On Haiku

by Hiroaki Sato

  Divine-speed battle-victory: plum blossoms have lagged

  In reaction to the same news, Yamaguchi Seishi wrote:

  国捷てり寒煙高く汽車出で立つ

  Kuni kateri kan’en takaku kisha idetatsu

  Nation victorious: with cold smoke high the train departs

  Seishi’s haiku in English can be read in a sizable selection of his work in Takashi Kodaira and Alfred H. Marks’s translation, The Essence of Modern Haiku: 300 Poems of Seishi Yamaguchi, but this piece doesn’t appear in it, possibly because Seishi—who worked with the translators on the selection—didn’t want to include it. After Japan’s defeat, many writers tried to bury their wartime compositions that celebrated Japan’s “holy war.”

  The initial string of “divine-speed” victories soon proved misleading. The war dragged on. Suiha wrote:

  長期戦菊は斯く咲き斯く匂ふ

  Chōkisen kiku wa kaku saki kaku niou

  Protracted battle: the chrysanthemum blooms thus, smells thus

  The next haiku comes with a headnote, “Paying My Respects to Yasukuni Shrine”:

  十二月八日の冴えに退りけり

  Jūnigatsu yōka no sae ni shisarikeri

  December the Eighth lucid I have stepped back

  Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor started at 7:55 on the morning of December 7, 1941, Hawaii time. In Japan, it was early December 8. That day was celebrated in Japan until their defeat.

  いくさ深しすめらみくには薺粥

  Ikusa fukashi sumera mi-kuni wa nazuna-gayu

  Deep into battle: in the empire shepherd’s purse gruel

  Nazuna (Capsella bursa-pastoris), “shepherd’s purse,” is treated as a common weed in the United States and elsewhere, but in Japan it has been counted among the “seven grasses (wildflowers) of spring” and eaten during the New Year. Suiha used a classical, old-fashioned, even reverential word for ikusa, “battle,” “the army.” In this haiku, did he imply some irony in eating a humble plant during the growing food shortages?

  雪もよひ銃後に白魚いでにけり

  Yuki moyoi jūgo ni shirauo idenikeri

  On the home front suggestive of snow the icefish is out

  Shirauo (Salangidae), “white fish” (icefish), is small, almost transparent while alive, but turns white when dead or cooked. The Japanese began to value the fish as a spring delicacy during the Edo period (1603–1868). However, Bashō’s famous hokku on the same fish—“At daybreak the white fish is white just an inch”—was not meant to praise its taste but to mark its delicate appearance.

  The next haiku also comes with a headnote, “Yamazaki Unit”:

  アッツ桜と呼びなして死せり明易き

  Attsu zakura to yobinashite shiseri ake-yasuki

  Calling “Attu Cherry Blossoms” they died: day breaks early

  The Yamazaki Unit was a 2,500-man force commanded by Colonel Yamazaki Yasuyo, who was charged with the defense of Attu, one of the Aleutian Islands and the largest in the Near Islands group. The US forces, eight times as large, began landing there on May 12, 1943, and by the end of the month, the entire Yamazaki Unit had been wiped out. On May 31, the Japanese press exalted the unit for fighting to the last soldier rather than surrendering, as a noble embodiment of the Japanese military spirit, using the ancient Chinese word gyokusai (yusui), “shattering like a jewel.” Ake-yasushi, “day breaks early,” is a summer kigo. The syllabic formation of this piece is 7-8-5.

  In contrast, the 5,500 soldiers deployed on Kiska, another Aleutian island, were successfully evacuated on July 29, 1943. When the US forces started pounding the island in early August, not a single Japanese soldier was left on it. This operation, which followed the retreat of more than 12,000 men from Guadalcanal in February 1943, was only one of a few such retreats the Japanese military was able to execute in the face of an overwhelming enemy. The Shōwa emperor met Rear Admiral Kimura Masatomi, who had played the main role in the rescue mission, to express the country’s gratitude. The press, however, treated it more or less as an embarrassment, and its exaltation of gyokusai would grow more frequent as the war worsened for Japan.

  短夜や地図には小さき血の孤島

  Mijikayo ya chizu niwa chiisaki chi no kotō

  Short night: on the map it is a tiny bloody solitary isle

  Mijikayo, “short night,” is another summer kigo.

