only question the grasp of the principles of Western poetry revealed by Toyama Chuzan (1848-1900), the author of the poem entitled "On the Principles of Sociology," which begins with the lines, "The sun and moon in the heavens and even the barely visible stars all move because of a force called gravity." This was hardly an imitation of any English poem, but rather a combination of the new learning (especially the writings of Herbert Spencer) with the new poetic forms. One man wrote a full-length geography of the world entirely in the new verse! But Selection of Poems in the New Style was ridiculed less because of its poetical ineptitude than because the authors had deliberately mingled elegant and unrefined words including, for example, Chinese-derived expressions in Japanese contexts. Despite such criticisms, the collection exerted enormous influence, and the words "poems in the new style" (shintaishi) of the title came to be employed as the normal designation of the new poetry. Collections of this verse appeared in rapid succession during the following years.

The instant popularity of the new poetry was obviously not due to its exceptional beauty. It came rather as an explosive reaction to the overly familiar stereotypes of Japanese poetics. Tachibana Akemi in a satirical essay had derided the old poetry: "In early spring one writes of the morning sun gently shining and of the spreading mists; at the end of the year one speaks of the 'waves of years crawling shorewards' and of waiting for the spring. For flowers there is 'the blessing of rain' and for snow 'regret over leaving footprints.' Poetic language has come to mean such phrases and nothing else. A hundred out of a hundred poets, the year before last, last year, and this year too have merely strung together the same old phrases. How depressing!" Tachibana Akemi, not knowing about Western poetry, could offer no way out of the impasse except his homely little verses on daily life. With the new translations, however, it became apparent that poetry could have a much wider range than anyone had previously suspected.

First of all, poetry could be much longer and in many forms. Long poems had been popular in eighth-century Japan, and some new poets justified their long compositions in terms of Japanese tradition, but the inspiration for long poems, particularly on contemporary subjects, came directly from the West. Secondly, the subject matter was entirely new. The variety of topics treated by Western poets made some Japanese novices suppose, not surprisingly, that any subject, even the principles of sociology, might be celebrated in verse. The liberation from the old themes was sometimes excessive, and poets were eventually to discover that some hackneyed old topics still had validity, but it would never again be possible to limit Japanese poetry to the obviously "poetic." Finally, the language of Japanese poetry was enormously expanded, though not as much as the pioneers expected. Komuro Kyokuzan, the editor of one of the early collections, wrote, "Persons with unenlightened views, not realizing how the processes of civilization operate, assert that it is wrong to use in poetry any words except the old ones. This attitude in practice often leads to unfortunate results. For example, where once one spoke of a soldier carrying a bow and arrows, today he carries a Snyder, and there should therefore be no objection to writing of a soldier's Snyder. But when the critics insist that the poet must continue to refer to bows and arrows, does this not lead to an unfortunate result? They are mistaken because they do not realize that Snyder has already become a Japanese word." The argument is cogent, but unfortunately for Komuro Kyokuzan, the Snyder gun was not long afterwards replaced by a Japanese-made rifle, and the word Snyder, despite his predictions, never replaced bow and arrows.

Komuro Kyokuzan exemplified his theories of poetry with his "Ode to Liberty," translated in part by Sansom:

O Liberty, Ah Liberty, Liberty O
Liberty, we two are plighted until the world
  ends.
And who shall part us? Yet in this world there
  are
clouds that hide the moon and winds that destroy
  The blossoms. Man is not master of his fate.

It is a long tale to tell
But once upon a time
There were men who wished
To give the people Liberty
And set up a republican government.
To that end…

The first volume of new verse by a single poet was the collection The Twelve Stone Tablets (Juni no ishizuka) by Yuasa Hangetsu, published in 1885. It consists of a series of poems based on the Old Testament, cast into the traditional rhythms in five and seven syllables of the ancient Japanese poetry. The language is replete with the stylistic devices of the past, and the vocabulary rich in old-fashioned elegance, but the presence of the Land of Canaan and the Walls of Jericho remind us that the enlightenment has occurred. The strongest cultural influence of the early Meiji period was indeed the translation of the New Testament, completed in 1879. This period marked the high point of Christianity in Japan, as many people were converted to the religion of the West, the source of the new culture. Believers and nonbelievers read the Bible and sang hymns. The hymns especially proved important in the development of the new poetry.

The first critical study of the new poetry, published in 1893, began with the remarks, "People constantly tell me, 'I am living in Meiji Japan, and I use the language of Meiji Japan. Why should I study the dead writings of the past and waste my time over the old circumlocutions?"' Owada Tateki, the author of this study, though sympathetic with the point of view expressed, felt that much was still to be learned from the past. He favored the use of modern Japanese, but noted how difficult it was to set standards for the ordinary, contemporary language of the Meiji era. In 1893 there was no standard spoken Japanese. The tradition of writing the spoken language was so recent that people were not even sure how to record common colloquial expressions, nor which words were standard speech and which were dialect. Owada felt that a certain artificiality was therefore inevitable. Above all, he counselled, there should be "moderation" in expression—avoidance of bizarre phraseology merely to achieve novelty of effect. He declared, for example, that "direct imitations of such Western expressions as 'the moon dances' or 'the mountains clap their hands' are likely to surprise, but they are not pleasing."

On the whole, however, Owada was optimistic about the future of Japanese poetry. "A new atmosphere is about to flood into our literary world. Already it is seeking cracks through which to gain admittance. Breathe in! Breathe in! Japanese poetry has its strange, unique beauty, but we must not forget that foreign poetry has extraordinary virtues. It would be a mistake to abandon our own traditions and adopt theirs in entirety, but if we add theirs to our own we shall widen our literary horizons. The long poem is unquestionably the special glory of their literatures; we should therefore transplant it in our garden, tender it, water it, and make Eastern flowers blossom on this Western plant. The Japanese Po Chü-i has long since completed his labors and sleeps in the ground. When will the day come that a Japanese Milton will write Paradise Lost at the Ishiyama Temple?"

Japanese Miltons, even of the mute, inglorious kind, were never to abound, but the lyricism of the past, assuming the freer and more varied forms inspired by the West, was to produce before long a fair number of Japanese Wordsworths, Shelleys, and eventually Verlaines. The lyric in the strict sense was to remain the dominant form for thirty or more years; many of the best lyrics are widely known even to school children in the musical settings later given them. Because the Japanese language was unable, like English, to rely on rhyme or a pronounced rhythm to differentiate poetry from prose, a sustained poem was difficult to manage, and the greatest successes continued to be in shorter works even after the tanka had been rejected for its excessive brevity.

The first collection of modern poetry still widely read today appeared in 1897. The fifty-one poems in Seedlings (Wakana-shu) by Shimazaki Toson (1872-1943) described the poet's youthful loves with an overt romanticism which captivated his readers. A few years later Toson related what his feelings had been when he published this collection: "A new era in poetry had at last arrived. It was like the coming of a beautiful dawn. Some poets shouted their words like the prophets of old, others cried their thoughts like the poets of the West; all seemed intoxicated with the light, their new voices, and a sense of fantasy. Youthful imagination awoke from an age-old sleep and clad itself in the language of the common people. Traditions took on fresh colors again. A brilliant light shone on the life and death ahead of them, and illuminated the grandeur and decline of the past. Most of that crowd of young poets were merely simple youths. Their art was immature and incomplete. But it was free of falsity or artifice. Their youthful lives flowed from their lips, and their tears of passion streaked their cheeks. Try to remember that their fresh, overflowing emotions made many young men all but forget food and sleep. And remember too that the pathos and anguish of recent times drove many young men mad. I too, forgetting my incompetence, joined my voice with those of the new poets."

Toson published two more collections of poetry, in 1899 and 1901, before turning to the novel. His most famous poem, "By the Old Castle of Komoro," appeared in 1900. Its opening lines are known to most Japanese:

By the old castle of Komoro
In white clouds, a wanderer laments.
The green chickweed has not sprouted,
The grass has yet to lay its carpet;
The silver coverlet on the hills around
Melting in the sun, the light snow flows.

Toson's indebtedness to the West included imitations of Shakespeare and of the "Ode to the West Wind." Other Japanese poets turned to Keats or to Browning. Susukida Kyukin (1877-1945) wrote one poem beginning, "Oh to be in Yamato, now that October's there." After this comically obvious imitation, he continues quite respectably:

I would follow a lane through the wood of
   Kaminabi, with its sparse
   leaved trees,
To Ikaruga, at dawn, the dew on my hair—when
   the tall grass
Ripples across the wide field of Heguri like a
   golden sea,
And the colour fades from the dusty paper
   window, and the sun is faint—
Between the wooden columns, insatiably, I peer
   at the golden letters of
     the precious age-old scriptures,
At the ancient Korean lyre, the grey unglazed
   pottery and the gold and
     silver paintings on the wall.

Without Browning the poet would probably not have conceived of this sentimental journey to Yamato, but once on his way he chooses images that are real and Japanese. In this respect the influence of English poetry on Japanese differed categorically from the centuries-old influence of Chinese poetry. Imitation of Browning enabled Susukida Kyukin to evoke effectively a Japanese scene, but imitation of Chinese poetry had generally imposed the obligation of describing China as well, even on poets who had never seen China. In a real sense, then, imitation of European poetry led to a liberation of Japanese poetry, giving direction to thoughts which poets had long entertained but never known how to express. Fortunately for the Japanese, the European languages were so remote in idiom that no possibility of closely imitating them existed; imitations were thus usually of conception rather than of imagery. The poem on Yamato in October is otherwise indebted to Browning in the use of enjambement, not unknown in traditional Japanese poetry, but generally avoided, in keeping with the dictates of Chinese poetics.

