by Hiroaki Sato
Still, the three men may have differed greatly from one another in their reactions to the West and Westerners. Takamura, who studied sculpture in New York (with Gutzon Borglum of Mount Rushmore fame) and Paris, and Saitō, who studied psychiatry in Vienna and Munich, may have suffered from an inferiority complex in one way or another, but Fujita didn’t seem to feel anything of the sort. He traveled to Paris in 1913 to study painting in what was considered the mecca of the art world at the time; hobnobbed with the likes of Modigliani, Picasso, and Soutine; married two Frenchwomen; and was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government and the Belgian Order of Leopold in 1925. In 1933, back in Japan, he painted scenes of war, and when he was accused of being a collaborationist after Japan’s defeat, he moved back to France in 1949 and naturalized there, never to return to Japan.
Saitō Sanki had an unusual career as a haiku poet. For one thing, he didn’t get into haiku until almost his mid-thirties. For another, living in Singapore from the end of 1925 to the end of 1928, made him feel like a “ghostly étranger” when he returned to Tokyo. While there, in the British colony where Asians, Europeans, and Middle Easterners mixed, Sanki became so entranced with “the country of frankincense and myrrh right under the equator” as he wandered around town with friends from Baghdad and Alexandria that he thought of abandoning his Japanese nationality to settle down there permanently. In the end, he didn’t have the courage to do it, partly because the Japanese military action in Jinan, between Beijing and Shanghai, in 1928 turned Singaporean residents against Japanese products, making it impossible for ordinary Japanese to live there even as Sanki worked as a dentist. This background made him approach the haiku, “the pearl of the Orient” as he called it, not with traditional respect but as “an epicurean bohemian,” “a self-exile” within his own country, the haiku commentator Yamamoto Kenkichi noted.
Once he got into haiku, in his thirties, Sanki “was called the standard-bearer of the Newly Rising Haiku movement,” or so he wrote in his Biography of Haiku Foolery (Haiguden). What “newly rising haiku” meant, in fact, shifted over less than a decade during the 1930s when it existed, from the practice of composing a group of haiku on a single subject (rensaku) rather than that of composing each haiku as an independent entity, to “modernization,” and to the abandonment of seasonal words. But the movement was originally touched off in reaction to “the strongly binding guidance policy of Takahama Kyoshi,” who held unparalleled power over the haiku world through his magazine Hototogisu, which Sanki asserted “was the haiku world.”
Let us look at some Sanki pieces chronologically from his first book, Flag (Hata), published in 1940, which sold out immediately. Among the 209 haiku included in it is a 1935 piece:
聖燭祭工人ヨセフ我が愛す
Seishokusai kōjin Yosefu wa ga aisu
The Candlemas craftsman Joseph I love
From 1936:
水兵と砲彈の夜を熱たかし
Suihei to hōdan no yo wo netsu takashi
On the night with sailors and artillery shells fever high
And from 1939:
機關銃眉間ニ赤キ花ガ咲ク
Kikanjū mayuma ni akaki hana ga saku
Machine gun: between his eyebrows a red flower blooms
機關銃闇ノ黄砂ヲ噴キ散ラス
Kikanjū yami no ōsa o fukichirasu
A machine gun sputters out yellow dust in darkness
捕虜共の飯食へる顏顏撮られ
Horyodomo no meshi kueru kao kao torare
POWs eating meal faces each face filmed
These haiku antagonized “traditional” haiku poets. As Sanki noted, those who stuck to “birds and flowers expected people to turn out, without any reflection, ‘national-spirit-total-mobilization’ haiku that would please the military.” Haiku with cinematic descriptions of war especially provoked conservatives; they dismissed them as “fiction” and “inexcusable to the soldiers in battlefield” because these and similar haiku—by Sanki and others—were written by people who had not fought in the war. Indeed, Sanki made that clear by putting some of these pieces under the group heading “Newsreels.”