  In the early hours of March 10, 1945, Tokyo was hit by the most destructive air raid of the Second World War. Involving a total of 334 B-29s, the raid, lasting just three hours and twenty-two minutes, burned up 100,000 people and rendered 1,000,000 homeless. Air raids on that metropolis did not begin or end with that one. Excluding the Doolittle Raid on April 18, 1942, the Tokyo air raids started on November 24, 1944, and ended only after Japan’s surrender.

  Suiha’s next haiku comes with the headnote “Leaving Tokyo on the First of April”:

  大戦生きて妻子の影麗ら

  Ō-ikusa ikite saishi no kage urara

  Surviving the great war wife and child’s shadows balmy

  Urara, “balmy,” is a kigo for spring. Was Suiha still supportive of the war?

  The headnote for the next one is “The End of the War”:

  二日月神州狭くなりにけり

  Futsuka-zuki Shinshū semaku narinikeri

  Under a two-day moon the Divine State has really shrunk

  One of the Allied Powers’ conditions for Japan’s “unconditional surrender” was the abandonment of all the colonies and other territories Japan controlled through international agreements or otherwise since the end of the nineteenth century. Shinshū, “Divine State,” like Shinkoku, “Divine Nation,” is the honorific that the Japanese used to apply to their country at least since the fourteenth century. As a kigo, the “two-day moon” is assigned to the eighth lunar month, which means Suiha wrote this haiku toward the end of September that year.

  Fubasami Fusae began to write haiku in elementary school. In the first haiku below, ippen no kami, “a slip of paper,” refers to a draft notice, also called akagami, “red paper.” This haiku apparently describes the experience when her husband received the notice, a dreaded moment for an ordinary citizen.

  炎天の一片の紙人間の上に

  Enten no ippen no kami hito no ue ni

  Under burning sky a slip of paper on a human

  夜濯ぎの水に涙ははばからず

  Yo susugi no mizu ni namida wa habakarazu

  Night-laundering I shed tears in the water unrestrained

  征く父に抱かれ睡れりあせもの児

  Yuku chichi ni dakare nemureri asemo no ko

  Held by father to war a child with heat rashes asleep

  鶴ばかり折つて子とゐる秋時雨

  Tsuru bakari otte ko to iru aki shigure

  I fold only cranes with my child in the autumn shower

  Origami cranes are made to express a prayer for peace.

  還り来し父に馴れ初む花火かな

  Kaerikoshi chichi ni naresomu hanabi kana

  Beginning to get used to returned father: fireworks

  Here, one can clearly see the kind of compression commonly employed in haiku. The one beginning to get used to the father who has returned alive from the war refers to the couple’s child.

  Fusae kept up her great haiku spirit to a ripe old age. In 2013 she won the prestigious Dakotsu Prize for her selection White Horse (Hakuku) at age ninety-nine, thus becoming the oldest person ever to win a haiku prize. The title of the book, she explained, comes from a passage in the Taoist classic Zhuangzi: “A man lives between Heaven and Earth only for a second, like a white horse passing the crack [between doors].”

  Hayashibara Raisei studied English with Natsume Sōseki at the Imperial University o
f Tokyo before becoming a novelist. Apparently, he had always aspired to become a novelist but spent much of his professional life working as a professor of English, unable to write a worthy novel. He began writing haiku in 1907 and wrote a good many of them while teaching in Taiwan for several years beginning in 1925. In the 1930s he wrote essays on the importance of “rhythm and melody in haiku,” a subject to which he returned two decades later.

  夏夜空映し出すものみな敵機

  Natsu yozora utsushidasu mono mina tekki

  In summer night sky all that’s lit up are enemy planes

  生き残れり蕎麦蒔けばはや花となり

  Ikinokoreri soba makeba haya nana to nari

  Survived: the buckwheat I sowed already flowering

  焼け跡のともしび殖えぬ初嵐

  Yakeato no tomoshibi fuenu hatsu-arashi

  In the burned-out land lamps increase in the first storm

  Hatsu-arashi, “first storm,” refers to a strong wind that precedes the autumn typhoon season. The war ended in August, the last month of the summer.

  At first a teacher at a normal school and later a librarian, Takeshita Shizunojo stressed the importance of “self-awareness” in haiku. She had two sons and three daughters, and wrote the first of the following in 1937, evidently for one of her sons.