The most powerful Western influence on Japanese poetry came in 1905 with the translations by Ueda Bin (1874-1916) of the French Parnassian and Symbolist poets. Ueda's explanations of the functions of Symbolist poetry, based on the theories of Vigié-Lecoq, were to exert an enormous influence on subsequent Japanese poetry. His translations introduced to Japanese the works of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Verlaine, all of whom at once became favorite poets of the intellectuals. The popularity achieved by the French Symbolists in Japan is not entirely surprising, in view of the world-wide success of the movement, but that this poetry should have blotted out almost all other Western influences surely indicates some special affinity with the Japanese. In the introduction to his 1905 collection entitled Sound of the Tide (Kaicho-on), Ueda wrote, "The function of symbols consists in borrowing their help to create in the reader an emotional state similar to that in the poet's mind; they do not necessarily attempt to communicate the same conception to everyone. The reader who quietly savors the symbolist poetry may thus, in accordance with his own taste, sense an indescribable beauty which the poet himself has not explicitly stated. The explanation of a given poem may vary from person to person; the essential thing is that it arouse a similar emotional state."

Such views, as I have indicated, were borrowed from the West, but at the same time they represent quite accurately the special qualities of the traditional Japanese tanka. Since the ambiguities of the Japanese language are so extreme—in the tanka, for example, personal pronouns are rarely used, there is no distinction between singular and plural, often no distinction in tense, and the subject is usually unexpressed—it is natural for a given poem to produce different effects on different readers. The important thing, as in symbolist poetry, was the communication of the poet's mood, and here the shadings were extremely fine. The relatively straightforward poetic statements of Shimazaki Toson, reflecting the nineteenth-century English traditions, were welcomed by the general public, but the poets responded more enthusiastically to the indirection shared alike by the symbolists and their own country's classical poetry. If they had been urged to look to the past, to avoid contamination by foreign ideas, these poets would have been outraged. They would have declared that such obscurantism was contrary to the spirit of the enlightened Meiji age. But when told that eminent foreign poets had preferred ambiguity to informative clarity, the Japanese responded with double enthusiasm. Foreign appreciation of other Japanese traditional arts was to provide the impetus for Japanese rediscovery. When the German architect Bruno Taut proclaimed the uniquely Japanese beauty of the Katsura Palace, the Japanese rapidly and instinctively echoed his excitement. A Japanese love of ambiguity and suggestion, going back a thousand years, underlay the triumph of the Symbolist school.

Ueda Bin's translations were acclaimed not only because they introduced celebrated European poets to Japan, but because they were exceptionally beautiful as Japanese. He maintained in general the traditional fives and sevens of Japanese poetry, sometimes combining them in novel ways, as in the lines of five, five, five and seven syllables he used in translating Mallarmé's "Soupir." The vocabulary was entirely traditional, even slightly archaic, using the most natural Japanese words (rather than exotic, literally translated phrases) to communicate with remarkable fidelity the mood of the original. Ueda was a polyglot, and his collection Sound of the Tide includes a section from d'Annunzio's "Francesca da Rimini," a sonnet by Rossetti, some German lyrics, and even poems from the Provengal, but it was his translations from the French which affected most markedly the dominant stream in modern Japanese poetry.

English and American poetry on the whole has not been of great influence in Japan, at least since the time of Ueda Bin. For many years Japanese poetry remained under the spell of the French Symbolists, and they were succeeded by the Dadaists, Surrealists and so on. English poetry belonging to the same schools was welcomed, and T. S. Eliot in particular worked his gloomy magic on the younger poets, even before the war created bombed-out wastelands for them to celebrate, but his absorption with tradition and religion escaped them. For the most part, English and American poetry excited relatively little interest, perhaps because translations from the French were literarily superior, perhaps because of the allure of Paris, which captivated the Japanese in the twenties and thirties no less than the Americans. By the 1880's English had become the second language of Japan, and every schoolboy, however unlikely ever to leave his farm or fishing village, was required to study English until he could plod through one of Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare or an 0. Henry story. But English tended to be thought of as a practical language, the language of commerce and information, not of poetry. Translation from the English was therefore generally left to teachers of English grammar, and most Japanese poets, as if to distinguish themselves from schoolmasters, studied French, though a few preferred German or Russian. Ueda Bin's translations influenced a whole generation of Japanese poets.

The volume of translated poetry, Corals (Sangoshu), published by the great novelist and poet Nagai Kafu in 1913, was also from the French, and consisted chiefly of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Henri de Régnier, and the Contesse de Noailles. Kafu's translations are close to the original, sometimes in the classical tongue and sometimes, a great rarity in those days, in the colloquial. His translation of Verlaine's "Colloque Sentimental" was particularly successful.

Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé,
Deux formes a tout à l'heure passé.

Samui samushii furuniwa ni
Ima shi totta futatsu no katachi.

By choosing for "solitaire et glacé" two Japanese words, both beginning with the sound samu, Kafu intensified the weariness of the atmosphere. Later in the poem we find

—Te souvient-il de notre extase ancienne?
—Pourquoi voulez-vous donc qu'il m'en
     souvienne?

—Omae wa tanoshii mukashi no koto wo oboete
    iru ka?
—Naze oboete iro to ossharu no desu?

Here the distinction between the tu employed by the man to the woman and the vous used by her in reply is preserved in the Japanese, though not possible in English. The tone is colloquial yet poetic, and completely natural, replacing such un-Japanese conceptions as extase ancienne with the familiar tanoshii mukashi no koto, "happy bygone things."

It is striking that although Kafu spent four years in the United States as a young man, including one year at Kalamazoo College, he never felt impelled to translate English poetry. His subsequent residence in France was only one year, including a bare two months in Paris, but his passion for French poetry and all things French remained with him for the rest of his long life, and influenced many younger men.

The next important collection of translated poetry was again from the French. The translator, Horiguchi Daigaku (b. 1892), was to gain fame in his own right as a poet, but his translations of Samain, Jammes, Apollinaire, and Cocteau, published after his return to Japan from France in 1924, exerted an extraordinary influence on modern Japanese writing. Most leading critics of Japanese literature today wrote on French poetry before turning to the works of their compatriots, and many developments in the Japanese novel may also be traced in terms of the effects of translations of novels by Cocteau and his generation. France itself was the dream of most young poets, painters and intellectuals, a sentiment commemorated by Hagiwara Sakutaro, the finest modern poet, in verses beginning:

I wish I could go to France,
But France is too far away …

The Japanese painters who studied in Paris (most leading contemporaries spent a few years there) all depicted the Riviera, Montmartre, and the other frequently represented scenes. The poets, on the other hand, were much freer in their borrowings. Horiguchi Daigaku, for example, rewrote a fable of La Fontaine in the style of Apollinaire, but managed to remain Japanese:

The Cicada

There was a cicada.
He spent the whole summer singing.
The winter came.
What a fix, what a fix!
          (Moral)
It was worth it.

Much earlier, the poet Kitahara Hakushu (1885-1942) had exploited the possibilities of exoticism, but his exoticism was drawn from the Japanese past, and not a recent importation:

I believe in the heretical teachings of a
   degenerate age, the witchcraft of
 the Christian God,
The captains of the black ships, the marvellous
  land of the Red Hairs,
The scarlet glass, the sharp-scented carnation,
The calico, arrack, and vinho tinto of the
  Southern Barbarians,
The blue-eyed Dominicans chanting the liturgy
  who tell me even in
 dreams
Of the God of the forbidden faith, or of the
  blood-stained Cross,
The cunning device that makes a mustard seed
  big as an apple,
The strange collapsible spyglass that looks even
  at Paradise.

Hakushu attempted in this poem to intoxicate the reader with bizarre words derived from the Portuguese or Dutch dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Japan was first in contact with the West. Often the sound of the words, rather than their meanings, was uppermost; Hakushu delighted in the cadences of deus, kapitan, araki, bateren, birodo, and his poetry was heavy with absinthe, the odor of chloroform, the sobbing of violins, the putrefying of marble, and the moans of sick children. His exoticism easily turned into a fin-de-siècle overripeness, but his symbolism was sometimes simple and effective:

The acacia blossoms gold and red are falling,
In the dusky autumn light they fall.

My sorrow wears the thin flannel garb of one-
  sided love.
When I walk the towpath along the water
Your gentle sighs are falling,
The acacia blossoms gold and red are falling.

In this poem, a lingering trace of his partiality for exoticism, Hakushu deliberately wrote of the acacia, a foreign tree, rather than the normal Japanese cherry blossoms, which to modern poets would be anathema. Hakushu's early fondness for the sound of foreign words, however, eventually led him to appreciate the peculiar capabilities of Japanese sounds. As so often in Japan, the young man's passion for the exotic developed later in life into a rediscovery of the traditionally Japanese. Hakushu published in 1923 one of his most celebrated poems, "Chinese Pines" (Rakuyosho), in which sound is at least as important as meaning:

karamatsu no hayashi wo
 sugite
karamatsu wo shimijimi to
 miki
karamatsu wa sabishikarikeri
tabi yuku wa sabishikarikeri.
karamatsu no hayashi wo
 idete
karamatsu no hayashi ni
 irinu
karamatsu no hayashi ni irite
mata oku michi wa
 tsuzukeri

Passing the forest of Chinese
  pines,
I stared profoundly at the
  Chinese pines.
How lonely were the Chinese pines.
How lonely it was to travel.
Coming out of the forest of
  Chinese pines
I entered the forest of Chinese
  pines.
Entering the forest of Chinese
  pines,
Again the road within
  continued.

