On Haiku

by Hiroaki Sato

  Here’s one of Ichimaru’s tanka:

  洞に臥す兵は地熱に冴えられてとかく熟睡のとりえぬ恨み

  Hora ni fusu hei wa jinetsu ni saerarete tokaku umai no torieenu urami

  Soldiers lying in the cave kept awake by the ground heat can’t have deep sleep in any way accursed

  Lieutenant General Kuribayashi rejected the “water’s-edge” tactic that had lost so many soldiers during battles till then in the Allied Powers’ island-hopping strategy in approaching Japan. He opted instead to dig in and fight out of caves and tunnels, of which Iwo Jima (“Sulfur Island”), with an active volcano, was full. That may have been an effective fighting method, but it forced the Japanese soldiers to suffer from the odor of the sulfur dioxide gas and volcanic underground heat when not out fighting and getting killed. During the battle, which lasted just over a month, most of the more than 20,000 defenders were killed, along with 7,000 American soldiers.

  Kuribayashi, though a gifted writer in school, was not a tanka poet but left three tanka as farewell-to-the-world poems. The last one reads:

  醜草の島に蔓るその時の皇国の行手一途に思ふ

  Shikogusa no shima ni hakoberu sono toki no Kōkoku no yukute ichizu ni omō

  Of the very moment when the ugly grasses vine over the isle, I think only of that future of the Empire

  The Japanese regarded Iwo Jima as the last bulwark against all-out assaults on Japan proper by US bombers, but by the time the battle started on February 19, 1945, B-29s were already raining bombs across the Japanese archipelago.

  Vice Admiral Ugaki Matome, who took part in all the major battles in the Pacific from the start to the end, sprinkled a few haiku here and there in his detailed chronicle of the war, Sensō roku. The word sensō here is a pun on Chinese characters, so it may sound like “war” but actually means “war seaweed/trash.” When Ugaki started his diary on October 16, 1941, he wrote that his diary would be trash. Despite his self-deprecation, his diary is regarded as one of the most important Japanese records of the battle to come out of the Pacific War.

  In his last post as commander in chief of the Fifth Air Fleet, he executed the navy’s last major “special attack” tactic, commonly known as the “kamikaze attack.” On March 11, 1945, the day he sent off twenty- four fighters for that purpose from Kanoya Base, Kagoshima, heading toward Okinawa, Ugaki wrote in his diary: “In recent times, when a commando unit [i.e., a special force] departs, I’ve come to be able to send it off, giving a farewell, without pain, with a smile, but that doesn’t mean I’ve become thick-skinned. I myself have already gone into and come out of crisis often. [I can remain unperturbed] because I’m resolved that someday I, too, will follow these young men.” And he wrote down three haiku:

  特攻の出で立つ朝や春霞

  Tokkō no idetatsu asa ya harugasumi

  The morning a special force departs in spring haze

  薩摩富士晴れて特攻見送れり

  Satsuma Fuji harete tokkō miokureru

  Satsuma Fuji clear I’ve sent off a special force

  春霞棚引く中の殺気かな

  Haru-gasumi tanabiku naka no sakki kana

  Amid spring haze trailing a killing intent

  Satsuma Fuji is Mount Kaimon, a volcano at the southern end of Satsuma Peninsula, west of Kanoya across the Kagoshima Bay. It is cone-shaped like Mount Fuji.

  On August 15, Ugaki listened to the Imperial announcement and wrote in his diary: “The radio conditions were bad and, with due awesome respect [to His Majesty], I was unable to make out its content, but I surmised it over all.” He then led a special force squadron, never to return.