  たゞならぬ世に待たれ居て卒業す

  Tadanaranu yo ni matareite sotsugyō-su

  Awaited by the unusual world he graduates

  征く吾子に月明の茄子もぎ炊ぐ

  Yuku ako ni getsumei no nasu mogi kashigu

  For my child going to war I pick and cook moonlit eggplants

  まつくらき部屋の障子に凭れ居し

  Makkuraki heya no shōji ni motare ishi

  In the pitch-dark room I remain leaning on a shōji

  Watanabe Hakusen was employed by a publishing house after graduating from Keiō University in 1936. Two years later he published a series of 116 “war haiku” that were highly critical of Japan’s 1937 military expansion in China. In 1940 he became one of the fifteen haiku poets arrested and jailed in the Kyōdai Haiku Incident, the government’s step to repress the Newly Rising movement. Ordered not to write and publish haiku, he turned his attention to a study of classical hokku.

  The use of colloquialism and the syllabic formation that barely scans convey his sense of frustration and derision.

  憲兵の前で滑って転んぢゃった

  Kenpei no mae de subette koronjatta

  In front of an MP I slipped and fell blap

  Kenpei, the military police, was patterned after that of France and, under the direct control of the army minister, held military, administrative, and judicial powers. Along with the Special Higher Police (tokubetsu kōtō keisatsu) or “thought police,” the Kenpei was regarded as the dreaded arm of repression.

  雪の街畜生馬鹿野郎斃つちまえ

  Yuki no machi chikushō bakayarō kutabatchimae

  This snowy town dammit motherfucker go fuck yourself

  戦争が廊下の奥で立ってゐた

  Sensō ga rōka no oku ni tatteita

  War was standing at the hall’s end

  銃後という不思議な町を丘で見た

  Jūgo to iu fushigina machi o oka de mita

  On a hill I saw a mysterious town called Home Front

  In June 1944, Hakusen was drafted into the Marine Corps of the Navy in Yokosuka. In the following haiku, he makes fun of the practice of the Japanese military replacing common words with difficult ones, be it with hard-sounding words or with difficult Chinese characters:

  襯衣袴下番兵凍る洗濯日

  Shatsu koshita banpei kōru sentaku-bi

  The shirts long johns sentries freeze on laundry day

  Here, shatsu, “shirt,” which is normally written in katakana (or hiragana) syllabary, is given the Chinese characters shin’i, “that which is worn close to the skin,” and zubonshita, “long johns,” is replaced by koshita, “that which is worn under the pants”—thus making them appear authoritarian and intimidating. It is also worth noting that the Japanese military rarely used hot water except for cooking and bathing.

  夏の海水平ひとり紛失す

  Natsu no umi suihei hitori funshitsusu

  In the summer sea a single sailor went missing

  Hakusen wrote a sequence of eleven haiku after his unit was attacked by a fleet of Grummans.

  死角よりグラマンの顔迫り来る

  Shikaku yori Guraman no kao semarikuru

  From dead angle a Grumman’s face presses upon me

  戦争はうるさし煙し叫びたし

  Sensō wa urusashi kemushi sakebitashi

  The war is noisy smoky I want to scream

  友の血よ噴け八方へとびかかれ

  Tomo no chi yo fuke happō e tobikakare

  Friend’s blood, spurt, pounce in eight directions

  血の甲板に青き冷たき夕暮来

  Chi no dekki ni aoki tsumetaki yūgure ku

  To the deck of blood comes a twilight limpid cold

  It was while Hakusen was stationed in Hakodate, Hokkaidō, that Japan surrendered. The emperor himself made the surrender announcement on the radio at noon on August 15, 1945, by reading “the Imperial Edict ending the Greater East Asian War.” The Japanese had been told to listen to “the gravely important broadcast” in advance, and it was aired not just throughout Japan but to all the colonies and places where Japanese military units were located. But the radio broadcast conditions were poor. The emperor also spoke in a special classical language reserved for imperial edicts, so most people did not understand much of whatever they could hear. His broadcast was called gyokuon, “the jewel sound.”

  玉音を理解せし者前に出よ

  Gyokuon o rikai seshi mono mae ni deyo

  Those who understood the Jewel Sound, step forward

  Although Hakusen took part in the formation of the Modern Haiku Association in 1947, he ended up not publishing a selection of his haiku before his death. In 1975 his haiku were assembled and published in two volumes, the main volume with all the pieces in his own handwriting in ink and brush that he had prepared before his death and the supplementary one with uncollected pieces.