The last of the eight stanzas runs:

yo no naka yo, aware
 narikeri
tsune nakedo ureshikarikeri
yama kawa ni yamagawa no
  oto
karamatsu ni karamatsu no
  kaze

Oh world, how sad you are,
Inconstant, and yet joyous.
In the hills and rivers, the sound
  of the mountain streams
In the Chinese pines the wind of
  the Chinese pines.

In the final stanza Hakushu not only demonstrates the special musical qualities of the Japanese language, but deliberately employs the most hackneyed of the old Buddhist images, the transience of worldly things. The slightly novel twist, the discovery of joy even in this impermanence, suggests the aged philosopher who, after his solitary walk in the forest of pines carpeted with fallen needles, finds a quiet happiness in his solitude. We may think this typically and pleasingly Oriental. Indeed, it is normal for Western critics to observe with satisfaction that the Japanese poet, after years of aping Western ways, has at last returned to the ancient traditions of his own country. We should not, however, forget that these sentiments were expressed by a man whose earlier poetry was chiefly influenced by French symbolism. Moreover, although the emotions are sincerely stated, the fact that Hakushu, writing in 1923, should have chosen the language of a thousand years before to describe the truth taught him by his walk through the forest, suggests how acutely aware he was of performing a Japanese action, doing what Japanese poets traditionally did. In his walk along the towpath amidst the falling acacia blossoms, Hakushu was the poet, the lover, not necessarily Japanese, but not un-Japanese. As he walked through the pine forest he saw himself as a Japanese, almost with the eyes of an outsider, and he relished the beauties of the Japanese language, almost with the ears of an outsider, as once he himself had delighted in the strange music of arrack, vinho tinto and velvet. Though he states, using the ancient classical language, that the world is aware (sad) and tsune nakedo (inconstant), he has not returned miraculously to the outlook of the ancient Japanese; he has discovered that their manner of expression suits him at this stage of his life, as French symbolism had suited him earlier. He himself remains that enigma, the Japanese in the twentieth century.

Hakushu's poem on the pine forest is cast in the traditional alternating lines of five and seven syllables, and is in classical language. This was a deliberate case of archaism, one might suppose, but the retention of these features of traditional Japanese poetry was general until the 1920's, and did not entirely disappear afterwards. The classical language had certain advantages over the modern tongue. Its greater variety of inflections enabled the poet, if he chose, to be more concise than modern language permits, or, on the other hand, to draw out a single word the full length of a line for special effect. For example, in Hakushu's poem "Chinese Pines" sabishikarikeri, meaning "it was lonely," is grammatically a single word in seven syllables; the modern word sabishikatta is not only two syllables shorter, but its double consonant destroys the prolonged, mournful tone desired.

Japanese poets found it hard to sense overtones in words without poetic ancestry. Writing modern Japanese was for them what writing poetry in Basic English or even in Esperanto would be for us. Even revolutionary poetry was cast in the classical grammar:

We know what we are seeking,
We know what the people want,
And we know what we must do.
We know more than the young men of Russia
  fifty years ago—
Yet no one with clenched fist bangs on the table
To proclaim V NAROD.

The modern language was used most effectively when the poet's intent was to disillusion or to be unpoetic. A pioneer effort, published in 1909, was entitled "The Rubbish Heap," and graphically described the odors, maggots, rotting objects and so forth found in the garbage. The poem was a step in the right direction, but not one that all poets wished to take.

The first truly successful poet of the modern language was Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886-1942). He used it not to startle with unpleasant images or vulgar colloquialisms, but for its own music, unlike that of the classical language but no less capable of moving the reader. The dissatisfaction of earlier poets with the modern language had stemmed from their attempts to make it respond in the same manner as the classical language; Hagiwara abandoned that attempt and wrote a free, colloquial verse which, as he himself recognized, altered the course of Japanese poetry. His themes often skirt the neurotic, and his sensitivity is akin to morbidity, but a haunting beauty remains.

The Corpse of a Cat

The spongelike scenery
Is gently swollen with moisture.
No sign of man or beast in sight.
A water wheel is weeping.
From the blurred shadows of a willow
I see the gentle form of a woman waiting.
Wrapping her thin shawl around her,
Dragging her lovely, vaporous garments,
She wanders calmly, like a spirit.
Ah, Ura, lonely woman!
"You're always late, aren't you?"
We have no past, no future,
And have faded away from the things of reality.
Ura!
Here in this weird landscape.
Bury the corpse of the drowned cat!

With Hagiwara modern Japanese poetry attained its maturity. The subject of his poems was the Japanese artist in the twentieth century, attracted by the West, savoring its civilization, but living in the ghost-ridden landscape of Japan. His poetry is in the Symbolist tradition, the fruit of other men's long years of translation. He rejected neo-classicism and the classical language, but equally the coarse realism which many poets assumed was the alternative to formalism. In the twenties, when the proletarian movement in literature was in full swing, Hagiwara insisted on the absolute values of poetry, and scorned what he termed third-rate versifying. His arbitrary judgments won him enemies, but also devoted followers who created the main stream of poetry in the 1930's. Miyoshi Tatsuji (1900-63), after Hagiwara the foremost Japanese poet, wrote a poem entitled "Hagiwara Sakutaro—Teacher!" that begins:

Dark mass of melancholy—
That character I loved,
Doubter and pessimist, philosopher and
  wanderer,
Crystallized, unchanged and incorruptible,
Like still-warm lava, of strange music.

Miyoshi was the guiding spirit of the magazine Shiki (Four Seasons), the leading poetry journal of the thirties, which published most of the poets of the period still esteemed today. They included the eccentric, short-lived Nakahara Chuya (1907-37), whose poetry has gained full recognition only in recent years. Nakahara, after a most erratic scholastic career, graduated at the age of twenty-six from the French Department of the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages, and later translated Rimbaud. In his own day he was famed as the arch example of a Bohemian, a dissolute incorrigible who consciously posed as a Japanese Rimbaud, but his best poems speak unaffectedly of the weariness and despair which occasioned his riotous living.

To a Dragonfly

In an autumn sky too perfectly clear
A red dragonfly is winging.
In the empty field I stand,
Bathed in pale sunset.

The smokestack of a distant factory
Meets my eye, blurred in evening light.
Breathing a great sigh,
I kneel and pick up a stone.

When I feel the pebble's coldness
Warm at last within my hand,
I let it go, and now over grass
Bathed in sunset glow it skims.

The skimmed-over grass
Droops earthwards, just perceptibly.
The smokestack of the factory in the distance
Meets my eye, dim in evening light.

Another poet of the Four Seasons school, even shorter lived than Nakahara, was Tachihara Michizo (1914-39). His poetry is exceptionally lyrical, and some critics believe that it raised the modern Japanese language to its highest peak of expressive possibilities.

For Future Remembrance

The dream always returns to that lonely village
  at the foot of the mountain
—Winds stir in the nettle leaves
And crickets endlessly pipe—
Along a road through a wood silent with early
  afternoon.

A brilliant sun shines in the blue sky, the
  volcano sleeps
—And I,

Though I know no one listens, go on talking
Of things I have seen: islands, waves, headlands,
   sunlight and the moon.

The dream never goes beyond that point.
I will try to forget everything, utterly.
When I have forgotten even that I have
  completely forgotten,

The dream will freeze amid recollections of
  midwinter,
Then open a door and leave in solitude
On that road lighted by scraps of stars.

One unusual writer who stood apart both from the poets of the Four Seasons school and their opposite numbers, the poets of social consciousness, was Kusano Shimpei (born 1902), the master of onomatopoeia. Of all languages of highly civilized peoples, Japanese probably has the richest variety of sound effects to represent every conceivable noise, as well as some phenomena (like the twinkling of a star) which only suggest sound. Kusano exploited this feature of the Japanese language and even invented a language of frogs, delighting readers with the curious, meaningless music. His fondness for frogs, he said, stemmed from his belief that they were the true proletarians—a harking back apparently to his early anarchist days. His use of onomatopoeia (to depict the sound of waves) is evident in this poem:

The Sea at Night

From the distant, deep, heavy bottom,
From the dark, invisible, limitless past
    zuzuzuzu zuwaaru
    zuzuzuzu zuwaaru
    gun un uwaaru

The black sea continues its roar,
In the black the lead-colored waves are born.
Splashing their lead-colored manes, the waves
     break,
And crawl on their bellies up the sopping strand.