At any rate, the conservatives had the upper hand. They even suggested that the disregard of kigo itself led to the denial of the emperor system (at the time the emperor was held to be sacrosanct). One reason for downgrading the requirement of kigo in haiku was for “realism,” but such “realism” was tantamount to “socialist realism.” Anything out of line was “liberal,” i.e., democratic, “pro-US and UK.” The army minister pronounced in the Diet, “Liberalism is the hotbed of communism.” It was to eradicate communism and uphold capitalism that the Public Security Preservation Law had been strengthened in 1925.
The arrest and imprisonment of Sanki and others that began in February 1940 spelled the demise of the Newly Rising Haiku movement.
For all this, the first Sanki haiku that Yūki Shōji highlighted in his book bears little direct link to any of that. In fact, Yūki made it clear that he didn’t care for Sanki’s early pieces. The one he chose to highlight instead is from Sanki’s second book of haiku, Peach of the Night (Yoru no momo), published in 1948, three years after the war was over.
雪の上に雪降ることのやはらかく
Yuki no ue ni yuki furu koto no yawarakaku
The way the snow falls upon the snow so soft
Yūki cited this piece apparently because the snow made him think of the 2.26 Incident—the revolt of units from four army regiments on February 26, 1936, which started with a series of assassinations of high-ranking government officials. The revolt was soon brought under control: the Shōwa emperor Hirohito, whom the insurgents called on to take over as ruler, rejected that notion outright. Still, it was another lurid manifestation of the military running amok in Japan. In fact, historians hold that the 2.26 Incident—or, rather, how the military responded internally to the incident—triggered “the decline and fall of the Japanese Empire,” to use the subtitle of John Toland’s massive account of Japan’s war against the West, The Rising Sun.
As it happened, the day of the revolt occurred on the night that the heaviest snow in thirty years fell in Tokyo. Sanki, ill in bed, wrote in his remembrances that Watanabe Hakusen and another haiku poet came to visit that afternoon, covered with snow, telling him what they’d seen and heard on their way through the middle of Tokyo. But he didn’t make any indication that his snow haiku published after the war had any link to that day or the incident.
To digress somewhat, Yūki’s choice of this haiku to discuss something not overtly related to the matter at hand reminds us that haiku’s brevity and lack of specificity often lets the reader imagine things that have little to do with what the writer might have intended to convey. Conversely, it lets the writer to make his piece suggest what it may barely be able to imply. I once wrote about this problem in relation to Sanki’s haiku about Hiroshima. When a substantial selection of Sanki’s prose sketches and haiku—four hundred of the latter—appeared in The Kobe Hotel, translated by Saitō Masaya (no relation to Saitō Sanki), I reviewed it and wrote:
The sketches include some that explain the circumstances of the composition of certain haiku. One of them reminds us—if that is needed at this late date—how difficult it is to pack meanings into a single haiku and make that piece understandable on its own. It has to do with Hiroshima ya tamago kū toki kuchi hiraku, “Hiroshima: when I eat an egg my mouth opens.” A year after the atomic bombing, Sanki happens to find himself in the city on a “pitch-black” night. Saitō Masaya translates:
Sitting on a stone by the side of the road, I took out a boiled egg and slowly peeled the shell, unexpectedly shocked by the smooth surface of the egg. With a flash of searing incandescence, the skins of human beings had as easily slipped off all over this city. To eat a boiled egg in the wind of that black night, I was forced to open my mouth.
In that moment, this haiku came to me:
Hiroshima—
to eat a boiled egg,
the mouth opens.
By reading this haiku by itself, how many readers can guess the ghastly chill that the poet might have tried to have it convey?
