On Haiku

by Hiroaki Sato

  The “cockscomb dispute” flared up in the era immediately following Japan’s defeat in the Second World War in 1945, when all values seemed turned upside down. It was touched off by the haiku poet Shima Yoshijirō, who condemned Mokichi’s opinion, prompting some of the better-known haiku poets to weigh in. Summarizing the controversy in his 1950 essay, Yamamoto Kenkichi supported Mokichi’s assessment, calling Kyoshi’s refusal to include it “a surprisingly bullheaded denial.” He further touched on the controversy in his 1964 book, saying that anyone who couldn’t understand the “creative locus” that inspired Shiki to write this haiku “should forget about art.” The dispute continues to this day.

  Any such selection of course depends on the predilections of the one making it. Take, for example, Shiki’s haiku that Gary Snyder felt embodied the Zen spirit, which Jack Kerouac depicted in his Dharma Bums, as noted earlier:

  ぬれ足で雀のあるく廊下かな

  Nure ashi de suzume no aruku rōka kana

  The sparrow

  hops along the veranda,

  with wet feet

  The original of this haiku first appeared in volume one of Shiki’s own selection Cold Mountain and Trees with Leaves Fallen (Kanzan rakuboku), which collected his haiku up to 1892, but Kyoshi didn’t include it in his 1940 selection. Or, for that matter, whoever made the selection for Masaoka Shiki • Takahama Kyoshi didn’t include it either. The latter selection contains roughly 1,500 Shiki haiku, but as with many books like this in Japan, the name of the person who made the selection is not given. Snyder’s choice, with its translation, is found in Blyth’s four-volume Haiku. So it was Blyth who waded through Shiki’s “complete works,” which appeared in fifteen volumes in 1925, then in twenty-two volumes in 1929.

  Incidentally, in my coedited anthology From the Country of Eight Islands, Burton Watson translated Shiki, making his own selection. At the time, I only had the selection of Shiki’s haiku in Masaoka Shiki • Takahama Kyoshi, but my selection still would have been very different from Watson’s. I float through a large number of haiku (or any other genre of poetry) with the vague thought of “translatability.” In this regard, I think of Shiki’s following piece, which comes with a headnote: “One day, into the night, I [spent] exhausting the haiku box.” Shiki worked as the tanka and haiku editor for the newspaper Nippon, so the other box must have contained tanka submissions.

  三千の俳句を閲し柿二つ

  Sanzen no haiku o kemishi kaki futatsu

  I’ve inspected 3,000 haiku on two persimmons

  * * *

  * The quaint expression, “otter ceremony” comes from a phrase in the Confucian Book of Rites: “The east wind thaws the freeze, hibernating worms begin to stir, fish rise above ice, otters ceremonialize fish, and swans and geese arrive.” The phrase “otters ceremonialize fish” (獺祭魚 tajiyu), dassaigyo in Japanese reading, was taken to mean that “otters line up the fish they caught before eating them.” That metaphorically came to mean the act of consulting many books to write a poem or a piece of prose. The late-Tang poet Li Shangyin, who made obscure allusions and references in his poems, supposedly wrote with a number of books surrounding him as references, and gave himself the penname Ta Jiyu—or so Northern Song poet Yang Yi claimed.

  The “Gun-Smoke” Haiku Poet Hasegawa Sosei

  Shiki’s Advocacy of War Haiku

  Many haiku aficionados may be surprised to learn that the reformer Masaoka Shiki advocated writing about military matters in the verse form he chose. After all, none of his better-known pieces, among them his iconic “I eat persimmons and the bell rings at Hōryūji,” suggest anything remotely militaristic. Writing about persimmons, bells, temples, and such in haikai and hokku was at the core of the tradition, which was nurtured and developed during peaceful times. The genre had little to do with wars and battles.

