The nation may well be important, but we cannot possibly concern ourselves with the nation from morning to night as though possessed by it. There may be those who insist that we think of nothing but the nation twenty-four hours a day, but, in fact, no one can go on thinking only of one single thing so incessantly. The bean-curd seller does not go around selling bean curd for the nation’s sake. He does it to earn a living. Whatever his immediate motives may be, he does contribute something necessary to society, and in that sense perhaps, the nation benefits indirectly. The same might be said of the fact that I had three bowls of rice today for lunch and four for supper. I took a larger serving not for the nation’s sake but, frankly, to suit my stomach. These things might be said to have some very indirect influence on the country, and indeed, from certain points of view, they might bear some relation to the entire drift of world affairs. But what a horror if we had to take that into account and eat for the nation, wash our faces for the nation, go to the toilet for the nation! There is noting wrong with encouraging nationalism, but to pretend that you are doing all of these impossible things for the nation is simply a lie. This was more or less what I said.
No one—and I do mean no one—is going to be unconcerned about the nation’s safety when one’s country is in danger. But when the country is strong and the risk of war small, when there is no threat of being attacked from without, then nationalism should diminish accordingly and individualism enter to fill the vacuum. This only stands to reason. We are all aware that Japan today is not entirely secure. Japan is a poor country, and small. Anything could happen at any time. In that sense all of us must maintain our concern for the nation. But this country of ours is in no danger of suddenly collapsing; we are not about to suffer annihilation; and as long as this is true, there should be no need for all the commotion on behalf of the country. It is like running through the streets dressed in firefighting clothes, filled with self-sacrifice, before any fire has even broken out.
Finally, however, this is all a matter of degree. When war does break out, when a crisis involving the nation’s survival does arise, anyone with a mind that can think—anyone who has cultivated sufficient character such that he cannot help but think—will naturally turn his attention to it. Nature itself will see to it that he gives his all for the nation, even if this means placing restrictions on his individual liberty and cutting back on personal activity. Thus, I do not for a moment believe that nationalism and individualism are irreconcilable opposites engaged in a constant state of internecine warfare.
I would like to say more on the subject but time does not permit, so I will limit myself to these remarks. There is just one other point that I would like to bring to your attention—namely, that a nationalistic morality comes out a very poor second when compared with an individualistic morality. Nations have always been most punctilious over the niceties of diplomatic language, but not so with the morality of their actions. They swindle and cheat and trick each other every chaotic step of the way. That is why you will have to content yourself with a pretty cheap grade of morality when you take the nation as your standard, when you conceive of the nation as an indivisible monolith. Approach life from a foundation of individualism, however, and you arrive at a far loftier morality; the difference between the two deserves a good deal of thought. To me, therefore, it seems obvious that in a time of tranquillity for the nation, we should place the greater emphasis on individualism with its lofty moral sense. I am afraid I have no time to say anything further on this subject today.
I want to thank you for inviting me here. I have tried my best to explain to you how necessary individualism will be for young men such as yourselves who will have the opportunity to live lives of individual fulfillment, and I have done so in the hope that it might be of some use to you once you have gone out into the world. Whether or not I have, in fact, made myself understood, I of course cannot know, but if there should be points that are still unclear to you, it is because I have expressed myself insufficiently or poorly. If you do find that something I have said remains vague, please do not assign some random meaning to my words, but come to see me at my home whenever you wish and I will do my best to explain. Of course, nothing could give me greater satisfaction than to have gained your understanding of my true meaning without this extra effort.
YOSANO AKIKO
Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) published her first important essay, “An Open Letter” (Hirakibumi, 1904), in the form of a letter to her husband, the poet and editor Yosano Tekkan. Written while she was on a trip home with her two young sons, Hikaru, then two, and Shigeru, only a few months old, the core of the essay is a defense of her poem “Beloved, You Must Not Die” (Kimi shinitamō koto nakare, 1904), a translation of which appears in the poetry section for this period.