Leaden waves are born out there,
And out that way too,
Then swallowed in the black of India ink,
But once again appear and press to shore.
     zuzuzuzu zuwaaru
     zuzuzuzu zuwaaru
     gun un uwaaru …

Poetry, like all forms of literary activity, fell increasingly under governmental supervision in the thirties with the start of the wars in China. Not surprisingly, the same period saw a marked development in surrealist or dadaist poetry. The escape from reality into fantasy or a pure poetry, which created meanings of itself instead of expressing existing ideas, characterized such avant-garde poets as Kitasono Katsue (born 1902) and his VOU group, celebrated by Ezra Pound. It is tempting to discover in the great vogue which surrealist poetry has enjoyed in Japan since the thirties something of the long tradition of extremely complicated poetry, often filled with irrational verbal associations, encountered in the Japanese drama. Overtones and associations, rather than ideas, absorbed the surrealists, and thereby saved them from possible ideological sins. The Four Seasons poets too, being uninterested in political matters, escaped trouble from the authorities, and by the time of the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941 had come to be recognized as the most serious group of modern poets. During the war the poets behaved much like the rest of the population, rejoicing over victories and lamenting the deaths of soldiers, on occasion falling into hysterical outbursts of bellicosity.

The immediate postwar generation grew up in a bleak atmosphere. Hunger, the black market, and the collapse of the old moral values induced despair or a blank craving for pleasure. The most important group of new poets gathered around a journal aptly called The Wasteland (Arechi). The Wasteland poets wrote of their sense of hollowness and futility, taking comfort (if at all) in a desperate search for human values. Tamura Ryuichi (born 1923), a leader of the Wasteland poets, wrote in a typical vein:

"Why do little birds sing?"
At the Press Club bar
My friend Hoshino introduced me to an
  American's poem.
"Why do people walk? That's the next line."
We drank our beer
And ate our cheeseburgers.
At a corner table
A middle-aged Englishman lit his pipe;
His wife was lost in a novel about God and the
  devil.
After the twentieth of September
The nights in this age without faith become
  autumnal.
We walked slowly along the narrow asphalt
  streets
And separated at Tokyo Station.
"Why do little birds sing?"
I woke from my dream in profound darkness
Moved
By something falling from extremely high,
Then once again I plunged
Into the dream, towards "the next line."

The wasteland mood appears frequently in the postwar poetry, though sometimes altered by surrealist or even traditional haiku techniques, as in this poem by Ando Tsuguo (born 1919) entitled "Tubers" and found in a collection divided in haiku fashion by the seasons of year.

Worms, mole-crickets, slugs

When eyeless things
Go searching for the eyes
Of dead things which
Address them amiably

The smell of their breath
From a whole year back
Crowds before them

The corpses of small birds,
Like forgotten tubers,
Lie fallen this month.

Wakeful children
Wander a sky
Which could not be inhumed

Tomorrow,
Peaches. Grasshoppers. Cumulus clouds.

The tubers of this poem suggest The Wasteland, though the season is June here, and the roots are not being stirred into activity by the rain so much as rotted away. Only the sky escapes the seasonal decay and offers a promise of the summer of childhood.

A still later generation of Japanese poets, raised in more cheerful times, seems to have escaped from the wasteland and to be intent on creating poetry explosive in its intensity but curiously unconcerned with the moral and political issues that torment older Japanese. Poetic production since the war has remained largely under the domination of the older generation, notably Miyoshi Tatsuji and Nishiwaki Junzaburo, a professor of English literature whose translations of T. S. Eliot have been seminal. Nishiwaki has favored surrealism in his own poetry, and influenced younger poets with his intuitive, flashing style. Contemporary Japanese poetry is generally difficult, both in syntax and imagery, and even when not written under any direct influence from the West is likely to reveal kinship with the works of Eliot, Yeats, Rilke, or the French modernists.

My discussion has thus far been restricted to poems written in the new form—irregular in length and composed directly or indirectly under Western influence. This does not mean that the more traditional Japanese verse forms, the tanka and the haiku, were abandoned. Far from it. After an initial period of about twenty years of relative inactivity following the Meiji Restoration, a time when the existing schools of tanka and haiku failed to reflect the changes in the new society, a revolution occurred in the haiku with Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), and then in the tanka with Yosano Tekkan (1873-1935). It would be tedious and repetitious to chronicle the successive shifts of taste within these two types of poetry. In both cases revolution meant first of all a rejection of prevailing modes of composition. In the haiku, Shiki attacked Basho, long venerated as a god, and advocated instead the pictorial techniques of the eighteenth-century master Buson. Shiki also concerned himself with the tanka, rejecting the Kokinshu, the ideal of nineteenth-century tanka poets, in favor of the ancient collection, the Manyoshu. Yosano Tekkan and his wife Yosano Akiko began in 1900 the publication of the magazine Myojo, which served as the organ of the new tanka. The pages of Myojo were soon splattered with such untraditional words as "passion," "blood," "purple," "flesh" and so on, suggesting the wildly romantic strain characteristic of the new poetry. Yosano Akiko's collection Tangled Hair (Midaregami), published in 1901, stirred women readers in particular, not only because of the lyrical beauty, but because her poetry seemed to proclaim a new age of romantic love. Using the familiar classical language of the old poets, Yosano Akiko moved readers with her self-proclaimed emancipation:

kazu shiranu
ware no kokoro no
kizahashi wo
hata futatsu mitsu
kare ya noborishi

Of the numberless steps
Up to my heart,
He climbed perhaps
Only two or three.

Myojo served as a focal point for activities by tanka poets in the early 1900's. One frequenter of the Yosano salon was Ishikawa Takuboku (1885-1912), who emerged in the course of his short life as probably the most popular tanka poet in all Japanese history. Takuboku also wrote poems in the modern style (one is quoted in part above), but he owed his fame to his tanka, and remains today a literary idol thanks to the dozen or more verses that everyone knows and to the romances spun around his tragic life. The interest he showed in anarchism and socialism has especially endeared him today with "progressive" critics. His most famous tanka runs:

Tokai no
kojima no iso no
shirasuna ni
ware nakinurete
kani to tawamuru

On the white sand
Of the beach of a small isle
In the Eastern Sea,
I, my face streaked with tears,
Am playing with a crab.

Many of Takuboku's poems might be dismissed as sentimental, but Japanese find their melancholy charm peculiarly attractive. The lonely boy, weeping as he plays with a crab on the empty shore, certainly struck a warmer chord of sympathy than the poetry of the new style, expressing loneliness in terms of dark and confusing symbols. The simple lyrical impulse of the tanka enabled it to survive even after the successes of the new poetry movement had opened to Japanese poets channels of expression far more varied and flexible than the rigid thirty-one syllables of the classical form. The form itself sustained what in a freer verse might be little more than an inarticulate cry of emotion. The poet needed not devise an elaborate structure for his tanka; the structure was already there, waiting for its delicate burden. For a poet like Hagiwara Sakutaro the limits of the tanka would have constituted an intolerable impediment to his poetic expression, but for innumerable other Japanese, the poetic impulse consisted of a single perception or reflection which could only be vitiated if expanded to greater lengths.

Both the tanka and haiku were inevitably influenced by developments in the modern poetry. European influence, the adoption of words of foreign origin, the use of the colloquial in place of the classical language, the acceptance of irregular lines in place of the traditional fives and sevens—all aroused the passions and bitterly divided the tanka and haiku poets, to an even more pronounced degree than the modern poets, if only because it was possible to invoke tradition more effectively. Unlike the case of modern poetry, moreover, the conservative forces proved victorious in the end. Most tanka and haiku are written today in the classical language, and despite English or French words that may be introduced to lend an exotic note, the themes are often reminiscent of the past. Modern themes, even when employed by good poets, tend to seem contrived or precious when presented in the traditional form and language.

teiden no
yoru no roka ni
inu nemuri
inu no shizukeki
ibiki kikoyuru

Tonight a breakdown
Of electric current: my dog
Snoozes in the hall;
I can hear the murmur of
His tranquil canine snoring.
Miya Shuji (born 1912)

icho ochiba
yogoreshi minato no
machi no tsuji
niguro no hei ni
michi wo kikarenu

Fallen gingko leaves
Have dirtied the harbor streets;
At the road crossing
A negro soldier stopped me
And politely asked the way.
Kimata Osamu (born 1906)

dokubu ni
aku e no shiko wo
wasurekoshi
tomo wa nukegara to
shika omowarezu

I can only think
My friend who has forgotten
His taste for evil
In solitary confinement
Is but the husk of himself.
Kasugai Ken (born 1940)

The tanka and haiku of today are distinct from modern poetry in one important respect: they are not considered to be exclusively the business of trained poets. Literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of tanka and haiku groups publish journals devoted to works by members, who are drawn from all levels of society. The daily newspapers carry tanka and haiku columns in which verses by readers are appraised by leading professionals. Labor union magazines and businessmen's journals alike feature tanka and haiku columns; the haiku, being shorter, is generally more popular.

It is easy for a Japanese, even of modest education, to write a poem in seventeen or thirty-one syllables. An ability to dash off a haiku at a drinking party is prized as a social asset. Naturally enough, the quality of most amateur haiku is deplorable. However, the most influential article written about the haiku since the war (in 1946), "On Second Class Art" ("Daini Geijutsu-ron") by Kuwabara Takeo, a professor of French literature at Kyoto University, asserted that the difference between a haiku composed by an acknowledged master and one by a bank clerk or a railway engineer was hardly perceptible. Taking a hint from the method used by I. A. Richards in Practical Criticism, he asked a group of colleagues to evaluate various haiku, some by masters and some by dubs, first removing the names of the poets. The results were so chaotic that Kuwabara felt justified in his claim that most people judge haiku by the poet's reputation and not by the works themselves. He asked if it were likely that a short story or a long poem by a master would be confused with one by an amateur, and concluded that the haiku must be a second class art, not objectionable as a mildly artistic diversion for amateurs, but certainly not to be considered a serious vehicle of literature.

