The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by J. Thomas Rimer

  How many years do I have left?

  And look at what you’ve done!

  You say I have to stop wearing white Korean dress

  Woe is me!

  And put on colored clothes.

  Why don’t you just shoot me?

  Ah!

  How can I abandon the white vestments

  The gods bestowed?

  Ah! Emperors! Ancestors!

  The headman wants to take my white garments

  And make me dress in black like a crow.

  Lightning should strike him!

  I won’t do it!

  He can kill me first!

  I’d rather die,

  Than be in anything but white!

  Woe is me! Woe is me! Woe is me!

  The old women tremble with sadness and alarm:

  They know the power of the law.

  Blind with the fear that at any moment

  The clothes will be ripped from their back,

  They grind their foreheads in the ground and wail.

  Shut up, you useless hags!

  You were just here the other day,

  Weeping and wailing!

  You’ll jump at any excuse

  To interfere with the changes

  Being implemented [by the Japanese]1

  Anyone who refuses to change

  From white to colored clothes,

  Is a good-for-nothing

  Who stands in the way of [ Japanese imperial policy]

  And will be nailed to a cross head down!

  Wheedling and cajoling, the headman

  Tries to convert them

  From traditional white Korean dress.

  But just as water flows from deep sources,

  So sadness springs from deep within.

  In a procession of anguish and rage

  The old women wend their listless way home,

  The curtain of night a heavy sack

  That envelops their heart.

  O Korea!

  Even if you make old women

  Defend to the death the hoary tradition of white,

  No one is left to inherit it,

  Neither nature nor man.

  Wasted Korea!

  Only the young

  Know your essence.

  While they wear shoes hard as iron

  And walk with an iron gait,

  The aged tread with a clip-clop of clogs,

  And return from the headman’s office,

  Grumbling.

  As the women walk through the mist,

  Suddenly squawklike screams are heard.

  They are struggling with a band of men

  And trying to flee the mountain road,

  But the men cut them off.

  Damned bitches!

  Wear white, will you?

  Then watch how easily it soils!

  You worthless toktack shrews!

  Take them off

  Or have your clothes dyed as you wear them!

  The careening old women

  Are kicked by young feet,

  Struck by young fists,

  And the young men, whooping it up,

  Pursue them as dogs chase aged hens.

  They raise brushes

  Dripping black ink

  And slash across their ancient adversaries’ white apparel.

  Who would do such a thing?

  No good can come

  From abusing the aged!

  With earsplitting screams the women flee,

  But the men give them no quarter

  And relentlessly sully their pristine robes.

  The pathetic, high-pitched voices trail away,

  A moment’s clamor interrupting

  The quiet Korean night.

  Soon it grows quiet again.

  Their hair disheveled,

  Their miserable white robes

  Blackened in the ink attack of

  The men from the headman’s office,

  The old women, their faces twisted,

  Struggle to their feet and leave.

  When dawn breaks, the old women of the village

  Act as if nothing has happened.

  Calling their neighbors,

  They head for the banks of the Naktong.

  They plunge their besmirched raiments in the water,

  And for a moment the stream turns black.

  But the pollution flows downstream, the water clears,

  And the old women’s enraged expressions soften, too,

  As tok-tack, tok-tack, tok-tack,

  They begin to beat the laundry.

  Striving to affirm all that has happened,

  Their expressions change to pain-filled smiles.

  They raise frail hands

  And strike the rocks.

  They sing songs of Korea.

  They beat the defiled robes with their mallets.

  The mallets that beat weep.

  The clothing that is beaten weeps.

  The old women who beat weep.

  The stones that are struck weep.

  All Korea is weeping.

  Translated by David G. Goodman

  POETRY IN TRADITIONAL FORMS

  Strictly speaking, no poets can be placed in the category of “war poets.” Some, such as Saitō Mokichi and Maekawa Samio, wrote tanka or haiku during these years that now appear chauvinistic in tone, but such poetry was not central to their works. Other poets, who opposed the war, usually were not able to have their work published until after 1945. As examples, some of the works of two poets who might be placed in the latter category are included here.

  SAITŌ SANKI

  Saitō Sanki (1900–1962) began his career as a dentist. After being trained in Japan, he opened a clinic in Singapore, where he also became an accomplished ballroom dancer. Forced to return to Japan in 1929 because of illness, he now, by his own account, found himself, as a cosmopolitan person, to be a stranger in his own country. Saitō accidentally discovered his talent for writing haiku when he was in his thirties, and his free and outspoken poems caused him to be considered a “thought offender,” an offense for which he was briefly imprisoned. Most of his sardonic antiwar poems, with their sometimes startling images, could be published only after 1945.