Akiko wrote this poem when her younger brother was drafted and sent to China during the Russo-Japanese War. The poem had been strongly criticized for its seeming antiwar slant, but in this essay Akiko denies that she opposed the war and justifies the poem’s stance by insisting that the poet’s only responsibility is to express honestly his or her deepest emotions. Akiko’s emphasis on poetry as the expression of emotion dates back, in Japanese tradition, to Ki no Tsurayuki’s statement in the Kokinshū (Anthology of Old and New Japanese Poems, early tenth century) that the seed of poetry is the human heart.
Although “An Open Letter” is compelling because of its ideas, much of its appeal is the personal narrative in which the ideas are embedded. Literary doctrine is woven into gossipy news and the volatile emotions of family life to reveal Akiko’s own literary ideal, which was the unity of art and life. “An Open Letter,” in other words, shows the seamless blend of the personal and the public that was a trademark of Akiko’s essay style.
AN OPEN LETTER (HIRAKIBUMI)
Translated by Janine Beichman
November 1904
Dearest,
We arrived safely and I wired you right away, but this letter is two days late. Hikaru, of course, does not remember his grandmother and all the rest are strangers, so he clings to me and fusses and, at the slightest provocation, calls out “Papa, Papa!” and gets up to leave. This is the place where I was born, but with Father dead and my younger brother away, I hardly feel at home. It has been difficult to write. Forgive me.
Mother is looking better than I expected. She is overjoyed at your kindness in letting me come home and boasts of it to everyone. Osei seems very depressed. My brother’s words when he set off for Port Arthur—“Go home often, comfort them”—must have been less for Mother’s sake than for his new bride. The sight of her moved me to tears. My brother writes me often in that vein but seems to send almost no letters home, to either his bride or Mother. When I think of how he must feel, it seems even sadder.
But I’ve forgotten to thank you. That night in the rain, you took us all the way to Shinagawa before saying good-bye, and by the time you left, the wind and the rain had gotten even worse. It was an exceptionally chilly night, and I wondered anxiously how you would get home. You stood on the platform looking at us through the window, and then suddenly you were gone, and Hikaru, with a strange and uneasy expression, kept staring outside. Sué tried all sorts of things to distract him, but he had no interest in “The Fishy’s Tale” or “The Watermill Song.” When the train, unaware of this small child’s heart, arrived in the twinkling of an eye at Hiranuma, he thought he might see his papa among the crowd. He pointed at the window to make me open it and pressed his head against the glass the better to see outside. When a young Western woman standing on the platform noticed him, her face with its flowery hat was suddenly reflected in the glass, and she said something to him in a sweet voice, at which he burst into tears and almost fell off the seat. The shock seemed to make him forget you, but then he cried and fussed until we started up the slope to Hakone and so woke up the soundly sleeping Shigeru. I thought it might be like last year’s trip, when he was so difficult, so I offered him my breast, though he seldom nu
rses anymore, and at last he fell asleep. He slept soundly until the outskirts of Omi, and both children were more comfortable than I had expected. But I, who was watching over three people, including Sué, did not get a moment’s rest. When we reached Osaka and I saw the servant sent to meet us, I felt such relief that all at once I was overcome by a wave of exhaustion, like a drowning man.
On the train as I was leafing through The Sun—you must have seen it by now—I was astonished to come across Ōmachi Keigetsu’s review. For him to condescend to read a work that someone like me just dashed off! I blushed, but more from shame than gratitude. I am unworthy of his notice. And yet with a brother at the front, my only younger brother, in whose absence I traveled all the way home from Tokyo, a distance of more than three hundred miles, for the sole purpose of comforting my mother and offering moral support to my brother’s wife, I cannot accept this review in silence.