Kuwabara's article aroused enormous controversy, as was to be expected, and diverted many budding young haiku poets to other fields. It is difficult to say that an art with the enormous following of haiku is not flourishing, but Kuwabara's article certainly shook the foundations of the art in a manner from which it has not recovered. The tanka, though not specifically a target of Kuwabara's, was susceptible to much the same criticism. It moreover has suffered from its intimate association, as the oldest and therefore "purest" Japanese verse form, with the ultranationalistic activities during the war. The tanka poets were vociferous in the adulation they offered to the mystique of the Imperial Family and the Japanese civilizing mission. The student who today writes tanka is therefore regarded with suspicion as a possible embryonic fascist, no matter what subjects he may choose. The seventeen-year-old boy who assassinated the leader of the Socialist Party wrote a tanka in his prison cell before committing suicide.

On the whole, the future of the tanka and haiku does not seem promising, despite the many magazines and newspaper columns. The two poetic forms will undoubtedly survive, as almost every traditional art has survived in Japan, practiced by retired old gentlemen and smaller numbers of active young men. The future of poetry in Japan would seem to lie, as in other countries, with the professional poets of the modern school. We may regret the diminishing of purely Japanese poetic arts, and fear that the new poetry will be little more than a reflection of Western writing. But modern Japanese poetry has by now achieved its identity. Though part of the larger stream of world poetry and no longer an entirely distinct flow, it is as Japanese as Japan in the middle twentieth century can be. Here is what Takamura Kotaro (1883-1956) wrote about his poetry, and in a sense of all modern Japanese poetry:

My Poetry

My poetry is not part of Western poetry;
The two touch, circumference against
   circumference,
But never quite coincide …
I have a passion for the world of Western poetry,
But I do not deny that my poetry is formed
   differently.
The air of Athens and the subterranean fountain
  of Christianity
Have fostered the pattern of thought and diction
  of Western poetry;
It strikes through to my heart with its infinite
   beauty and strength—
But its physiology, of wheat-meal and cheese
  and entrecôtes,
Runs counter to the necessities of my language.
My poetry derives from my bowels—
Born at the farthest limits of the far east,
Bred on rice and malt and soya-beans and the
  flesh of fish …
Western poetry is my dear neighbour,
But the traffic of my poetry moves on a different
  path.
(translation by Ninomiya and Enright)

Kijima Hajime

SOURCE: "On Postwar Japanese Poetry," in The Poetry of Postwar Japan, edited by Kijima Hajime, University of Iowa Press, 1975, pp. xi-xxvi.

[In the following excerpt, Kijima presents an overview of trends in Japanese poetry written after World War II.]

Postwar Japanese poetry emerged from the ashes. During the wartime, the poets who were not influenced by the ultra-nationalistic military activities were rare, and almost all poets were mobilized to write war-encouraging poems. Spontaneously, rather than by being forced, they participated in this kind of literary effort. And of course, no literary works of endurance could come of such activities. As a result, when Japan was defeated by the Allied Forces in 1945, there was no base upon which the new poets could stand—only the so-called "Given Democracy."

Ashes, vacuum, and "Given Democracy." But nothing creative can be expected from these.

The writers who had been ardent militarists yesterday suddenly became "democrats." Their guilty consciences caused them to accuse the then famous poets of their fascistic literary activities during the wartime. Thus began the long controversy about the responsibility of the poets during the war. Critics pointed out the relation between the ultra-nationalistic totalitarianism and the traditional psyche which was represented frantically in the war poems. Could such a relation be found and analyzed well enough? Hot debates continued.

In 1946 a serious article was published by Professor Kuwabara about the traditional short poem, haiku. I want to quote the concise summary of this article and its result as presented by Professor Keene:

It is easy for a Japanese, even of modest education, to write a poem in seventeen or thirty-one syllables. An ability to dash off a haiku at a drinking party is prized as a social asset. Naturally enough, the quality of most amateur haiku is deplorable. However, the most influential article written abut the haiku since the war (in 1946), "On Second Class Art" ("Daini Geijutsu-ron") by Kuwabara Takeo, a professor of French literature at Kyoto University, asserted that the difference between a haiku composed by an acknowledged master and one by a bank clerk or a railway engineer was hardly perceptible. Taking a hint from the method used by I. A. Richards in Practical Criticism, he asked a group of colleagues to evaluate various haiku, some by masters and some by dubs, first removing the names of the poets. The results were so chaotic that Kuwabara felt justified in his claim that most people judge haiku by the poet's reputation and not by the works themselves. He asked if it were likely that a short story or a long poem by a master would be confused with one by an amateur, and concluded that the haiku must be a second class art, not objectionable as a mildly artistic diversion for amateurs, but certainly not to be considered a serious vehicle of literature.

Kuwabara's article aroused enormous controversy, as was to be expected, and diverted many budding young haiku poets to other fields. It is difficult to say that an art with the enormous following of haiku is not flourishing, but Kuwabara's article certainly shook the foundations of the art in a manner from which it has not recovered. The tanka, though not specifically a target of Kuwabara's, was susceptible to much the same criticism. It moreover has suffered from its intimate association, as the oldest and therefore "purest" Japanese verse form, with the ultra-nationalistic activities during the war. The tanka poets were vociferous in the adulation they offered to the mystique of the Imperial Family and the Japanese civilizing mission. The student who today writes tanka is therefore regarded with suspicion as a possible embryonic fascist, no matter what subject he may choose. The seventeen-year-old boy who assassinated the leader of the Socialist Party wrote a tanka in his prison cell before committing suicide. (Donald Keene, Modern Japanese Poetry [University of Michigan, 1964].)

One thing I wish to add is the fact that tanka became the form of death poema by soldiers and generals who were executed as war criminals after World War II. Almost all made death poems as an accompaniment of their rigid rituals. But they never composed haiku when they were about to die. Thus, for the relation of the war to traditional poetry, tanka was actually more deeply involved than haiku, as Professor Keene has pointed out. And after the devastating war, many poets were forced to become keenly aware of the sentimental lyricism in tanka. What elements in the Japanese psyche could mold themselves into ultra-nationalistic militarism? Poets could not avoid this question. Modernity in Japan itself did mean the imitation of Western expansionistic civilization, which was the stepfather of militaristic provocative activities by Japan—or was it not? Reflections like these kept coming.

Fundamentally, in modern Japanese lyricism there must have been something fragile that tended to be sentimentally totalitarian, and poets should have criticized this element, but actually they promoted this tendency without being aware of it.

The ultra-nationalistic power oppressed all literary activities: modern, avant-garde, and proletarian. But after the surrender of resistants to this oppression, people who were educated militaristically became rather more and more enthusiastic about the governing class's ultranationalism. So, oppressed by power, and surrounded by the warmongering people, many poets could not write their own personal feelings even clandestinely, or even inside their own hearts.

But the unknown poets or the poets-to-be were mumbling, and chewing over the whole experience, and not a few genuine poets died during the war. Kusuda Ichiro was one of them. He wrote the following lines before he was killed on some battlefield.

Where this wind blows itself out
The hollows of valleys
Without air or clouds
The cries of beasts nibbling
At the thistle's stinging leaves,
All rush up into a blank sky
Like violent soldiers.
Humans are being killed,
Being killed.
Look at this tree,
Listen to this stone.
Inside the cracks of the earth
Many lives continue.

Various blood billows up
And gleams in daylight
Like the coolies' greased foreheads.

Evening was stained and looted
This eye witnessed the devastation

They were excluded from sleep
They slept standing, like trees
(from "Dark Songs," translated by Kijima Hajime)

In these lines the young poet was keenly aware of what the war was bringing about.

He can be called a forerunner of the postwar poets. And this poem was published after the war by his friend Ayukawa Nobuo, who became one of the most influential poets and critics, founding the poetry group Arechi (The Waste Land) in 1947. As is clearly shown by its name, this poetry group Arechi started its literary activities under the influence of T. S. Eliot, considering this age of ours as that of devastation, futility, and despair.

It must be added that this forming of the poetry group Arechi was made during wartime, not officially, but with some of the same feeling, coming spontaneously in separate places, that "hope is abominable for us, and despair is more suitable for us in 1941 and 1942" (Ayukawa Nobuo, The Wartime Diary). There was no vacuum for them. They were breathing the new poetic air through destruction.

What should not be forgotten is that already in the nineteen twenties and thirties all the trends of modern or post-modern poetry had been introduced into Japan. After 1868 when feudalism ended, within the next forty to sixty years, Japanese poetry changed its dress several times—romanticism, naturalism, symbolism, dadaism, futurism, surrealism, intellectualism, proletarianism—and stood as a contemporary with Western poetry having the same kind of consciousness in common. However, it did not find any tie with Oriental poetry at all, even in the field of folklore or popular lyrics. It faced toward the West always, this tendency still continues, and nobody can foresee the prospect of change. Perhaps this comes from the linguistic and political isolation of Japan, and also from her unprecedented modernization in Asia. But Japanese poets have tended to feel a strong affinity with the West, and in the last stage before World War II they felt the same artistic consciousness as the Western avant-gardists. For example, Takiguchi Shuzo, who was once put into prison and became one of the most respected art critics after the war, was a colleague of those international surrealists like André Breton and Paul Eluard. The reason why the police had arrested surrealists was simple. The men in power thought surrealism not understandable, and therefore dangerous for them. Even though Takiguchi stopped writing poetry very early, his would be considered as one of the forerunners of postwar poetry, and under his influence not a few young poets began to concentrate their energy upon the imaginative. Here is an example of his poetry.

