by Hiroaki Sato
塹壕に一つ認識票光る
Zangō ni hitotsu ninshikihyō hiraku
In the trench gleams a single identification tag
戦友ヲ葬リピストルヲ天ニ撃ツ
Sen’yū o hōmuri pisutoru o ten ni utsu
Having buried my war buddy I shoot my pistol into heaven
In 1940, a year after the second special issue of Haiku Studies on the Sino-Japanese War was published, Seitō, Sanki, and thirteen other haiku poets were arrested by the “thought police.” This later became known as the Kyōdai Haiku Incident. What crime did the poets commit? In 1925, the government had enacted the Public Safety Preservation Law to suppress Communism. It was quickly expanded to cover anything deemed detrimental to mainstream conservative thought: democracy, liberalism, realism, antiwar sentiments, and, by the time of the arrests, “friendliness” toward the United States and United Kingdom because these countries represented liberalism. Naturally, those of the Newly Rising Haiku movement were regarded as harboring “dangerous thought.”
Actually, as far as “short-poetic-form literature” was concerned, thought suppression had been first directed to the writers of senryū, the branch of haiku that deals with social issues and tends to be satirical. In December 1937, about the time Seishi and Sanki announced the importance of describing war in haiku, the police had arrested some of the contributing members of the magazine Senryū Man (Senryūjin) who wrote pieces such as:
手と足をもいだ丸太にしてかへし
Te to ashi o moida maruta ni shite kaeshi
Returned as logs with arms and legs wrenched off
退却が待ち遠しい銃をかついでいる
Taikyaku ga machidōshii jū o katsuideiru
Can’t wait for a retreat with guns on shoulders
The first piece was by Tsuru Akira, who died of dysentery in prison not long after his arrest. The second was by Nakagawa Kamenbō. We know Nakagawa published a book of senryū titled Sparks (Hibana) in 1987, so he at least survived the police and the war.
Hasegawa Sosei and “Gun-Smoke” Haiku
Among those who were sent to the front and turned what they observed into haiku, Hasegawa Sosei stood out. Takahama Kyoshi, the “flower-bird-wind-moon” man, promoted Sosei’s war haiku through his magazine Hototogisu.
Sosei, whose given name was Naojirō, studied Japanese literature at the Imperial University of Kyoto and, while doing so, took interest in haiku. His pieces appeared in Hototogisu for the first time in 1930. But by then Kyoshi’s approach and power were beginning to ferment resistance among haiku poets, and Sosei must have felt uneasy. In 1933, he, with two dozen others, started Kyōdai Haiku, recruiting Mizuhara Shūōshi and several others as advisers. Yet, as its members’ approach to haiku converged with that of the Newly Rising Haiku movement, Sosei broke off in 1936 and went back to Hototogisu. Shūōshi, who had parted company with Kyoshi in his famous 1931 essay “‘Nature’s Truth’ and ‘Truth in Literary Arts,’”* joined a group in fiercely renouncing the “Newly Rising” designation a few years after it was conferred upon them, even though by then many were writing haiku under the movement.
In 1937, Sosei was called up and commissioned second lieutenant in field artillery. He received the rank because he had been an officer candidate with the Mishima Heavy Artillery Regiment back in 1932. He fought in various parts of China for nearly a year and a half until late 1938, when he, a well-built man, was struck down by tuberculosis and sent back to Japan. Kyoshi published Sosei’s haiku in Hototogisu as he received them from the front. These attracted a good deal of attention, and soon were called shōen haiku, “gun-smoke haiku.” Kyoshi then selected 214 of them, which were published in the spring of 1939 under the title Gun Carriage (Hōsha).
In his preface, Kyoshi noted that these haiku were written by a man who “constantly ducked artillery smoke and raining bullets, struggled with cruel heat and cruel cold, and went through all the suffering of actual battles.” In that respect, he added pointedly, they do not compare with “the haiku of those who stay here and write while imagining battles.”
Let us look at some of the haiku in the order of the places where Sosei was sent as a soldier, starting with Japan.