The original of this haiku (ヒロシマや卵食ふとき口開く: Hiroshima ya tamago kū toki kuchi hiraku), with the prose explanation of the circumstances of its writing, appeared in Sequel Kobe (Zoku Kōbe), a series of five essays Sanki wrote for the haiku magazine Heaven’s Wolf (Tenrō) in 1959, which followed Kobe, a series of ten essays he had written for Haiku magazine from 1954 to 1955. In these he recalled the comings and goings of certain oddball characters in an apartment hotel, then in a “Western mansion,” in Kobe, during the war and the few immediate postwar years. The haiku quoted above was originally one of eight poems, all beginning with “Hiroshima” under the heading “The Famous Town.” The eight pieces as a group had been printed in a magazine, but Sanki did not include them in his second selection of haiku for fear of Occupation censorship that continued for several years after Japan’s defeat. The censorship of the effects of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incidentally, has been variously documented and described over the years.*
Regardless of censorship, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may not have led to the immediate writing of haiku for the obvious reasons of the devastation and shock. Shimomura Hiroshi, a physician who lived in Nagasaki all his life and dealt with many victims of the bomb, is thought to have composed haiku about the aftermath some time after the blast. Here are two of them:
水乞ひし人は屍や西日没り
Mizu koishi hito wa kabana ya nishibi iri
The one who begged water now a corpse: westerly sun sets
炎天の躯を運ぶ塵芥車
Enten no mukuro o hakobu jinkaisha
Carrying cadavers under burning sky a garbage cart
Unlike Sanki, Katayama Tōshi was drafted, twice; he didn’t survive his second tour. Tōshi had been working at a bank when he was sent to the front lines in China, in 1937. While in the war zone, he wrote a good many haiku describing what he saw. When he returned to Japan, he gathered his haiku—including the pieces he’d written before he was sent to the front—and published his selection in Northern Corps (Hoppō heidan), in 1940. A year later, Tōshi was drafted again. Then in early 1944 he was killed while fighting in East New Guinea. His haiku and letters from the front were assembled and published in 1983. Yūki tells us that Tōshi wrote the following haiku while deployed in China:
我を撃つ敵と劫暑を倶にする
Ware o utsu teki to gōsho o tomoni seru
With the enemy shooting at me I share the furious heat
ひと死にて慰問袋の独楽まひ澄む
Hito shinite imon-bukuro no koma mai sumu
He died and his care package top spins into serenity
冷雨なり二三は遺骨胸に吊る
Reiu nari nisan wa ikotsu mune ni tsuru
Cold rain: two, three carry the bones on their chests
Whenever possible, a Japanese soldier who died on the front was cremated, his ashes (literally, “remaining bones” in Japanese) placed in an unpainted wooden box, and one of his comrades carried the box home by means of a sash slung around the neck.
難民の駱駝秋風より高し
Nanmin no rakuda akikaze yori takashi
Refugees’ camels taller than the autumn wind
This haiku suggests that Tōshi’s unit may have gone as far as Mongolia. The association of the autumn sky (or wind) with height comes originally from a passage in The Book of Hang describing the Xiongnu Eurasian nomads: “Among the Xiongnu, come autumn, horses grow fat, and they take up bows and invade our fortresses.” Later, Du Shenyan, a poet of early Tang dynasty, wrote a poem with the line: “In autumn the sky is high; northern horses grow fat.”
飢餓うすれ陽炎重く眠りたる
Kiga usure kagerō omoku nemuritaru
Starvation receding heat haze heavy as I sleep
木の葉落つおちて吹かれぬ歩くは兵
Ki no ha otsu ochite fukarenu aruku wa hei
Leaves fall and fallen are blown: the soldiers walk
Describing the war zone in these terms did not provoke censorship. In this respect, Tōshi’s work is sometimes compared with Hasegawa Sosei’s “gun-smoke” haiku.
Mitsuhashi Takajo was born into a family that had produced several tanka poets. She, too, wrote tanka, but switched to haiku after marrying Azuma Kenzō, a dentist who also wrote haiku. Yūki cites the following haiku of hers with a caveat, “It may be rude to say ‘Even women,’” because it shows the writer was “full of fighting spirit and pugnacious.”
爆撃機に乗りたし梅雨のミシン踏めり
Bakugeki-ki ni noritashi tsuyu no mishin fumeri
I’d ride a bomber; I treadle the rainy season sewing machine
As Yūki points out, of course, organizations existed like the Women’s Patriotic Association and the National Defense Women’s Association. The two bodies, founded thirty years apart, were different in nature and purpose, and their activities, such as fund-raising for soldiers on the streets, grew conspicuous as Japan’s war with China expanded during the 1930s. So there were many women who voiced warlike sentiments.