At the end of a letter to my brother I wrote a poem—what is wrong with that? It is a poem, no more, no less. My family and I are natives of this country—who could love it more than we do? What did I learn from my honest and upright parents? No shopowner in the town of Sakai revered the emperor more than my dead father did or forget himself more in duty to the imperial house. Even the strength of character that keeps my brother from writing home reminds me of the father I have lost. And as for myself, this young woman—who from the age of nine knew only A Tale of Flowering Fortunes and The Tale of Genji—even now that I am grown, I only feel more and more affection for the courtly era, so much so that I despise contemporary stories based on the vulgar doings of commoners and thus shudder at a single word from the likes of those who carry on in the Commoners’ Newspaper (Heimin shinbun). And yet for all that, any young woman hates war. If, for the nation’s sake it could not be helped, as I am told, then I pray for victory in this war, pray for victory and that the war be over as soon as possible. For some time now, we have had to live so frugally that even though I have wanted to buy you a jersey undershirt since the spring, I have made you do without. Even so, we have done as much as we could for this war; one should not boast of it, of course, but the people in our village of Shibuya must know. You excused yourself only from the lantern processions, but the other things amount to as much as the one hundred yen that this Izumi house contributed to the soldiers’ fund, don’t they? The gaudy horse carriages prancing along with their drivers and grooms on the way to the Red Cross, where stylish matrons carry out the much-admired act of rolling bandages, a chore so simple our Sué could do it—that is something, pray forgive me, of which someone like me has no knowledge and wants none. And yet with all my heart I do try to fulfill my, and our, duty as inhabitants of this land. A few days ago when someone said in print that none were as disinclined to donate as those who debated the important issues, I felt secretly that such contempt could not extend to us.
As you know, when my younger brother was called up and bravely went to the front, he courageously spoke of what should be done in case the worst happened. If the “valiant warriors” who often appear in the newspapers these days deserve that name, then without a doubt my dear younger brother does, too. But my dead father never taught his youngest son to behave like a pitiless beast, to kill people, or to seek out death. My brother was sent to school and allowed to write haiku and tanka, and his thoughts are always for his wife, his mother, the child soon to be born, and for you and me. For a brother whose feelings are so human, how could I, a woman, write the sort of things that we hear in today’s war songs?
Keigetsu says the ideas expressed in my poem “Beloved, You Must Not Die” are extremely dangerous. But isn’t the current fashion, on the contrary, the real danger—this saying “die, die!” and the constant use of phrases like “loyalty to the throne and love of country” and quotations from the Imperial Rescript on Education? Although I am no expert, I like the courtly writings we still possess and I doubt that anywhere among them could be found this command to die or any careless scribbling about things connected to the imperial house. Even in the works about the Minamoto-Taira war, which describe many battles, I would hardly expect anything like that, would you?
A poem is a poem, no more no less. Since I began to write, I have always wanted to set down the heart’s truth in poetry in a way that would not be ridiculed by later ages. What value can a poem have if it does not express the heart’s truth? What good can come of one who does not create poems and prose based on that truth? True emotion, unalterable and unchanging until the end of time, and adherence to that truth: these are what I desire most. I ask Keigetsu to allow me to express this desire in my poetry. He may not have a younger brother, but even so, if he spends one hour at Shinbashi or Shibuya stations on a day when troop trains are leaving, he will surely be impressed when he sees the parents, siblings, friends, and relatives who have come to say good-bye. Gripping the hands of the young men going off, they say “Come back safely, take care!” then shout “Banzai!” in one loud voice. At Shibuya Station, the policeman, the Shintō priest, the village mayor, even our Hikaru, all do this. Is it wrong for them to do so? I think that my own humble poem “Beloved, You Must Not Die” is only saying in effect “Come back safely, take care, banzai,” is it not? Theirs and mine both are true voices, and I know no other way to make a poem than to speak the heart’s truth.