夏灼くる砲車とともにわれこそ征け
Natsu-yakuru hōsha to tomo ni ware koso yuke
With a summer-scorched gun carriage I myself go
(Japan)
The ending verb yuku (root of yuke, here in the imperative mood for emphasis) implies “go to war” because of the Chinese character Sosei applied.
Here, one might ask: What kind of artillery did Lieutenant Hasegawa’s unit carry? He never mentioned it, but it may well have been a very dated Type 38 howitzer originally made by Krupp for the Russo-Japanese War and later modified somewhat in Japan. In fact, many weapons of the Imperial Japanese Army were awfully dated. It could also have been a Type 94 (US identification) introduced in 1934, a “75mm mountain gun [that] could have been broken into eleven units and transported on six pack horses,” according to S. L. Mayer in The Japanese War Machine.
Hasegawa’s unit crossed the Bohai Bay into China in late fall. As soon as it landed, it fell into a firefight. Then it moved toward Shijiazhuang, southwest of Beijing.
友をはふりなみだせし目に雁たかく
Tomo o hafuri namida seshi me ni kari takaku
A friend interred, in my tearful eyes geese are high
(Hebei)
Then they were ordered to move south, toward Nanjing, the Chinese capital at the time. They “pressed hard on the enemy along the Nanjing National Highway,” the lieutenant notes. From Shijiazhuang to Nanjing it’s 500 miles as the crow flies—a great distance to cover for a military unit encumbered with artillery pieces—and the whole region is covered with lakes, marshes, and rivers, large and small.
焼けあとの壁と冬木とのみの村
Yakeato no kabe to fuyuki no nomi no mura
Burned out: a village only with walls and wintry trees
わが馬をうづむと兵ら枯野掘る
Waga uma o uzumu to hei-ra kareno horu
To bury my horse the soldiers dig the withered field
稲の山にひそめるを刀でひき出だす
Ine no yama ni hisomeru o tō de hiki idasu
Those hiding in a pile of rice plants pulled out with swords
“Changshu falls, Wuxi falls, we destroy Changzhou,” Hasegawa reports. “Pressing hard, we’re finally close to Nanjing, the enemy’s defensive fight ever more stubborn.”
霜おきぬかさなり伏せる濠の屍に
Shimo okinu kasanari fuseru hori no shi ni
Frost settles on piled prone corpses in the moat
(Jiangsu)
On December 13, 1937, “Nanjing finally falls.” The attack on Nanjing resulted in 6,000 Japanese soldiers killed and 8,000 Chinese soldiers killed. But what brought infamy upon the attacks decades after the war were the killings that followed the fall. Through varying fierce debates, estimated numbers of those killed have ranged from 20,000 to 300,000. Whatever its number, what became known as “the Rape of Nanjing” makes us pause when we come to Hasegawa’s haiku with the heading: “For a while we are within Nanjing Castle on guard duty”:
南京を屠りぬ年もあらたまる
Nankin o hofurinu toshi mo aratamaru
Nanjing having been destroyed the year too turns anew
(Nanjing)
Here, Hasegawa probably used hofuru (root of hofurinu) in the sense of “destroy [the enemy],” and it is so translated, but the Chinese character for the verb usually means “to slaughter [something]”—an animal, for example.
I should note that “castle” in the heading of this haiku denotes a very different thing in China. In Japan and Europe, the word may evoke an independent fortress with a d
onjon and such. In China it refers to a whole city protected by high walls. Thus it is often translated as “city.”†
The “Nanjing Castle” haiku was followed by this one:
福寿草掘るとて兵ら野をさがす
Fukujusō horu to te hei-ra no o sagasu
Saying they’ll dig fukujusō soldiers search the field
The wildflower fukujusō (Adonis amurensis) blooms, like the crocus, as soon as it sprouts out of the earth. Its name means “happiness-longevity grass” in Chinese, and its flowering is seen as the felicitous harbinger of spring that guarantees a long life. It resembles the “pheasant’s eye,” though the latter’s flowers are predominantly scarlet, while the fukujusō usually blooms yellow.
Soon afterward, Hasegawa’s unit was taken by transport ship back to northern China, Hebei, “North of the Yellow River.” It was bitterly cold. It was cold even in Jiangnan, “South of the Yangtze River.”
