Miyazawa Kenji: The Poet as Asura?

Extract

Do they still require schoolchildren to memorize Miyazawa Kenji's poem Ame ni mo makezu? I ask my young friend Donald Howard who is teaching English in Iwate, where his wife Saori is from. Donald and Saori had also visited the Miyazawa Memorial Museum for me a few years earlier, when they still lived in New York, and brought back a CD of Kenji's musical compositions orchestrated and sung. After checking with a couple of teachers, Donald responds: Yes, they do.

I asked because, though I myself do not remember ever being required to memorize the poem in school during the 1950s, I've learned the requirement was in force in some places, at various times. And if it still is, it must be in Iwate, I thought, where Kenji was born, in 1896, grew up, spent most of his life, and died, in 1933. I learned, years ago, its extracurricular popularity, as it were: it appears on all sorts of souvenirs – towels, mugs, fans, etc. – made and sold in Iwate, especially in Hanamaki, Kenji's birthplace. It is also, I learned, the most revered poem in twentieth-century Japan.