  Kubota Mantarō was better known as a novelist, playwright, and stage director than as a haiku poet, and insisted that haiku was no more than a hobby for him. For one thing, he was one of the three founders of the influential theatrical troupe Bungaku-za in 1937. And yet he maintained a sizable presence in the haiku world, and even established his own haiku magazine Spring Lamp (Shuntō) in 1946.

  うちてしやまむうちてしやまむ心凍つ

  Uchiteshi yamamu ichiteshi yamamu kokoro itsu

  Will smite and stop will smite and stop my heart freezes

  Uchiteshi yamamu, “will smite and stop,” is a phrase that occurs in several “songs” in the Record of Ancient Matters (Kojiki), the semi-mythological history of Japan compiled in 712 and Japan’s oldest extant book. It means, “We won’t stop fighting until we’ve destroyed the enemy.” The government adopted this expression as a slogan to mark Army Day on March 10, 1943. In this haiku, Mantarō implies his criticism of the adaptation of this ancient phrase partly through an orthographic change: normally the phrase is written with a mixture of Chinese characters (撃ちてし止まむ), rather than all in hiragana as in the haiku above, which makes it softer, less “menacing,” and accordingly more “derisive” in this context. As the manager of a patriotic literary group at the time, it is doubtful he published this haiku during the war.

  The first American air raid on Tokyo that I mentioned earlier was carried out on April 18, 1942, by sixteen B-25s led by Colonel James Doolittle. The second time the United States bo
mbed Tokyo, on November. 24, 1944, they used eighty B-29s. Thereafter, air raids did not let up until Japan surrendered. On August 14, according to Faubion Bowers, knowing that Japan’s surrender would be announced the next day, the United States displayed the biggest bang, with 1,000 bombers and fighters swarming over Japan.

  柊の花や空襲警報下

  Hiiragi no hana ya kūshū keihō-ka

  Holly blossoms under another air-raid alarm

  Hiiragi (Osmanthus heterophyllus), “false holly,” has small, delicate blossoms despite its thick, leathery leaves with spine-tipped teeth. It is a winter kigo. Mantarō probably wrote this toward the end of 1944.

  He wrote the following haiku with the headnote, “At dawn on May 24, an air raid, and my house burned down”:

  みじか夜の劫火の末にあけにけり

  Mijikayo no gōka no sue ni akenikeri

  Short night: after the hell fire the day breaks

  The number of B-29s flown on this air raid was even larger than on March 10, with 525 of them deployed. The raid destroyed 65,000 houses, including Mantarō’s. Gōka (also kōka) is the fire that destroys the entire world, in Buddhist belief. The raid the next day deployed 470 B-29s and destroyed 16,600 houses. In June Mantarō’s father died, followed by his mother’s death in July.

  The novelist Nagai Kafū noted in his diary on December 31, 1944: “At ten o’clock at night there was an air raid alarm. At once all clear. Past midnight alarm again. Sounds of guns incessant. Thus ends the nineteenth year of Shōwa [1944] and a disheartening New Year is about to come. There has been nothing like this since the birth of our nation. All this is the doing of the military men.” So how about the military men?

  Many servicemen could turn out tanka and haiku. Among them, Rear Admiral Ichimaru Rinosuke, one of the commanders of the Japanese defenders of Iwo Jima, was a tanka poet. In fact, he published enough tanka in magazines for his daughter Haruko to collect and publish albeit sixty-one years after his death, in 2006.

  Today, Ichimaru may be far less known than Lieutenant General Kuribayashi Tadamichi, the protagonist of Clint Eastwood’s film Letters from Iwo Jima. But Ichimaru, who was assigned to the volcanic, sulfurous island as commander of the navy’s Twenty-seventh Air Flotilla (with only a few aircraft at his disposal at that stage), was once better known in the States than Kuribayashi. Before his death in March 1945, Ichimaru had written a letter addressed to President Franklin Roosevelt and had it translated into English by his Nisei aide. A US Marine found the letter, and it was published in the New York Herald Tribune, among other newspapers, in July 1945. In 1971, John Toland reproduced it in The Rising Sun.