  Indeed, in 1892, just three years before he composed the above haiku about the Hōryūji temple that had been standing since the seventh century, Shiki argued in “Haikai Talks in the Otter-Ceremony Library” that “fūryū [that is, haikai] does not linger over the bow, horse, sword, or spear.” To show what he meant, he named two samurai among Bashō’s disciples, Mukai Kyorai and Naitō Jōsō, for “surpassing all those now and in the past in rectitude of character and refinement in poetry,” and cited Kyorai’s hokku:

  何事ぞ花見る人の長刀

  Nanigoto zo hana miru hito no nagagatana

  An outrage: A man viewing cherry blossoms with a sword on

  Shiki must have thought this embodied the non-martial spirit of haikai, for he cited it more than once in his essays. Yet, early in the same year, he wrote this piece to mark New Year’s Day.

  兵隊は國の花なりけふの春

  Heitai wa kuni no hana nari kyō no haru

  Soldiers are the nation’s blossoms: spring today

  Then, for New Year’s Day 1893, Shiki wrote:

  十萬の常備軍あり国の春

  Jūman no jōbigun ari kuni no haru

  With a 100,000-man standing army the country in spring

  With these haiku, Shiki may well have become the first poet to praise his nation for its soldiers and standing army. Praising the country, region, or particular area, known as kunibome, had long been part of Japan’s poetic tradition, but Japan did not have a standing army until a conscription was instituted in 1873.

  What developments prompted Shiki to compose such haiku? One was the rise of nationalism. Japan abandoned its semi-isolationist policy beginning in the early 1850s because of the imperialistic strife that had reached East Asia. With the establishment of the Meiji regime in 1868, strengthening the military became one important policy goal. And so the government introduced a conscription to replace the feudalistic samurai system.

  With the opening of the country, Westernization became a social, national slogan. This invited a strong reaction. During the 1880s the government promoted the second wave of Europeanization as part of its effort to revise unequal treaties. One ostentatious thing it did was to expend a huge sum to build the Rokumeikan, a large Italianate social center where the members of Japan’s high society were to mix with foreign dignitaries. Among the many polemicists against Occidental aping, I bring up two men: Shiga Shigetaka and Kuga Katsunan.

  Shiga, like many young men at the time, once had sweet dreams about the West, but he became disillusioned when, in 1886, he went aboard a naval training ship and visited Kusaie Island, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, and Hawaii for more than ten months. In those places, he saw how European colonizers overwhelmed and destroyed indigenous cultures and ways of life. He published Conditions in South Pacific (Nan’yō jijō) to describe what he observed, and went on to advocate paying greater respect to the “essences” (sui) of various manifestations of Japanese culture, spawning kokusuishugi. Today the word would be called “chauvinism,” but Shiga’s thinking may be closer to the broadly understood “nationalism.” He did not reject Western culture, and was only stressing the importance of what was worthy of Japan’s own culture. In 1888, he started the magazine The Japanese (Nihonjin). He went on to become an important geologist.

  In a similar spirit, Kuga, who studied French law, started the newspaper Japan (Nippon) in 1889. Warning that the kind of Europeanization being pushed would lead to Japan’s colonization, he stated, “We know and respect the goodness and beauty of European civilization, but we should make use of it for the interest and happiness of independent Japan.” Kuga, then thirty-two years old, added Shiki, then twenty-two years old, to his staff as a literary editor. You could say that Shiki’s argument that haiku is art, that it is in no way inferior to other forms of literature, was as similar to Kuga’s spirit as the two haiku of his cited above.

  Shiki’s nationalism became more pronounced after Japan started to fight against China over Korea’s sovereignty in July 1894. Before the war, he even feared tha
t Chinese soldiers might land in Tokyo; but once the war began, Japan won one battle after another. In January 1895, he published “Haikai and Martial Matters” (Haikai to buji) in Nippon—although this short essay with a suggestive title only argued that Buson excelled in composing hokku that touched on martial matters when “things like battles could not be experimented by a peaceful poet but also, at the height of the Tokugawa period, they didn’t even appear in people’s dreams.” In other words, those “martial” hokku referred either to things of the past or merely to swords and arrows.

  That same month Shiki wrote a friend, saying, “The Sino-Japanese War is a delight to me,” though he added that his health was not good and that he had postponed his plans to take part in the military campaign as a correspondent. On February 26, he wrote another friend, a journalist who had reported on the actual battles: “Although everyone has stopped me, I’ve been unable to restrain myself and I’m finally going to the front. This is the best thing that has happened to me since I was born.”