  On the night of the surrender, Vice Admiral Ōnishi Takijirō, who had first employed special force tactics in the Battle of Leyte in the fall of 1944, disemboweled himself without a “second” to behead him as soon as he ripped his stomach, and he did so to prolong his own agony. Ivan Morris details his death in his book The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan. Ōnishi left behind a testament in which he apologized for sending so many young men to death. He also left two haiku:

  すがすがし暴風のあとに月清し

  Sugasugashi bōfū no ato no tsuki kiyoshi

  Refreshing: after a violent storm the moon’s clear

  これでよし百万年の仮寝かな

  Kore de yoshi hyakuman-nen no karine kana

  All’s done: a catnap for a million years

  When the war ended, Kubota Mantarō wrote:

  何もかもあっけらかんと西日中

  Nani mo kamo akkerakan to nishibi-naka

  All gone nothing left to say in the westerly sun

  Nishibi, “the westerly sun,” a term that the physician Shimomura also used, is a summer kigo. The day Japan surrendered, it was a bright, clear, hot day in burned-out Tokyo.

  Faubion Bowers knew Mantarō well. After teaching English at the Hōsei University for a year and absorbing kabuki, he returned, via Java, to the States. He joined the Military Intelligence Service Language School that was set up in the summer of 1941 in preparation for the impending war with Japan and mastered his Japanese. During the war, he served on the front, translating captured Japanese documents and interrogating Japanese POWs. Arriving at the Atsugi Airfield on August 28, 1945, in the vanguard of the Occupation forces, he asked the Japanese journalists who had gathered there—in Japanese—the immortal question: “Is Uzaemon doing well?” He was referring to the kabuki actor Ichimura Uzaemon XV (1874–1945), son of the French-born American General Charles le Gendre and Ikeda Ito. Uzaemon had died on May sixth of that year.

  In 1995 I asked Mr. Bowers to give a talk on his experiences of the war to the lunch group I managed for my employer, a Japanese trade agency, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Japan’s defeat. He ended his moving account by quoting Mantarō: “All gone nothing left to say in the westerly sun.”

  * * *

  * For recent examples, see Erin Barnett and Philomena Mariani, ed., Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945 (2011) and Greg Mitchell, Atomic Cover-up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made (2012).

  “Haiku Poet Called a Hooker”: Suzuki Shizuko*

  During the last few decades, Japan’s “comfort women” (ianfu 慰安婦) have gained international notoriety. Far less known may be that the Japanese used the same term for those who worked in the brothels set up to slake the sexual needs of Occupation personnel expected to pour into Japan upon its defeat—an estimated total of 420,000 in the end. They did so even before the first American soldiers landed in Japan at the end of August 1945, calling them “special comfort facilities” (tokubetsu ian shisetsu) created under the auspices of the Recreation and Amusement Association.

  These “special comfort facilities” were abolished in short order because of the rampant spread of venereal diseases, but some 55,000 to 70,000 Japanese women worked in them during that short period. The Occupation—American, mainly, though originally to be managed by the top Allied Powers: the United State, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and China—then requisitioned existing brothels or set up “P houses” for their soldiers.

  The haiku poet Saitō Sanki, who worked as an electrician-plumber in Kobe for a while following the war, described one such establishment, which frequently called for his skills. There, with an MP sternly on duty at the entrance, segregated white and black American soldiers created “a pond of wine and a forest of flesh”—an ancient Chinese idiom, as Sanki noted—of about 150 women on alternate days. Japan suffered from food shortages during the war that they had brought upon themselves, and even worse shortages for several years after its defeat, whereas victorious Americans arrived with a surfeit of food and money. As Sanki put it drily in his account of his Kobe days, “Any woman, as long as she was a woman, didn’t have to worry about starvation.”
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  Though the term “comfort woman” may have disappeared soon afterward, it reemerged on the international stage decades later. The somewhat more enduring term was panpan or panpangirl, though it was popularized only after the Occupation began and faded away after it ended in 1952. faded away. With several possible etymological sources, ranging from the Indonesian word perempuan, meaning “woman,” to the American (and French) pompom, the word referred to an independently operating prostitute mainly catering to Occupation personnel, and who generally worked in dance halls, cafés, and other places of entertainment.

  The haiku poet we take up here, Suzuki Shizuko, became a panpan—or shōfu (娼婦) as she chose to call herself in her haiku. That word comes directly from Chinese, its first appearance said to have been in China’s famous mid-eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber. Here let’s translate shōfu (changfu) as “hooker.”