雪に伏し掌あはすかたきにくしと見る
Yuki ni fushi te-awasu kataki nikushi to miru
Prostrate in snow the enemy joins hands I see with hate
This compressed piece depicts the captured enemy prostrate in the snow, his (or their) hands joined in front of his face or above his head, pleading for his life. Singular or plural isn’t indicated in the following either:
雪の上にけもののごとく屠りたり
Yuki no ue ni kemono no gotoku hofuritari
On the snow I slaughtered him as if he were a beast
酷寒にたうべる草もなき土民
Kokkan no tauberu kusa mo naki domin
In the cruel cold without even grass to eat: the natives
いくさゆゑうゑたるものら枯野ゆく
Ikusa yue uetaru mono ra kareno yuku
Because of war the starved saunter the withered field
あはれ民凍てしいひさへ掌に受くる
Aware tami iteshi ii sae te ni ukuru
Piteous people: even frozen rice they receive on palms
食を乞ふかじかめる掌の指をひらき
Shoku o kou kajikameru te no yubi o hiraki
They beg for food opening the frozen hands, fingers
(Hebei)
The last two come from a group of haiku describing the Japanese army’s senbu, “pacification program.” The absurdity of destroying another country, slaughtering its people, and then indulging in the ostentatious attempt to “win the hearts and minds” of the survivors seems never to occur to those who devise such things.
雪の上にうつぶす敵屍銅貨散り
Yuki no ue ni utsubusu tekishi dōka chiri
Facedown on snow an enemy corpse coppers scattered
(Shanxi)
The Japanese military in a foreign land, like the military of any other country, routinely conjured up the existence of “native rats” to hunt down. Lieutenant Hasegawa often led his troops out of his base for that purpose. One night, his company surrounded a village on the northern bank of the Yellow River on the tip that “native rats” were hiding in it and, as he put it in a haiku,
李花咲いて平和な村のすがたなれど
Rika saite heiwa na mura no sugata naredo
Plum blossoms abloom it is a peaceful village however
they attacked it.
おぼろ夜のいくさのあとのしかばねよ
Oboro yo no ikusa no ato no shikabane yo
Under blurry moon in the battle aftermath such corpses
(Hebei)
According to a survivor of the war who once served in the Mishima Artillery Regiment, the battery crew was not allowed to carry guns, so we may assume that the village was destroyed by artillery fire.
Hasegawa Sosei and His “Definitive Edition”
Kyoshi wrote, “Sosei got [from the war], without trying to and with ease, what Shiki ardently sought but could not get.” Sosei certainly did. His close friend, the haiku poet Hashimoto Keiji, reported that “the bodily blow [Sosei] received from the war was tremendous” and, as Sosei moved from hospital to hospital, “his loathing of war became fierce.”
Now seriously ill and with the furies of killing and destruction over, Sosei returned to the lyricism that had characterized his haiku before he was sent to the front. After publishing four more books following Gun Carriage, he selected 323 haiku from those he had written from the summer of 1942 to the spring of 1946 and published them in the collection Calendar Days (Rekijitsu). He divided them into the twenty-four seasonal segments that make up ancient Chinese astronomical observations. Let us look at a couple of them. Here’s one from the section on shōkan, “Small Cold,” which begins around January 5 according to the solar calendar:
日の中のひかりをひいて鴛鴦すすむ
Hi no naka no hikari o hiite oshidori susumu
Pulling the light in the sun mandarin ducks proceed
The next one is from the section on daikan, “Big Cold,” which begins around January 20:
太幹の裏の寒さのしづかなり
Taikan no ura no samusa no shizuka nari
The cold behind the large tree trunk is quiet indeed
The two Chinese characters that begin this haiku, taikan (“large tree trunk”), may be also read futomiki. The last one I’ll cite comes from the section on rittō, “Start of Winter.” It begins around November 8.