  A machine gun,

  the low moon,

  round and resounding

  kikanjū

  hikuki tsuki rin

  kodama suru

  A machine gun soars

  and shoots

  short soldiers

  kikanjū kakeri

  kakeri mijikaki

  hei wo sasu

  A machine gun—

  in the middle of the forehead

  a red flower blooms.

  kikanjū

  miken ni akaki

  hana ga saku

  Photographed

  face by face—

  prisoners of war eating

  horyohei no

  meshi kueru

  kaogao torare

  Photographed—

  prisoners of war shout commands

  to prisoners of war

  horyohei ni

  gōrei kakeru

  horyohei torare

  A machine gun

  stutters;

  scorpions copulate.

  kikan’on

  sasori no shiyū

  Kasanareri

  Translated by Masaya Saitō

  TOKI ZENMARO

  A friend of Wakayama Bokusui, Toki Zenmaro (1885–1980) began studying European literature as a university student, and then began his career as a newspaper reporter. Toki began publishing his tanka in 1910 and dedicated some of his early poems to Ishikawa Takuboku, whose work and social humanism he much admired, although he felt himself to be far less of a dedicated socialist. His poetry, as evidenced by the tanka included here, often reveals a sharper sense of the human predicament in a social context than is typical of traditional poetry.

  EVIDENCE

  ESSAYS

  HAGIWARA SAKUTARŌ />
  During the early part of his career, Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942), some of whose verse is presented in the previous chapter, was a highly experimental poet who helped create the traditions of a truly modern Japanese poetry written in the colloquial language. Later he returned to writing poetry in traditional forms. By the mid-1930s, however, Hagiwara virtually stopped writing poetry of any kind and turned to essays to express his thoughts about Japan and Japanese culture. One of the best known of these short essays is “Return to Japan” (Nihon e no kaiki), the title essay in a collection published in 1938. The sense of weariness is evident: the young poet who wished so fervently to go to France has been replaced by a more stooped and weary figure, and the sentiments he expresses seem to mirror the feelings of many artists and intellectuals at that time.

  RETURN TO JAPAN (NIHON E NO KAIKI)

  Translated by J. Thomas Rimer

  A Song I Sing Myself

  1

  Until recently, as far as we were concerned, it seemed as if the West was our old home. And just as in the ancient myth Urashima sought his soul in his own old home, in that image of the dragon palace across the sea, so we, looking across our own sea, had our illusory images of the West. Now our illusions about that apparition have vanished. That “garden of the West,” where lights always burned in a vast and multilayered crystal palace that knew no night: ah, for us, so far away, this was a phantom vision that brought us to writing youthful poems to the spirit of civilization while the carriages rolled in and out of the Rokumeikan. Now, however, the streets in which we see our phantoms have become the real ones of Tokyo as we stroll about under the neon lights. Yet it cannot be said that we are happier than before. For our illusions have disappeared altogether. And so, like Urashima, after a long voyage of half a century and bearing his jeweled box as a memento, we have come back to our authentic “old home.” Yet in the instant when we open the lid, it is as though we were plunged back some two thousand years to the beginning of our own nation, and we are shocked by the fact that we, all of us, seem now gray bearded.

  2

  Since the beginning of the Meiji period [1868–1912], we have studied Western culture in a frantic fashion and with a virtually superhuman effort. Yet this effort was not brought about through any self-induced incentive. Threatened by Perry’s black ships, we, as Japanese, afraid that we might be violated by the dangerous white man with his military arms and his science, decided that in order to protect this one isolated island, we must find a way to defend ourselves. With great wisdom, the Japanese studied the art of defeating this enemy with his own weapons. (In the case of the Chinese or the Indians, they were cursed with their own Asian sense of pride and, since they learned nothing from the barbarians, were themselves invaded.) Yet it was some thirty years ago that Lafcadio Hearn1 made a prophecy. He saw that in the future, if once we had absorbed this “Western enlightenment” and made it our own, should we decide to oppose the white man with all his armaments and industry then suddenly at that moment, we would awaken from our confused dream of worshiping the West and become conscious of our own national identity. Now it seems that the prophecy of this poet is finally coming true in Shōwa Japan.