  It was one day before then, on February 25, that Shiki had asked two of his friends, Kawahigashi Hekigodō and Takahama Kyoshi, to have dinner with him at a restaurant near his newspaper, and when they had finished he handed them a formal letter addressed to both of them. After thanking them for remaining friends, “as if it came from a contract made in our previous life,” for all the severe criticisms he had given them he wrote:

  What I hope to accomplish lies in literature. There are two kinds of literature. One, they say, is to write poetry, prose, and fiction; these belong to “elegant matters” [gaji 雅事]. The other, they say, is to edit literary books and educate men of letters; these belong to “secular matters” [zokuji 俗事]. . . . I happen to write for a newspaper, and perhaps because of this I’ll be able to take part in the war as a correspondent. Should I pass up this opportunity, I’d be stupid if not lazy, timid if not arrogant. Whether taking part in the war will help me in refined matters, I do not know. Whether it will help me in secular matters, I do not know. Whether it will help me in both elegant matters and secular matters, I do not know. But I expect it to help me in one. . . . Should I not achieve my wish and die [fail], there should be no one to achieve my wish and carry out my work other than the two of you. I would be extremely happy if you agree with this.

  February 25, the 28th Year of Meiji, Masaoka Shiki

  In talking about “refined matters” and “secular matters,” Shiki was evidently alluding to the words the famous Chinese painter Zheng Banquio of the early Qing dynasty, who is said to have written to his brother: “Writing and painting are refined matters but they are also secular matters. If a man cannot contribute [anything of substance] to Heaven and Earth and nurture the people through writing, won’t just fiddling with brush and ink be nothing but a secular matter?”

  Shiki’s letter bewildered the two poets, as Hekigodō later recalled. Neither had expected their friend, albeit their senior by several years, to go to the front with such a serious resolve. Yet what actually happened was more than a disappointment.

  By the time Shiki reached the battlefields in April 1895, all the major battles were long over, with only a peace treaty waiting to be signed. The first place his group was taken to, Jinzhou, northeast of Dalian, on the Liaoning Peninsula, had seen battles half a year earlier. Not only that, Shiki, as a correspondent, was treated shabbily by the soldiers, both on his way there and after arriving. Thus, half a year later, he started his report on his war experience with a principle: “A nation cannot be without newspapers. A battle cannot be without newspaper reporters. Accepting newspaper reporters into the military is not for a couple of newspapers but for the nation and for the soldiers and officers.” Finally, aboard a ship back to Japan in May, Shiki vomited a quantity of blood and had to be taken to the hospital upon arrival in Kobe.

  Here are some of the haiku he wrote about his experiences on the front:

  永き日や驢馬を追ひ行く鞭の影

  Nagaki hi ya roba o oiiku muchi no kage

  Long day: driving donkeys the whip and its shadow

  大国の山皆低きかすみかな

  Taikoku no yama mina hikuki kasumi kana

  In the big country the mountains are all low in haze

  戦ひのあとに少き燕かな

  Tatakai no ato ni sukunaki tsubame kana

  After a battle there are only a few swallows

  梨咲くやいくさのあとの崩れ家

  Nashi saku ya ikusa no ato no kuzure ie

  Pear blooms: after a battle a collapsed house

  もろこしは杏の花の名所かな

  Morokoshi wa anzu no hana no meisho kana

  China is a place famed for apricot flowers

  なき人のむくろを隠せ春の草

  Naki hito no mukuro o kakuse haru no kusa

  Hide the corpse of the one who’s deceased: spring grass

  These were not much different from the types of haiku Shiki was already condemning—products of Edo-style “trivial versifying” (fūryū inji) utterly devoid of the “actualities of the ferocity of war,” or so judged the haiku writer and scholar Katō Shūson.