  Shizuko was born in Tokyo in 1919. At her birth, her father, Toshio, was working in Siberia as a surveyor for the military during the Siberian Intervention, an international attempt by Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and others to quash the Russian Revolution. She attended a five-year women’s higher school. It was while a student, in 1938, that her haiku began to appear in The Sea of Trees (Jukai), the haiku magazine edited and published by Matsumura Kyoshū, who would become her teacher.

  In 1939, when she flunked the entrance exam for a women’s college for the second time, Shizuko went to a technical drafting school, which may have served her well in the end: Upon graduating in 1940, she was employed by a machine-tool manufacturer that boomed during the war. In 1945, when the Occupation requisitioned the company, she had no trouble finding a job at the design division of another, larger company, Toshiba. That meant, in the chaos of a thoroughly defeated nation, she at least had a job, whatever kind of drudgery and however low-paying it might have been.

  Shizuko also had luck—extraordinary luck, you might say—with her haiku. In early 1946, when she showed her first selection to a publisher, Shizuko must have been surprised: the publisher paid her ¥500 for the first run of 1,500 copies, according to Yazawa Ogami, her superior at Toshiba who wrote several recollections about her. What was ¥500 worth at the time? Kawamura Ranta, the author of Shizuko, cites ¥60 for the monthly salary of a policeman in 1945. However, other data shows that following Japan’s defeat, inflation rose rapidly and so the monthly rate for a policeman in 1946 was around ¥540. At any rate, Shizuko titled her selection Spring Thunder (Shunrai), a seasonal word that suggests something that is brief but foreboding.

  Thereafter Shizuko’s haiku began to appear in various haiku magazines with those of established poets. They were discussed in forums, and special issues on her appeared.

  One of her haiku printed in the March 1948 issue of The Sea of Trees provoked controversy, raising a racy question.

  欲るこころ手袋の指器に觸るる

  Horu kokoro tebukuro no yubi ki ni fururu

  Desiring heart: my fingers in gloves touch the thing

  It had to do with the word ki (器). On the face of it, the Chinese character means “vehicle,” “receptacle,” but here doesn’t it mean the phallus, as some dirty minds took it to mean? And Shizuko wasn’t innocent—she was provocative. In the August 1947 issue of the influential magazine Haiku Studies, for example, she had published haiku like these:

  中年の男の魅力鳥雲に

  Chūnen no otoko no miryoku tori kumo ni

  A middle-aged man’s charm: bird in a cloud

  This one apparently alludes to Bashō’s well-known hokku: “This autumn, why do I grow old? In clouds a bird.” The allusion, combined into a middle-aged man’s charm, makes the haiku oddly disconcerting.

  アマリリス娼婦に似たる気の動き

  Amaririsu shōfu ni nitaru ki no ugoki

  Amaryllis: my mind resembling a hooker moves

  Shizuko was twenty-eight and unmarried. In the August 1947 issue of another magazine, Gate to Haiku (Haiku no mon), she wrote:

  積乱雲西ゆ頭上本能を恥ず

  Sekiran’un nishi yu zujō honnō o hazu

  Thunderhead from the west above ashamed of instinct

  節操や朝ひとときの葡萄の葉

  Sessō ya asa hitotoki no butō no ha

  Chastity: morning for a moment a leaf of grape

  And along with the haiku in question in The Sea of Trees, the next one was printed:

  ひらく寒木瓜浮気な自分におどろく

  Hiraku kanboke uwakina jibun ni odoroku

  Open cold flowering quince: my flirty self surprises me

  The flowering quince (Chaenomeles lagenaria Koidz) is orange-red or pink. The kind mentioned here blooms in winter, hence its Japanese name kanboke, “cold quince.”

  Back in 1940 or so, Shizuko had met a man and became engaged to him, but he was killed in the war. Now almost twenty-nine years old, she was again apparently engaged to another man, most likely a coworker at Toshiba. The haiku she published in early 1948 strongly suggested certain frustrations she felt about her new fiancé. Her openness in haiku suited the Zeitgeist: “democracy,” which the American Occupation strongly promoted. It revived open discussions of sex that had previously flourished during the “Taishō Democracy” in the 1910s and 1920s, bringing in ideas of Western sexologists, such Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld.