Virgin decorations
Ashes of innumerable inverted candles
Branches and flowers of transparent trees
Roars of infinite mirrors and
Spasms of windows of houses

My whole body
In the water fossil increasing its brightness day
   by day

My desire swims none the less
I am the noble bastard of the huge chandelier
   called azure

No one calls me the sphinx of love

My dream, in the fable of jasper,
Glitters all the more blue
("The Desire of the Fish," translated by Sato Hiroaki)

The poet who criticized the rising ultra-nationalistic tendencies most severely before the war was Oguma Hideo. He died in 1940, and was the last major proletarian poet who resisted very strongly the inclination toward fascism until his death. He expressed himself openly, and criticized his fellow poets and novelists bitterly but humorously after the regime forced the proletarian writers union to disband. He tried to write more colloquially than others.

Even if darkness
Blinds the earth forever
Our rights will always
Awaken.
Roses appear
Black in the darkness,
But if sunlight strikes them
Their color burns.

Grief and sorrow are our share,
Not theirs,
But they can have
Neither joy nor laughter.
I know all about darkness.
Therefore I believe light is coming.
Comprehend the hard meaning,
Comrades,
Of our search for fire:
We even strike our fists on stones.

Millions of voices
Cry in the dark.
The air is trembling and it illuminates
The windows.
It feels its way as a key does
And it brings light,
And it brings victory.

Never be useless and silent
When you are near roses.
Surely action
Is the synonym of hope.
Surely your emotion is a brilliant bridegroom.

So get ready.
Your carriage is coming.
You are going to welcome your bride.
You'd better get started.
Blow your horn's thunder,
Whip the horses along,
And make the clear sound
Of your loud wheel-track song.
("Starting Song of Our Carriage," translated by Kijima Hajime)

When the poetry group Retto (Archipelago) was formed in 1958, it intended to follow and develop this line of Oguma's with much more imaginative experimentation, like that of Takiguchi's.

Between these two main poetry groups, Arechi and Retto, there was one common awareness—the rumination over war experience. Of course, among those poets who did not belong to these two groups, the same feeling existed. How to reorganize the images, sounds, and deep feelings of wartime was the main concern of many poets. In the totalitarian war where almost all Japanese people were involved, nobody could avoid the disastrous results, mental and physical. So the naming of "Postwar Poetry" was irresistible and quite usable, until the generation with no experience and memory of war began to appear.

Every nation has its own memorable dates. Every person, too. Independence, confusion, and revolution. Love, crisis, and self-discovery. For postwar Japanese poetry the special date was 1945, because a new poetry began to emerge. But the date does not mean simply the defeat of militarism and the birth of a new nation. It also indicates a tremendously unfathomable image-burden for us. August 6th. Who can cope with the first event in the whole history of mankind with his imagination?

Together with the helplessness of soldiers, this unprecedented image of actual genocide haunted the postwar poets. The Inferno of the present age should have been written in Japanese. Perhaps no overwhelming poem has been written yet about the whole human experience of World War II. Let us read a memorable poem written by Ando Tsuguo who was born in 1919.

"On August 6th, 1945 at 8:15 a.m.
the first atomic bomb in human
history, dropped on Hiroshima,
branded on the granite a human
shadow sitting eternally at rest."

Rosy crystallized sunlight creeps around.
Now over the earth
The damp mold covering the lower world
Widens.
It increases a billion times faster
Than human activity.
It has been a long time
Since we wished to exterminate
That castrated shadow;
Since that day we stopped
Walking on two legs.

But we refuse to walk
On four legs forever—
Since our legs and arms have grown
To unmatching sizes.
With our hands placed forward obsequiously
On the earth,
We crawl around gladly
On our knees.

Since we saw the immense mushroom cloud
A dark purple that day
In the rosy crystallized sky,
Our bellies swelled up
Like those of pregnant women,
And from our navels an oil
Trickles continually.

How fussy we are about its amount—
Increasing? No.
We quarrel with each other about soiling
What was just cleaned.
How we laugh at these pointless arguments
With groans
As if our lungs were translucent.
We have no need now
To hide our genitals,
Nor enough time to bother with them.
All this pain is caused
By one problem: how to get rid
Of this dark red, swollen,
Unmanageable navel.
On the navel eyes grow
And a nose,
And on the bald head
We check for downy hair quivering
Like dry rice in a field;
Turning the navel
Over again and again for a close inspection
Is the most solemn duty
In our daily schedule.
And therefore we crawl out gladly
Into the rosy crystallized sunlight
On our knees.

A long time has passed
Since we began
To extinguish our widening shadows
Over the earth.

A long time has passed
Since we began to forget
The dark home country
From which we'd started.
("The Book of the Dead," translated by Kijima Hajime)

Thus the abnormal mental condition resulting from the war continued. The wounded, the mutilated, and the ghosts were rampant in postwar Japanese society, even though people were taught about democratic reconstruction. How can they disappear in the imagery of sensitive poets?

During this time, curiously enough, or rather naturally enough, the healthy appeared singular and prominent. When Tanikawa Shuntaro began to publish his poems which had no war shadows, his works were thought to be fresh and clear, and attracted attention. But, although he was considered to be totally free from the influence of the war, it was not true. Such an interpretation is superficial.

About Tanikawa's formative years, let us hear the opinion of Iwata Hiroshi who belongs to the same generation:

Then [during the war—Kijima] the junior high school students, who were too young to be desperately intoxicated with the war cause, but too mature to overlook the war reality, were opening their keen adolescent eyes in the vague freedom that was allowed only for noncombatants. In an over-strained period, to be wise one must always be on the alert, and also be abnormally sensitive. Day and night the junior high school students at that time used much sharper and purer imaginations than those who spent their adolescence in the other periods.

This remark of Iwata's about their adolescence can be applied to Tanikawa Shuntaro and other poets of the same age. And when the new poetic generation gathered together, forming a group named Kai (Oars) in 1953, it was thought that a third group besides Arechi and Retto was appearing. But actually the members of this group, too, were very concerned about the war and its results. The works of the poetess Ibaragi Noriko, one of the founders of this group, show that quite clearly.

So it can be said that paradoxically enough all the intense experiences of the war absurdly nurtured and prepared the important and distinctive voices in postwar poetry. In a sense, its intensity guaranteed the artistic quality of the poetry as long as it lasted in the poets' minds and among the public.

Thus the critical moment for postwar poetry came when the symptoms of the disintegration of this intensity began to appear. What the postwar poets began to suffer then was a lack of intense experience, an oppression of mass production, and the diffusion of poetic themes. Poets suddenly found themselves in the labyrinth of economic over-production and commercialism after violence, starvation, and suicidal devotion. This was a tremendously drastic change. People are becoming paralyzed and apathetic in the mass society, and although poets feel crazed with bitterness they cannot yet discern whether this change is structural or not, and rather feel completely dismayed in the new situation—a rare one in modern Japan. For in the process of Japanese modernization there has never been such a long peaceful term as the one since 1945. Always modern Japan was involved in wars, or rather I must say Japan kept on invading Asian countries, anachronistically imitating Western imperialism. Although modern Japanese intellectuals resisted this tendency, their proposals were all defeated. Not a few committed suicide. If not, they converted—converted not into another belief, but rather into aestheticism.

But if we look back to the premodern age, Japan had more than 250 years of peaceful isolation under the Tokugawa shogunate. And poets, like the anonymous Senryu poets, who belonged to the common people and contributed 17 syllabled satirical verses to the compiler Karai Senryu (1718-90), had to and could endure the staleness of society, yet produce a kind of creative writing. So if we see the Japanese cultural situation from afar, it is the history of long isolation and sudden interference, the sad repetition of the colonial mind and chauvinism, and the peculiarly incomprehensible uniqueness. Can poetry be unrelated to this? I don't think it is possible.

Japanese language itself is considered to be very isolated, and yet inside the country it is an integral part of life and can be understood well anywhere, although there have been numerous dialects. As for the way of inscribing, it absorbed and digested foreign words through its peculiar way of adaptation, especially from the Chinese. For example, poems were written in Chinese from ancient times in Japan, but these poems in Chinese were recited completely differently from the way they were in China.

In the present Japanese language, Chinese characters are used together with two kinds of Japanese phonograms (Hiragana and Katakana) mixed, and Chinese characters (Kanji), which have more than one pronunciation usually but have not yet lost some essential charm to the poets as ideas or as things visualized. This mixed use of ideograms and phonograms at the same time is undoubtedly peculiar in itself. I think this may be very dogmatic, but I want to say from my poetic preoccupation that this mixed use through adaptation has some curious coincidence with religious syncretism in Japan, which appears unbelievable for Westerners, but very natural for Japanese. People believe at the same time in Shintoist Gods, Buddhism, and Confucianism. In everyday life these are combined and embodied in numerous rituals. From the Western theological point of view the Japanese attitude cannot be called religious, but rather too worldly. However, from the Japanese point of view, Western Monotheism is after all connected with that other world—the absolute one—which is a little bit too absurd for contemporary living. So in the contemporary age this syncretism can be the way to be worldly-wise about everything crucial, for good or for evil. And this mixed use, or peaceful coexistence of the various opposing elements, can be seen in every sphere of Japanese cultural life.