  Not all was for naught. Shiki’s determination to get something out of taking part in the war as a correspondent, along with the letter he composed for his haiku friends spelling it out, led to his redoubled effort for reforming haiku. In addition, Hekigodō and Kyoshi took his request seriously, carrying forward his haiku work after his death at age thirty-five. The two poets, however, were opposite types, as Shiki knew, calling Hekigodō “as cool as ice” and Kyoshi “as hot as fire,” and they took haiku in two divergent directions. Hekigodō developed untraditional ideas, promoting “free-rhythm” haiku that ignored the 5-7-5 form and discarded seasonal words, even as Kyoshi stuck to the use of kigo, keeping the form.

  War, at any rate, always excites. After Japan went to war with Russia in February 1904, Segawa Sozan scoured newspapers and magazines throughout the country for haiku dealing with the war and published a collection titled War Haiku (Sensō haiku) almost a year before it ended. Many pieces were written with the casual assumption of Japan’s victory, even while the fighting slogged on to a stalemate. Japan was awarded the victor largely because President Theodore Roosevelt arbitrated the outcome. Still, the victory became a source of enormous pride for the Japanese. Hoshino Bakujin, who had studied haiku with Shiki, celebrated the Battle of Tsushima in a series of eleven haiku ten years later. The battle took place in May 1905, when Japan’s Combined Fleet annihilated Russia’s Baltic Fleet. Among the eleven is this one:

  夏霞敵艦晴れて波高し

  Natsugasumi tekkan harete nami takashi

  In summer haze enemy warships are clear waves high

  This piece incorporates the famous telegram Vice Chief of Staff Akiyama Saneyuki sent upon sighting the Russian fleet: “Although the weather is clear the waves are high.” Bakujin wrote this and other haiku by imagining the scene—“summer haze,” a fine kigo but unlikely that day. None of the other ten pieces described the actualities of war. One wonders: If Bakujin had been aboard one of the warships and seen flesh blown apart, would he have written such cheerfully triumphant haiku?

  Newly Rising Haiku and Kyōdai Haiku

  War came to the fore in the haiku world again three decades later, in the summer of 1937 when Japan suddenly expanded its military activity in China. As one division after another was sent to China, and large numbers of men were drafted and sent to the front, some haiku poets made overt political moves.

  In the December 1937 issue of the monthly Haiku Studies (Haiku kenkyū), Yamaguchi Seishi declared, “If Newly Rising’s nonseasonal haiku does not take up this war, that’s when God will finally give up on it.” In the same month’s issue of Kyōdai Haiku, Saitō Sanki announced as if in sync: “This fierce reality is the most glorious opportunity to magnify what nonseason
al haiku truly is.” By “Newly Rising,” Seishi was referring to the shinkō haiku movement that had started several years earlier, rejecting the required inclusion of seasonal words. Kyōdai Haiku was started by haiku poets associated with the Imperial University of Kyoto, Kyōdai being the acronym of the university. This magazine also pushed for greater freedom and flexibility in haiku subject matter.

  Then the September 1938 issue of Haiku Studies carried a bombshell: An entire war novel, Wheat and Soldier (Mugi to heitai) by Hino Ashihei, was turned into a series of haiku. Hino’s book, a realistic account of Japanese operations west of Shanghai, had become an instant best seller, selling some 1.2 million copies. The trio of Hino Sōjō, Higashi Kyōzō, and Watanabe Hakusen undertook this haiku-ization. Their efforts provoked strong condemnations from some haiku poets who believed that haiku ought to describe what the writer actually saw. But the phrase Sōjō used in describing the haiku-ization process, senka sōbō, “imagining and seeing the fire of war from afar,” captured the war fever nicely. It took off as the name of a category, and it became fashionable to write haiku imagining what might be happening on faraway battlefields.

  Then the November 1938 issue of Haiku Studies devoted itself to a selection of “3,000 haiku on the China Incident.” Half a year later, the April 1939 issue of the same magazine followed with a “new” collection of 3,000 haiku on the same war. Here are just three senka sōbō haiku. The first is by Hirahata Seitō, the second and third by Saitō Sanki:

  軍橋もいま難民の荷にしなふ

  Gunkyō mo ima nanmin no ni ni shinau

  The military bridge now sways with refugees’ loads