Yosano Akiko

The following snapshot is a guest post from Christopher Harding. Christopher is a cultural historian & broadcaster based at the University of Edinburgh. He writes about Japan, India & East-West encounter, and is the author of Japan Story, The Japanese and The Light of Asia.

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Yosano Akiko

She calls out
To awaken the tender young priest:

A window in spring.
Touched by a long trailing sleeve

The sutras topple.

Yosano Akiko was born in the city of Sakai, near Osaka, in 1878. She came of age in a country undergoing breakneck change, thanks to its opening to Western trade, diplomacy and ideas of all kinds back in the 1850s. Not everyone in Japan approved of that change. By the turn of the twentieth century there were plenty who longed either for a return to the austere, Confucian values of the early modern past or else a more robust concept of ‘Japanese-ness’ that would limit Euro-American influence on Japanese life.

Yosano Akiko’s debut poetry collection Midaregami (Tangled Hair, 1901), featuring her poem about the seduction of a young Buddhist priest, marked her out as someone at the cutting edge of cosmopolitan Japan. Critics were divided. One of the 399 poems in the collection mentioned breasts, causing one commentator to dismiss her work as the kind of thing you might hear ‘from the mouth of a whore.’ Another reviewer wrote off the whole collection as the ‘precocious prattle of a young girl.’

There was a theme to these critiques: as a young woman, there was a limit, in the eyes of many, to how much freedom – both of action and expression – Akiko ought to have. Japan’s modernizing leaders saw themselves as engaged in an urgent game of catch-up with the West. In the late nineteenth century, the likes of Great Britain and the United States were so far ahead in terms of science, technology and weaponry, not to mention economic strength, that Japan’s security could not be guaranteed. For these gaps between Japan and the West to be closed required everyone in Japan to do their bit. Men must work hard. Children must study hard, in a range of new nation-building disciplines from the law to engineering. And women must ensure that the next generation grew up physically healthy and with all the right values and ideas.

Women like Yosano Akiko threatened these arrangements by demanding more from life than the national slogan of ‘Good wife, wise mother’ allowed. Having scandalized people with her first poetry collection, Akiko went on to rub salt in the wound by criticising her country’s involvement in a war against Russia in 1904-5. She composed a poem for her brother, ‘Thou Shalt Not Die,’ which became an anti-war anthem:

Oh, my brother, I weep for you.
Do not give your life.
Last-born among us,
You are the most beloved of our parents.

Did they make you grasp the sword

And teach you to kill?
Did they raise you to the age of twenty-four,

Telling you to kill and die?

Brother, do not give your life.
His Majesty the Emperor
Goes not himself into the battle.
Could he, with such deeply noble heart,

Think it an honour for men

To spill one another’s blood

And die like beasts?

Supporters of the war in Japan were incensed by what appeared to be a toxic combination of defeatism, pacifism and disrespect for the monarchy in Akiko’s poem. And yet within a few decades, her support for cosmopolitan internationalism had begun to wane. It is hard to believe that the author of saucy sonnets and ‘Thou Shalt Not Die’ could also pen these words, in 1932:

Ah, the augustness of His Majesty’s Reign

That inspires people’s hearts!
It is a time that ignites our sense of duty.

It is a time to cease empty arguments,
And smash sissified dreams of compromise.

Knowing their course to be just,
Our forces attack through sufferings a hundredfold.

Though his is the body of one soldier,

Carrying the canister of destruction,

He dances through the barbed wire,

And transforms that body into powder.

Though his is the body of one major,
He expects no mercy from the enemy,
And scatters that body, purer than a flower,

Giving life to a samurai’s honour.

What had happened?

To an extent that people in Japan after World War II found difficult to accept, a substantial portion of the population began, in the 1930s, to buy into an emerging view of world affairs that emphasised Japan’s vulnerability and mistreatment at the hands of Western powers. When the League of Nations was established in the wake of World War I, Japanese diplomats hoped to have a racial equality clause included in its covenant. They failed, in part because – as the disappointed Japanese saw it – white Western nations sought to limit immigration from Asia along with the autonomy of upstart powers like Japan.

Western talk of international co-operation came to be seen, amongst nationalists in Japan – particularly within the military – as a fig-leaf for western colonial self-interest. The conclusion was stark: Japan would have to fend for itself, working out a means of surviving in a rough neighbourhood. Look at a map of the world, centred on Japan, and you could be forgiven for thinking that the country was encircled by actually or potentially hostile powers: China, the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands (the last two via colonial outposts in Asia). This view of Japan’s international relations dove-tailed, across the 1930s, with a critique of capitalism and cosmopolitanism at home: both were seen as disastrous to a ‘Japanese spirit’ which had urgently to be rediscovered and propagated everywhere from homes and schools to the media and the military.

When combined with a steady take-over of Japanese politics by the military and a series of army actions in mainland Asia – starting with the capture of Manchuria in the early 1930s – arguments like these became persuasive to ever more Japanese. Their country really did seem to be fighting for its survival – no matter that some of those fights were started by maverick military figures acting without orders.

Yosano Akiko’s celebration of Japanese fighting spirit in the 1930s reveals this dramatic shift in public thinking in Japan, which ultimately helped to lead the country to disaster. She lived just long enough to hear about the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Akiko’s political outlook remained the same and her poetry was still a thicket of militarist cliché. But a glimpse of the sort of trouble that her country was now in seemed to revive in her a hint of that earlier lyricism and restraint:

It is a time for falling tears.

As we enter the bitter cold

Of the twelfth lunar month…

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Sources:

• Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:YOSANO_Akiko_%28cropped%29.jpg