When did Takajo write this haiku? It appeared in the section “The Moth (1937–1938)” of her first book, Sunflower (Himawari), published in 1940. At the time, the Japanese navy’s “transoceanic bombings” were all over the news. First carried out on August 14, 15, and 16 in 1937, the bombers flew from Taipei to Hangzhou, to Nanjing, and to Nanchang; the press touted the bombing runs as a sensational technological feat, the round-trip distances roughly 1,000 miles. The main targets of the bombings changed as Chiang Kai-shek moved China’s capital from Nanjing to Hankou to Chongqing, with the bombings ending in August 1943. Meanwhile, the indiscriminate bombings provoked worldwide criticism.
The heading for a single haiku by Takajo simply says, “The Fire of War Expands”:
曼珠沙華咲いてまつくれなゐの秋
Manjushage saite makkurenai no aki
Red spider lilies blooming deadly scarlet the fall
“Red spider lilies” (Lycoris radiata) are traditionally associated with the dead in Japan.
The bomber haiku is part of a small group of four haiku called “Thistles in the Rainy Season” within “The Moth.” Here is another one:
戦争はかなし簾を垂れて書く
Sensō wa kanashi sudare o tarete kaku
The war is sad; with a blind down I write
From the context, Takajo seems to have been writing letters to soldiers on the front that would be sent with a care package.
Takajo’s book also included a group of three haiku called “The Great Festival of the Yasukuni Shrine” in the title section, “The Sunflower: 1930–40.” The Yasukuni Shrine was built to honor the war dead in 1869, following the civil war in the wrenching transition from the Tokugawa shogunate to the Meiji regime. The “great festival” at the shrine is held every year in spring and in autumn. Here are two of the three haiku:
遺児の列長し春塵木々に舞ふ
Iji no retsu nagashi shunjin kigi ni mau
Orphans’ line long: spring dust dances in the trees
英霊の母ぞ春塵瞳にくるめき
Eirei no haha zo shunjin me ni kurumeki
Heroic souls’ mothers: in spring dust their eyes dizzied
Eirei, “heroic soul,” was a word for someone killed in battle.
Takajo published her second selection of haiku, The Fin of a Fish (Uo no hire), in 1941. It has this piece:
黒猫もいたく夏痩せ我が家に
Kuroneko mo itaku nat
suyase waga ie ni
The black cat too is painfully summer-thin in my house
Natsuyase, “summer-thin,” reflects the observation that during the summer in Japan, one loses weight because the heat and humidity causes a loss of appetite. But this haiku also suggests the worsening food shortages that were affecting the Japanese population even before Japan’s multifront attack in December 1941.
Watanabe Suiha, the son of a famous Japanese-style “flower and bird” painter, spent his entire adult life simply writing, teaching, and editing haiku. His haiku about the war were positive, so that they probably won hearty approval from the military and police censors.
シンガポール落ちぬ春燈朝の如し
Shingapōru ochinu shuntō asa no gotoshi
Singapore has fallen: the spring lamp morninglike
The fall of “the most strategically important base in the British Empire”—as G. Herwig called it in his article for the Berliner Tageblatt, later translated as “Sights Seen in Singapore” in the September 1934 issue of The Living Age—occurred on Sunday, February 15, 1942, when Lieutenant General A. E. Percival, the commander of the garrison, surrendered. Yūki remembered the excitement at the news of the victory. The next day at his junior high school’s weekly morning assembly, Yuki tells us that the principal, a former colonel, suddenly took off his jacket at the podium and, ordering the 2,000 students gathered to follow him, proceeded to stab his arms up and down, repeatedly, each time with a shout.
From that day to the end of March, the Japanese army in Singapore rounded up a large number of “overseas Chinese” deemed to be “anti-Japanese elements” and shot many of them dead, dumping them off the coast, into the sea. Not knowing about any of this, Suiha used shuntō, “spring lamp,” a relatively new kigo that suggests a warm, sensual atmosphere. The next haiku was composed on the same occasion:
神速の戦捷に梅花遅れたり
Jinsoku no senshō ni baika okuretari