あたたかく枯れたるものの日の黄いろ
Atatakaku karetaru mono no hi no kiiro
Things that have warmly withered in the sun’s yellowness
Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945. Sosei died of tuberculosis on October 10, 1946. Expecting his death, he edited a “definitive edition” of his haiku, consisting of 250 pieces. From it, he dropped all the gun-smoke haiku except three, shorn of any of the headings. One of them he had written in the field hospital after being told he’d be sent back to Japan the next day.
明日は發つこころ落葉を手に拾ふ
Asu wa tatsu kokoro ochiba o te ni hirou
Tomorrow departing my heart picks up a fallen leaf by my hand
* * *
* See Shūōshi’s famous essay in Sato’s translation, “‘Nature’s Truth’ and ‘Truth in Literary Arts,’” in Modern Haiku 38, no. 3 (Autumn 2007).
† See the last essay, “Through the Looking Glass.”
From the 2.26 Incident to the Atomic Bombs: Haiku During the Asia-Pacific War
Faubion Bowers, a graduate of Columbia College and the Juilliard School, was on his way to Java to explore the music there when he stopped in Japan and accidentally found kabuki. That was in the late 1930s, a few years before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The war over, Mr. Bowers served under Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers General Douglas MacArthur as his aide-de-camp and personal interpreter, but a few years into the Occupation of Japan (1945–52), he resigned his military commission with the rank of major and moved to a civil section to uncensor some kabuki. For this work, he was later called “the savior of kabuki” and decorated by the Japanese government.
One day in the mid-1990s, he gave me a book by Yūki Shōji, Haiku Tsurezuregusa, published in 1985—Tsurezuregusa being the title of the collection of essays by the fourteenth-century scribbler Yoshida Kenkō that Donald Keene famously translated as Essays in Idleness. Later it occurred to me that, at the time, Bowers had just compiled The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology, an assemblage of English translations of better-known haiku.
This survey was inspired by Yūki Shōji’s book.
Yūki Shōji was a prolific writer of detective stories, but in his youth he studied haiku with Ishida Hakyō at a sanatorium where the haiku poet was battling a lung ailment. Late in his life, he decided to reflect on the first half of his life through the hokku and haiku of a range of writers, which coincid
ed with the turbulent first half of the Shōwa period (1926–89). The result was Haiku Tsurezuregusa.
During the 1930s, censorship became harsh in Japan and, after Japan’s military meddling with China took a serious turn in 1937, it became even harsher. Once the Pacific War started, it was felt best to avoid using even an old, common kigo like karegiku, “withered chrysanthemum,” in print because it might be judged to constitute lèse-majesté as the chrysanthemum was the imperial emblem. Yūki cites Hakyō remembering to note this after the war by quoting a 1931 haiku of Matsumoto Takashi: Karegiku to iisuten ni wa nasakeari—“To just say ‘A withered chrysanthemum’ it’s too sensuous.” Naturally, any critical reference to the war, which was prosecuted in the name of the emperor and was thus called the Holy War, could not hope to see print, unless it was so refracted as to make little sense.
This is in no way to suggest that the majority of the Japanese people, including haiku poets, were against the war. Following the 1930s, when Japan’s imperialistic actions got nowhere in China even as criticisms of foreign powers mounted, the Japanese experienced a collective, if not uneasy, sense of liberation and intoxication when in December 1941 their country attacked a US territory in the Pacific, as well as Dutch and British colonies in Southeast Asia, and won a string of victories during the next couple of months. Such well-known intellectuals as the poet and sculptor Takamura Kōtarō, the tanka poet and psychiatrist Saitō Mokichi, and the painter Fujita Tsuguharu supported the expansion of the war in their works and public pronouncements.
Here, Yūki Shōji mentions the three men I’ve just named to suggest that their support of Japan’s imperialistic expansion may have reflected the collective racial inferiority complex toward Europeans that had afflicted the Japanese ever since the country opened to the West in the mid-nineteenth century. He makes this suggestion even as he quotes a sarcastic comment that Itō Sei jotted down in his diary on hearing the news that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor: “We are destined to be unable to convince ourselves that we are first-rate people in the world except by fighting the first-rate among the whites.” Itō, a novelist, had by then translated Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and a collection of André Gide’s works.