  To go back to the word in question, ki, Shizuka replied to the risqué suggestion halfway: In a letter she wrote to her editor-teacher Kyoshū during the summer of that year, she explained that by ki she had meant a porcelain, only to add, “I think my lecherous work (jōchiteki na sakuhin) will continue.” Not long before, in fact, in the July 1948 issue of The Sea of Trees, she had published a very open haiku:

  ほろろ山吹婚約者を持ちながらひとを愛してしまつた

  Hororo yamabuki kon’yakusha o mochinagara hito o aishiteshimatta

  Fluttering Kerria rose: having a fiancé I’ve ended up loving someone else

  This piece utterly ignores the 5-7-5-syllable pattern and has far more than seventeen syllables, making it read like any of the “free-rhythm” (jiyū-ritsu) haiku advocated by Kawahigashi Hekigodō and others, as well as the shapeless “colloquial haiku” written by those in the Proletarian Literary Movement from the 1920s to 1930s. You might say it was regarded as a haiku because it appeared in a haiku magazine, although it did include the haikuesque kigo, “Kerria rose” (yamabuki), large, pompom-like double-yellow flowers (Kerria japonica ‘Pleniflora’).

  Shizuko, at any rate, exchanged betrothal gifts with her fiancé at the end of that year. But the following year she quit Toshiba and called off her engagement. Some of her haiku sent later to Kyoshū, dated August 24, 1951, suggest that between 1948 and 1949, she became pregnant, had an abortion, and buried the fetus herself.

  In 1949, the wobbling postwar economy met its first test. By order of the Occupation’s policy, the Dodge Line—so called because the Chicago banker Joseph Dodge recommended it—the Japanese government deliberately contracted the economy. During this precarious time, Shizuko moved to Gifu, in the far west of Tokyo. She seems to have left no clear word on what prompted the move, but one may assume that she became a panpan girl with an American soldier (or perhaps a group of them) in Tokyo, and that the GI she associated with was ordered to transfer to the air base in Gifu.

  It’s true that Shizuko’s aunt lived in Gifu, but it was also there that the US military had taken over a former Japanese air base.† And Shizuko rented an apartment near the base. There she learned to dance and started working for a dance hall. That was tantamount to becoming a prostitute—just as working for a café or a bar before Japan’s defeat meant the same thing, as Shizuko knew.

  Among the haiku she wrote after she was arrested by the police are these two:

  あはれ指紋すべての�
��婦とられたり

  Aware shimon subete no shōfu toraretari

  Alas fingerprints taken from all the hookers

  ダンサーも娼婦のうちか雪消の葉

  Dancer mo shōfu no uchi ka yukige no ha

  Dancers too are hookers aren’t they: thawing leaves

  Among her haiku that appeared in the April 1950 issue of Haiku Studies were:

  売春や鶏卵にある掌の温み

  Baishun ya keiran ni aru te no nukumi

  Prostitution: warmth of a chicken egg that’s in my palm

  娼婦またよきか熟れたる柿食うぶ

  Shōfu mata yoki ka uretaru kaki taubu

  Being a hooker’s good too: eating a ripe persimmon

  In June of 1950, the Korean War erupted. That October, Shizuko started living with a black GI named Kelly Kracke.

  By then, her life had begun to attract a good deal of attention. In early 1951, a story with Shizuko as model appeared in a haiku magazine. In May, Kracke was shipped to the Korean front. In June, she started sending “masses” of haiku to Kyoshū. Then a couple of months later, her lover returned to the Sasebo naval base, then moved to the Yokohama naval base. Shizuko hurried to Yokohama before Kracke was shipped back to the United States.

  横濱に人と訣れし濃霧かな

  Yokohama ni hito to wakareshi nōmu kana

  At Yokohama I parted with my love: the dense fog

  Again, she seems to have left no clear word on exactly what happened, but her haiku hint that her lover was seriously wounded in Korea and that he soon died in the States.