Mixture, but not thorough permeation. Transformation after transformation, and yet hard-core preservation. Noh, Kabuki, and the modern theatre. Japanese and Western paintings. Music of traditional, Western classical, and Jazz. They are existing altogether without mutual thorough inter-penetration. About poetry, traditional or modern tanka and haiku poets are seemingly very indifferent to contemporary free verse, and vice versa. These forms do not dominate each other, and one cannot extinguish the others. Of course, historically tanka originated first and was long preserved as a court poetry, and haiku came second and spread most widely. The fact that these three kinds of poetic forms can exist, and generally do not interfere with each other, also shows the symptoms of the Japanese cultural situation. I could not find an adequate word, so I am calling this a peaceful coexistence. It is well known that the two short traditional forms have definite regulating devices, but modern Japanese poetry does not have any such lasting regular form. It is free. In the prewar age at the time (1882) of the so-called Shin Tai Shi (the newstyled poetry) some forms of longer repetitive use of 5-7 or 7-5 syllables were about to become standard, but they could not because of their monotonousness. These two fundamental syllabic lines, which derived from classical tanka and haiku, can be seen now in popular lyrics—full of clichés. Modern poets, who want to put the importance upon the sounds and rhythms of their poetry, make use of some regular phonetic forms, and sometimes invent their own with much experimentation. But as a whole modern Japanese poetry has no regular forms at all—it is completely free—poets must find their own form each time they begin to write: "organic form."

Of postwar poetry, I mentioned only three groups, simply not to confuse readers, but actually there were innumerable groups, many of them publishing their own magazines. In one of the three monthly poetry magazines, Gendaishi Techo (Notebook of Contemporary Poetry), in its annual December issue a list of some 1,700 poets' addresses is made public. Among this number no tanka and haiku poets are included. But it should be noted here that on the other hand no major Japanese publisher takes the trouble to produce books of poems from among these numerous poets. The reading of modern poetry has not yet become popular, even though some trials or experimentations are occasionally made. (But annually in January in the emperor's court tanka recitation is held. Amateur tanka poets whose works have been accepted gather and hear their own tankas recited like an ancient ritual: an example of hard-core preservation.)

Two reasons, I think, may be mentioned why poetry reading cannot be popular in Japan. Modern poetry reading is actually surrounded not only by those who like tanka and haiku, but also by those who are pleased with Shigin (peculiar recitation of Chinese poems in Japanese), Rokyoku (sentimental epic recitation about gamblers and outlaws), and Kabuki declamations. Of course, these latter are not called poetry in the modern sense, but rather fall into the general category of entertainment: music with words. In any case, it should be noted that the way of recitation is well-preserved and does not show any signs of disappearing. Even though all these forms differ widely, in their concept of poetry, from the work of contemporary poets, they do have an impact on the auditory sense of the general public.

One more important thing is that contemporary poets use the ideogram Kanji (Chinese characters) very frequently to make their images precise and rich. And these ideograms are understood at once when seen like hieroglyphics, but sometimes misunderstood when pronounced. So it can be said that many contemporary poems are much more understandable when they are seen than when they are read aloud.

Consequently, modern Japanese poetry as a whole is cut off from vital colloquial expressions, but in exchange for this it can seek clear and subtle images full of sensitive feelings and the association of ideas—not with logic, but with seemingly arbitrary imagery. And this association of ideas and images, if it can have some consistency or enduring power, is the keynote of Japanese poetry.

Makoto Ooka

SOURCE: "Contemporary Japanese Poetry," translated by James O'Brien, in World Literature Today, Vol. 62, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 414-17.

[In the following essay, Ooka examines various characteristics that have emerged in Japanese poetry since 1970.]

About three years ago the Japan Foundation organized an exhibition of photographs. More than two hundred representative works were selected from photographs of nature and society which had been taken in our country over the course of almost fifteen years. Based on the theme "Japan, Its Life and Ways: 1971-1984," this exhibition traveled to various parts of the world. The selection of works was done in two stages. Representatives of the Japan Professional Photographers Society, after much debate, chose three hundred prints from a group of more than six thousand amateur and professional works which had appeared in newspapers, magazines, and other publications. In order to reduce the number to almost two hundred, a group of people without expertise in photography joined the jury of photography specialists for the final round of competition. I was a member of this final group.

Among the three hundred prints there was a considerable variety of subject matter. Needless to say, there were beautiful photos of nature illustrative of seasonal change, as well as views of life in fishing villages, in farm hamlets, and in the large cities. Both children and oldsters appeared in the photographs; people were working in some cases, enjoying themselves at a picnic or some similar function in others. Current fashion was on display, and ritualistic occasions—the coming-of-age ceremony, weddings, funerals, ancestral services—were also included. Indeed, the prints gave a composite picture of modern Japanese society.

As I examined the photographs, I became aware of something peculiar. Hardly a single one was focused on the image of Japanese society most representative of the seventies and thereafter. Our "high-tech" culture, with its computers and information-processing capabilities, was totally absent. Why was this? I asked the photographers on the jury if they had, in the course of culling these three hundred photos from the six thousand, deliberately excluded those which showed the most advanced sector of our country. Not at all, they replied. In fact, they had located such prints but found them uninteresting as photographs. Most had been taken for promotional purposes by various companies and did not fit into the exhibit. Furthermore, the photographers added, in the most advanced sectors of the economy the principal work was now being performed by robots rather than by people. Even if you took a photo, it looked like something out of a catalogue. Finally, the things a photographer would be most eager to show were precisely those a company was most secretive about. Photographing them was forbidden, and this was entirely understandable. That was why, the professional photographers concluded, I did not see any such examples in the exhibit.

Adept at managing vast quantities of information and systematized to a high degree, our high-tech "electronic society" is based on delicate machines which do not lend themselves to interesting photography. Needless to say, the machines themselves are operated by specialized engineers of high intelligence. One might take appealing photos of these engineers enjoying their leisure away from the job.

The group which thoroughly understands the complex structure of these delicate machines constitutes a small elite, the great majority being mere workers who are totally ignorant of such things. These workers only operate some appendage of the electronic device. One imagines the everyday lives of this group, lives rendered quite pleasant by those trivial comforts which all of us are gradually acquiring in exchange for handing over our independence and personal dignity to a bureaucratized and standardized society more and more controlled by computers. I might add that, as a consequence of this development, our inner anxieties, instead of getting resolved, become steadily more acute.

Is it not our teams of robots, with their transcendent and highly precise intelligence, which now have the authority once held by humans to make decisions on important questions? Furthermore, the amplification of these robots sometimes gives them access to destructive power beyond the imagination, as can typically be seen in accidents involving nuclear power plants. Against such eventualities the individual person is virtually helpless. Human intelligence can make these delicate machines; but once the machine gets beyond the control of that intelligence and careens toward violence and destruction, the ability to foresee the final issue of the process and to prevent it is almost nil. In using these teams of robots whose destructive power can grow out of control, mankind has achieved a level of prosperity unprecedented in history. Like children frolicking innocently upon the roof of a powder magazine which might explode at any time—that, one might say, describes the people in the so-called advanced countries.

Assuredly this describes the situation in Japan since the seventies. The younger generation in particular has suppressed the anxiety that ought to accompany this condition, opting instead for a hedonistic attitude of living cheerfully in the present. The rise of the new religions and the flourishing of astrology and other forms of divination probably have some necessary connection to the situation.

To my surprise, photos of large political demonstrations were absent from the aforementioned exhibit. The student riots which had kept Japanese society in turmoil until the end of the sixties quickly subsided in the seventies. In their place an indifference, if not animosity, toward declarations of political intent spread among the young people. The hedonistic attitude mentioned above accompanied this development.

The location of commercial and amusement districts in Tokyo popular among the younger generation has shifted. In place of the Ginza, the fashionable quarter of yesteryear, and Shinjuku, the place where the commoners gathered of old, such centers as Shibuya, Roppongi, Aoyama, Kichijoji, and Harajuku have suddenly taken over. Young people throng into these places and remake them in accord with their own tastes. Such districts play a leading role in fashion, in the computer games which the most advanced technology brings into being, and in sports too. The consumer culture which targets the young grows fat as it serves up change with dizzying speed. One fact concerning the rapidly expanding Japanese economy seems undeniable: it has produced a large class of younger people who are hedonistic and affirm the present while avoiding any social and political responsibilities.

Reflecting on the present situation, one cannot avoid the sense of a profound problem for Japan in what has already been said. I can cite here a characteristic phenomenon. Formerly the younger poets—the more enthusiastic ones at least—recognized themselves as an "avant-garde" and prided themselves on composing work that was experimental both in form and in content. It was only natural that few readers understood their poems. For these poets, however, the notion that poetry in particular ought to be in the forefront of literature and the arts was utterly natural.