When I was about eleven, I used to read Mori Ōgai’s Weir Magazine (Shigarami sōshi) and criticism by a certain Hoshikawa, though I didn’t really understand them. At thirteen or fourteen, when I subscribed to Grasses of Awakening (Mezamashigusa) and The World of Architecture (Bungakukai) and my older brother was still at university, he told me about a new journal called Imperial Literature (Teikoku bungaku) and sometimes sent it to me. At that time, new-style verse by Ukō, Keigetsu, and others began to be published there, and I realized for the first time that there were many new-style poets in Japan besides Shimazaki Tōson. Having been a poet since that time, how can Keigetsu fail to distinguish between the things before his eyes and a poem that even I, who am like his great-grandchild, somewhat understand? Having always respected Keigetsu like a grandfather, I find this somewhat strange.
In addition, Keigetsu kindly scolds me, pointing out how clumsy my attempt at a new-style poem is, and recommends that I stay away from what is not suited to me, all of which I accept with gratitude. This is not my fault but comes from you, who always tells me to write something long. But it also occurs to me that he has no need to point out the awkwardness of my work. For if Keigetsu is a grandfather and I a great-grandchild, then Keigetsu, who can create splendid new-style poems, also is a doctor of letters and I, who attempted to write a new-style poem after your urgings, am no more than a kindergarten pupil. To think that I may stop at this immature kindergarten level is indeed irritating.
My thoughts ran on like this until the Tōkaidō train reached Osaka. Tonight Hikaru is sleeping soundly and so, hardly noticing, I’ve ended up writing this long letter! The clock has struck one. By now you must have put your brush down, too. In the night so quiet without the boys, what are you dreaming of? Today I will visit my father’s grave. I recall last year at this time when I leaned against a pillar in the temple corridor and wept for some time.
Hikaru was taken piggyback by Sué to my older sister’s house, the Takemuras, and also to see the doves at Tenjin Shrine. I told Sué not to show him the monkeys there, with their rude manners. His grandma hugs Shigeru and says that she already knows it will be he she misses most when we leave. Hikaru is still not used to anyone here and keeps saying “I go I go Papa!” and wants only to go out to the big avenue with Sué.
On the train I read Tōson’s poetry for the first time in a long while, in another new edition. The beginning was mostly poems I know by heart, and as I read I felt as happy as if at this very moment I had run into my old koto teacher. Used to reading the worm-eaten block-printed books in our storehouse, I never cared about such things as the kana phonetic readings used for characters and detested gram
marians and literary scholars. Even at school, I vowed I would not learn from such shallow people and never attended the grammar class. I still have the same prejudice, but even I notice the mistakes in this edition and it makes me feel the same regret as looking at a pretty young girl in an unbecoming collar.
There are so many people I want to see—Tenmin, Sei, Mitsuko in Kyoto—but how can I do it with the children along like this?
And there is something else, too. I thought I wouldn’t say anything about it until I got back, but it is weighing on my mind. As I knew, the place where I was born is not a land of poetry. Last night I learned for the first time of a sad and awful thing.
When I called at the home of my older sister, who married into the Takemura family, she told me things that I wish I did not know but about which she could not keep silent. When I stood up to him,1 I knew that my reputation would suffer and was prepared for the consequences. But I am a girl and it pains me to know how alone one can be without a father. My mother and the people at home know nothing about it, but according to my sister, now that the house across the way is his, I will not be allowed to cross its threshold—this command he has sent all the way from England to XXX2—you will understand who I mean. Even so, she turned up a little after I arrived and invited me over, but I did not fall into the trap. What a frightening world it is. My mother and my younger brother’s wife go to the bath there, but things being as they are, I will not set foot in that house. I told my mother that after a Tokyo bathhouse, a regular home bath is too small and took the children to a public bathhouse on a side street. Some people there seemed to know who I was and looked askance. When I was small my wet nurse made me sandals from the leaves of the camellia bushes in the garden of that house, and I want to do the same for Hikaru now, but no matter how badly I want to see the garden there, I will not go.
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series) Page 51