The Asiatic Society of Japan

The December meeting brought the year to a triumphant conclusion. We had as our speaker Dr. Janine Beichman, Professor in the Department of Japanese Literature at Daito Bunka University, and we were happy to have with us for this occasion two of her friends, Dr. Donald Keene and Mrs. Eileen Kato. Dr. Beichman had chosen as her subject "Thou Shalt Not Die: Yosano Akiko and the Russo-Japanese War".

Dr. Beichman began by explaining that her interest in the pre-eminent female poet Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) had begun as a personal one: how had she been able to combine marriage, 13 children and a career? This puzzle had in fact been solved quite early on when Mrs. Kato had introduced her to one of Akiko's daughters-in-law, who simply explained that Akiko had been a kind of superwoman, who could compose poems while doing household jobs. Dr. Beichman had also suspected that Akiko, as a woman, had been unfairly judged; the conventional wisdom was that she had done her best work before she was thirty, and the remaining forty years had been of little interest. Dr. Beichman's subsequent studies had proved her suspicions correct, and she had set about writing Akiko's biography. The first volume, Embracing the Firebird, had only gone as far as the first collection of tanka, Tangled Hair (1901), so she was now working on a second volume, of which her talk this evening formed one chapter.

In the poem "Thou Shalt Not Die", which was published in Myôjô in September, 1904, Akiko is bewailing the fact that her younger brother Sôshichi has been sent to fight in the Russo-Japanese War, and appealing to him not to let himself be killed. (It is not a tanka, but a shintaishi, written in alternating lines of five and seven syllables). During that war it was regarded as an unpatriotic poem, but after World War II it achieved great popularity as an anti-war poem. In view of this Dr. Beichman proposed to discuss what kind of poetry was written about the Russo-Japanese War, what was the view of the war that motivated one attack on Akiko's poem, and how she responded.

Two poems in particular were of interest, both published under women's names but probably written by men. The first, Rokôgô ni tatematsuru (Presented to the Empress of Russia by Matsuura Kinu), appeared in a magazine Chûgaku Sekai and was virulently patriotic. Its combination of martial vengeance and sensual delight was clearly meant to inspire the young men who read the magazine, but it was in effect a series of terrible prophecies. In contrast to Akiko's prayer for her brother's safety, this poem was a curse, supposedly presented to the Czarina with a bouquet of flowers by an innocent young girl, as the last lines stated.

The second poem, "Lantern Procession and an Old Mother's Voice", published in a rather obscure socialist paper in Wakayama, was intensely anti-war. It ironically contrasts the wildly celebratory processions with an old woman lamenting the death of her son; of what use is all the glory to her - she would be happy living in poverty if she had her son with her.

In contrast, Akiko's poem seems middle-of-the-road. It has neither the patriotism of the curse on the Russian Empress nor the bitterness of the old mother towards her own countrymen. In it she in fact asks whether their own Emperor would ever think that men should kill each other and die like beasts, and the validity of this questioning attitude is actually borne out by Emperor Meiji's own poems.

The Russo-Japanese War is usually said to have been popular among the Japanese. Famous writers have left records of their joy and excitement when the war began, even Natsume Sôseki tossing off a patriotic poem, though he confessed he thought it silly. The Christian pacifist Uchimura Kanzô likewise ashamedly confessed that he could not always restrain his joy at the news of military victories. At first, a swift victory was assumed, but as the war dragged on depression began to sink in. The capture of Port Arthur, which had fallen quickly in the Sino-Japanese War, was not going to be achieved without a struggle. As reports of heavy losses came in, the people's zeal cooled off, and a mood of anxiety set in. Akiko, who had written her poem in the early stages of the siege, now became sick with worry, as news was scarce and often censored.

This change in the national mood is reflected in three poems by Ôtsuka Kusuoko, a disciple of Sôseki. The first, which appeared in June 1904, is a marching song, in the boastful voice of a soldier. The second, which appeared in January 1905, is the voice of a wife unable to decide whether to pray for her country's victory or her husband's safe return. The third, which appeared in May 1905, is the voice of a little boy whose father has died in the war. All three were published in Taiyô. The theme of the losses engendered by the war was also taken up by the Emperor; one of the few direct quotes included in Donald Keene's biography runs, "I am sure Port Arthur will fall, sooner or later, but it's terrible killing soldiers that way. Nogi's a good general, but the way he kills soldiers is really upsetting." Keene also quotes three tanka by the Emperor on the ills of war, and he writes of General Nogi that when he committed suicide in 1912 the overwhelming majority of Japanese believed that he had been moved by remorse over the tens of thousands who had died in the repeated attacks he had ordered, a view supported by a kanshi Nogi wrote expressing shame, not exultation, over Japan's success. In the light of all this, Akiko's poem seems to have expressed an emotion of grief and anxiety that was felt by all to a greater or lesser degree; if you call it anti-war, then you have to call the Emperor and General Nogi anti-war too.

Dr. Beichman then turned to the two other points she had set herself to deal with, namely the attack on Akiko's poem by the prominent critic Ômachi Keigetsu in the October 1904 issue of Taiyô; and her response to it. In particular Keigetsu attacked the second and third verses, in which Akiko said that the fate of Port Arthur was of no importance to a merchant like her brother, and questioned whether the Emperor really wanted men to die in war. Such views, he said, amounted to criticism of the Imperial Rescript on Education, which stated that a citizen should sacrifice his private interests for the nation, and constituted an attack on the Imperial Declaration of War.