Since to be of the avant-garde meant necessarily to go beyond the existing framework of poetry and to seek new methods in unknown territory, poets formerly sought ties with other artists, in fields such as music, the plastic arts, film, drama, and radio. The collaboration thus achieved resulted in the creation of works across the old boundaries. For certain individuals like myself at least, born around 1930 and first active in the fifties, one can definitely state that such collaboration was a clear raison d&être for the poet. My friend Shuntaro Tanikawa and I worked out a proposal for collaboration among poets alone. We would sit down at the same table with other poets, even foreign ones, and together compose dozens of pieces in a kind of chain. This practice of "linked poetry" constitutes a protest against existing ways of writing, reading, and criticizing poems. In carrying on this activity, we unquestionably seek something new in an uncharted land, something we Japanese poets have been looking for since the fifties.

Needless to say, we do not accept inferior and unsightly work under the guise of experimentation. We can only shake our heads at this common practice of the avant-garde. To what extent can we change the existing framework of composing? And can we produce superior and persuasive works by these means? Such are the questions that concern us. Poetry must be new in some sense to be worthy of its name.

From this perspective, the year 1970 seems a kind of symbolic watershed. The term avant-garde virtually disappeared from discussions of contemporary Japanese poetry, and young poets quit seeking the cooperation of artists from other fields. Those who still aimed toward original work along collaborative lines generally came onstage in the fifties and sixties. I am talking, in this regard, of my own generation and of poets just a decade younger. This is probably closely related to the fact that, among poets presently in their twenties and thirties, criticism which sums up the poetry of the period with compelling persuasion has ceased to exist. During the seventies the poets themselves were acutely aware of how futile their own words were within the great wave that was rapidly transforming Japan into an electronics and information society, and so they restricted their attention to what might be discovered in their immediate surroundings. The poets might write of their private joys and sorrows with sincerity or irony; but the systematized society, with its vast power and its robots, seemed something merely to be endured.

This focus of interest is reflected in the photographs from the exhibit which I introduced at the beginning of my essay, most of them either recording the quiet and pleasant lives of people seeking domestic happiness or else showing the scenic beauty of the four seasons. Perhaps the average citizen of contemporary Japan merely clings all the more to his middle-class pleasures for hearing at his back the roar of a revolutionary storm which begins to rage in each country as our century comes to an end. A proverb rooted in Buddhist thought speaks of "the candle in the wind." Our young poets should not be insensitive to the fate of our world, so like this very candle. Indeed, when they express in their subtle way the small joys and pains which they discover within middle-class life, the acute reader can sense in the background a nihilism that wears the mask of cheerfulness. One might even call this feature the key to gauging the honesty and talent of the particular poet.

Just now, then, the term avant-garde has become nothing other than an anachronism.

There is another phenomenon closely connected to this state of affairs. For approximately the last ten years there has been a marked revival—some might call it a "boom"—in the traditional forms of verse, the haiku and the tanka. For close to twenty years following Japan's defeat in World War II, our traditional values underwent a rapid decline and lost their credibility. However, along with the miraculous revival of the Japanese economy, the opportunity arose to reassess these same values. With this trend there came a general interest in the traditional forms of poetry. This interest reflected a straightforward desire by people to understand the roots of their country's culture.

An interesting phenomenon occurred after the initial phase of this reevaluation of tradition had passed: for the first time women came forward in large numbers to write in classical verse forms. Because of our economic development and prosperity, many household tasks could now be performed by machines. With more time to spend as they saw fit, women looked to creative activity—in literature or the arts—as a means of self-expression that had been suppressed hitherto. They became very active poets.

In cities throughout Japan and in farm and fishing villages too, schools run by businesses or by local governments, as well as cultural centers similar to colleges, have sprung up in great numbers. What we call the "cultural center" is the best-known example of this development. Such centers offer numerous courses of instruction, sustained to a large extent by the number of women who enroll in them. The courses cover such areas as religion, history, language, literature, art, dance, gymnastics, cosmetics, cooking, gardening, flower arrangement, and the tea ceremony. Included too are courses in the writing of modern verse, tanka, haiku, fiction, and essays. For these letter courses professional critics often serve as instructors, and so do poets who write in various forms. Among the women who take these courses, talented writers and haiku poets emerge in significant numbers.

The classes in tanka and haiku composition are quite popular. The need to write in a brief, set form disciplines the student in the use of language and leads to considerable satisfaction and pleasure. However, it must be said that there is a marked difference in the level of language discipline, depending on the quality of the instruction. It is not only that the teacher who is a haiku or tanka poet can give finer instruction and revise the work of the students. It is the students themselves who positively expect and even demand this of such a teacher. From the distant days of the Heian period (794 to 1185), the orthodox method of teaching the composition of traditional forms of Japanese poetry has been along these same lines. The clearest proof of this lies in the nature of the best critical writings in these areas.

These are not expositions about substance or principles, but manuals of composition and guidebooks which illustrate how to write and appreciate poetry with reference to specific examples. The tanka writings of Shunzei Fujiwara and Teika Fujiwara, the haikai writings of Matsuo Basho, and the writings on No by Zeami—these last composed under the influence of tanka—are all examples of this.

In other words the most widely read and influential works in the area of poetics and art are not those of pure theory; rather, they are precisely the records and accounts of how the best poets instructed their pupils day by day. Women, it might be generally said, readily accept this type of training; and now, in both the tanka and the haiku, the emergence of women poets is very striking.

Speaking of tanka, mention must be made of a volume of poems published early last summer called Sarada kinenbi (Salad Days Remembered). Composed by a woman in her midtwenties named Machi Tawara, the book sold two million copies by the end of the year and continues to sell well this year. Such a record is unprecedented in the publishing world generally. Tawara is a recent college graduate and now teaches high school. Closely observing the traditional verse form, her tanka sing lightly of love, of travel, of music, of books—while regularly using the conversational tone of young men and women. These works are modern popular songs in a classical verse form, and they are highly successful.

This poet has caught the public's eye as a cheerful, outgoing, sociable artist, thus reversing the prevailing image of the artist as dark and introverted. Moreover, as her poems are not flippant in the least, mature men who are not in the habit of the reading tanka end up greatly admiring them. Perhaps these men believe Tawara's poems provide insight into the opinions and lives of the so-called "new talents," a group such men normally regard as a strange new species. In short, this young woman poet has been accepted by all levels of Japanese society and has become a star of the mass media overnight. People are well disposed toward her because she is young and charming.

A hundred years ago, when Akiko Yosano's tanka appeared on the scene, many older people were scandalized by this woman's contempt for their moral sentiment and sexual respectability. As the author of a volume that has sold over two million copies, Machi Tawara is much talked about. There is a certain panache to her reception, but not even a hint of scandal. The Platonic notion of the poet as more or less a danger to society would appear to be outmoded in Japan, where mass culture has, in some sense, developed further than in any other country.

Still, even the popularity of Machi Tawara has already begun to abate; but the stage for women of superior poetic talent will be enlarged hereafter. However, we must be aware of the fact that the subject which women poets have commanded until now has, for the most part, been daily life in the home. One might say that this coincides with the point I made in my earlier comment on the photography exhibit.

Tanka and haiku are written and read by many people because their set forms are very approachable. In contrast, modern free verse will always be distant and forbidding. It can never be said that this kind of poetry, lacking a set form and so various in both its themes and techniques of expression, is really accessible. However, inasmuch as poetry is never something merely approachable and easily understood, this alienation of modern verse and reader could be a passing phenomenon.

As for myself, I began writing linked verse together with fellow poets around 1970. (Even some novelists joined in.) During the eighties we carried on the joint creation of linked verse with poets from such Western countries as America, the Netherlands, West Germany, and France. The poets who worked with me included Thomas Fitzsimmons of the United States; J. Bernlef, Willem Van Toorn, and Robert Anker of the Netherlands; Adrian Henri of Great Britain; Antonio Cisneros of Peru; Oskar Pastior, Guntram Vesper, and Karin Kivus of West Germany; H. C. Artmann of Austria; Jean-Pierre Faye and Alain Jouffroy of France; and Hiroshi Kawasaki and Shuntaro Tanikawa of Japan. In a house by a small lake in Michigan, in a garden on the outskirts of Rotterdam, in the Petite Salle of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, beside the Wannsee in West Berlin, or in the Literaturhaus in the center of the same city, we poets sat around a table and jointly composed linked verse.

A gathering of foreign poets essentially unknown to each other until our sessions together, we soon became close friends as we sat for several hours or a few days around a table and composed poetry as a group. We learned that, at some subterranean level, a burst of laughter or silent pause had meaning. On this breeding ground, where language bubbled up from within the participating poets, we shared in a rare experience: confronting one another as collaborative authors of verses that came from each of us.

One thing stood out as most important. We might have had differing notions of reality and diverging techniques of expression; but we could observe these differences in the very process of their formation and respond to them time after time. Ascertaining how heterogeneous we were, we paid due respect to our differences; and there is probably no path to mutual understanding other than transcending our heterogeneity and carrying on the dialogue. At present the world is full of misunderstanding. The struggles are becoming more fierce among the different peoples, religions, cultures, and societies in different stages of development. So long as there is no method for readily resolving these divisions, we must at least cultivate mutual respect by acknowledging our heterogeneity and striving to reach a point where we love one another. This we might call a duty for all people alive today.

From this perspective, the experiment described above does not, in my opinion, amount merely to making linked poetry. This is a challenge: we head toward a realm rich in productive incitements.