  In the early years of Meiji, the first steam train service began between Tokyo and Yokohama; yet despite the government’s promotion of it, very few ordinary people rode the train. The people of that time even disliked drinking milk for fear that they might smell like foreigners. The reason was that however convenient these products of the “enlightenment” might be, the population retained vague feelings of anger and resentment. It has been said that the government’s real difficulties at the time were finding a means to revive the greater population, which remained stubborn and obstinate in their will to expel everything foreign. Taking the lead, Itō Hirobumi and all the leaders of state danced like Westerners at the Rokumeikan and so, by revealing their intoxication with Western models, were themselves concerned with finding a way to bring prosperity to the country. In other words, this passion for Western culture was not self-induced; rather, to study the West seriously became the prevailing trend. So it is that less than half a century later, Japan has absorbed many hundred years of Western culture. To many people, this fact in itself seems like a miracle in the world. Yet it must be appreciated that the motive for this miracle was in fact the spirit that necessitated those dances at Rokumeikan; that passion for worshiping Western things that contributed to what we call our period of enlightenment was nourished in order to promote our country.

  Nevertheless, even in the midst of this passion for all things Western, Japan did not lose, by any means, its own sense of a national consciousness and so managed to abolish unjust laws relating to extraterritoriality, to reconcile unequal treaty relationships, and to censure the improprieties of the Koreans. Thus, just as Lafcadio Hearn observed, the Japanese passion for things Western did not represent an effort made because of any sense of dependency. In fact, quite the contrary, it was an effort expended in order to do battle with the West, to oppose the West. Then the Japanese invaded China and competed with France, Germany, and Italy, so that today Japan has truly achieved the status of one of the great powers. Thus as far as we are concerned, whatever we have learned concerning our own self-defense we have learned from ourselves. So it was in turn that we as a people slowly began to awaken from that long dream of longing for the West; eventually we began to reflect on our own culture. In other words, we have begun to free ourselves from that long voyage abroad brought on during the past seventy-odd years because of a period of “national emergency.” It now has become possible for us to return to our true home.

  Still, we stayed in the West for such a long time. And now that we have returned to our old home, the former traces of old are no more: the eaves are rotting, the garden is overgrown, and there seem to be no traces of any mementos that are truly Japanese; and we are shocked when we realize that we have lost it all. As we trudge through our old memories, searching in some corner of this desolate earth for some element that is “truly Japanese,” we appear to be no more than a crowd of drifters for whom the whole world seems tragic as we wander about, sadly, aimlessly.

  At the time when we imprinted the image of the “garden of the West” on our hearts, when we dreamed of the splendid palace that lay beyond the seas, we were bursting with hope, overflowing with the ardor of youth. Now, however, knowing that this palace has become merely an illusion, we know that however we may search around the world, we have only our own country, Japan, in which we must actually live. Yet here in our own country, clumsy models of that illusionary Western garden abound: steam trains and electric trains are running, and vulgar Western-style buildings go up everywhere. We seem to have forfeited everything. Yet at the same time, we are Japanese with our own traditions. Indeed, there is no questioning the truth that we have flowing in our veins the history of ancestors, one that has lasted some two thousand years. And so it is that within those limits, it can be said that we have lost nothing at all.

  We have forfeited nothing

  Yet we have lost everything

  So I wrote in one of my lyric poems. Truly, one kind of poem that we poets must compose—at this time when our culture has collapsed into nothingness—can only be that of some nihilistic vagabond caught in a rhythm of contradictions. A is not A. A is not not-A. The formula for such dialectics has been born as a rhythm that comes from the very emotions with which we poets live in the Japan of our time.

  Yet, has this Western intelligence really brought defeat to our country? Now, in these final days, must we clash with this “emptiness”?

  3

  By using our Western-style mentality, we have returned to seek what is truly Japanese. The days of this journey have been cold and sad. This is because this Western intelligence, in either a popular sense or the manner understood in literary circles, has not taken root in the climate of our country. We have been treated as heretics, we have lived as étrangers. Thus it is that so many of those who
praise or condemn what is “Japanese” are, curiously enough, nothing more than a group of “heretics” or “étrangers” themselves. Those who possess only superficial opinions state that they regard this phenomenon as the defeat of the intelligentsia and state, that we are involved in a “cowardly withdrawal.” Yet we have never acted in a cowardly fashion, not once. Quite the contrary, we have taken on the enemy at close quarters; we have charged recklessly. And just as we have succeeded in escaping, we have come out onto a vast plain, one of emptiness, nothingness. Now in this place, there is nothing to cast a shadow. There are only clouds, sky, and those shadows cast only by ourselves on the earth—and our starving, lonely hearts as well.