Akiko responded by publishing an "Open Letter" in the November 1904 issue of Myôjô. Keigetsu's criticism had taken the form of an essay, but Akiko adopted the form of a letter to her husband Tekkan, written when she was on a trip with her two small sons to her old home, from which she had run away to marry him and become a poet in Tokyo. With the intimate details of her family life unselfconsciously mixed in, seamlessly blending the personal and the public, this letter embodies Akiko's own theory of the unity of art and life. This unique combination has discouraged critics from treating it as a whole, and translators from translating it in full; Dr. Beichman's translation is probably the first complete one.

Akiko speaks first of the depression of Sôshichi's wife Osei now that her husband has gone to the war, and then gives an amusing description of her own exhausting 300-mile trip with two small children, during which she had yet found the time to read Keigetsu's review in Taiyô. She says she is flattered by the attention he has paid to a work she had just "dashed off", but that at the same time she cannot submit to the review in silence. In her defence she says that she has learnt to revere the Emperor, and has loved the literature of the Heian court since childhood, but yet she reserves to herself the right to hate war; if the authorities said it was necessary for the sake of the nation, then she would agree with it, but she wanted it to be over quickly. Furthermore, she does not agree with the current glorification of death. She cannot sing the sort of things that are in battle songs nowadays to her brother, whose thoughts are always for his wife, his mother, and the infant soon to be born. Mr. Keigetsu, she goes on, says that the ideas expressed in her letter are dangerous, but on the contrary is not the current fashion of exhorting people to die out of loyalty to the throne and love of country the real danger? No such commands to die or "careless scribblings" about the Imperial house can be found in the ancient writings of Japan.

Then comes the core of her letter, in which she defines a poem as the expression of true feeling, deriving its lasting value from this alone. True emotion and true reasoning are things that endure, and she asks Keigetsu to allow her to express this in her poetry. She describes how those who go to the railway stations to see their friends and relatives off all say "Take care! Come back safely!", and asks, does not her poem, which says "You must not die", express the same sentiment? These parting words are the voices of true feeling, and so is her poem. Then in the rest of the letter she goes back to family matters.

In sum, in "Open Letter" Akiko denies that she is against war, and justifies her stance by insisting that poets simply have the responsibility of expressing their deepest emotions with complete honesty; only this can give a poem enduring life. She implicitly claims the right to record her feelings about the war without being responsible for the larger political or ideological implications of her work, writing in the name of a greater value, that of human emotion.

In defining the poet's only duty as the expression of human emotion, Akiko reflects Ki no Tsurayuki's statement in the Kokinshû that the seed of poetry is the human heart, and Murasaki Shikibu's defence of the novel in The Tale of Genji. At the same time, the "Open Letter" stakes out the domain of the individual as sacrosanct, and in this way has resonances with Western tradition.

When Ômachi Keigetsu died in 1925, Akiko contributed a brief obituary, in which she was courteous to a fault. With regard to his negative review, she generously expressed gratitude to him for taking notice of someone as insignificant as she was then. Perhaps she felt grateful to him for having brought her poem to the attention of so many readers and having motivated her to write one of the most engaging poetic manifestos in Japanese literature.

During the time for questions Dr. Beichman was asked what she thought was meant by the word banzai which appeared in the "Open Letter". Is it "Ten thousand lives for the Emperor!" or "Ten thousand lives! - for whom?" She replied that she was not confident that it had any literal meaning but rather that it was simply said to mean something like "Hip hip hooray!" in English. One member of the audience commented that banzai in its Korean form of manse appears in the South Korean national anthem. He followed up by asking what Sôseki's true feeling was about the war. Dr. Beichman said that Sôseki had himself admitted that he had dashed the patriotic poem off before breakfast - that it was only a trivial thing. Dr. Donald Keene asked whether the brother had indeed come home safely from the war and the answer was that, fortunately, he had. He had previously been at Waseda University, but the elder brother had chosen to remain at Tokyo University undertaking further studies instead of returning home to take over the running of the family shop. The second son Sôshichi had therefore been obliged to return home to take up this role. This was quite a common phenomenon in families at the time.

Dr. Charles De Wolf gave the vote of thanks. He said that Dr. Beichman had been a friend for many years and that they had been "pagemates" together in the Asahi Evening News with columns on the same page. He said that he could sum up Dr. Beichman's dedication to poetry in the words that she had written to him in an e-mail whilst he was on sabbatical leave in Germany: "so few people care about beautiful language any more." He admitted that he himself had had a prejudice against Yosano Akiko but that Dr. Beichman's book Embracing the Firebird had made him change his mind completely; it was, he said, a thrilling read, a work of great scholarship, and provided a wonderful analysis of Yosano Akiko's life.

As Mrs. Schreck was not well, and Mrs. Tanaka was in London, we had not planned to have any reception afterwards. However, Mrs. Kikuko Hanami arrived kindly bringing sembei and chips to be added to the expected refreshments, and Mr. Takashi Sato brought some taiyaki kindly donated by Mr. Koh Yoshida, so cartons of cold drinks were quickly rustled up and we had a reception after all.