No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Japan, Pearl Harbor, and the Poetry of December 8th
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Article summary
Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
This article explores tanka poetry published shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack as a window into the initial public reaction in Japan to the outbreak of the Pacific War. We show that whereas tanka became a powerful tool of propaganda in the hands of professional poets, it also allowed amateur poets and political figures to express their private, diary-bound dissent.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Creative Commons
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 2016
References
Notes
1 See extra edition, Tōkyō Asahi shinbun, December 8, 1942.
2 The Manchurian Incident of September 1931 and the China Incident of July 1937 also led to popular enthusiasm and war fever. But the attack on the United States and Great Britain in December 1941 led to an outpouring of poetry, short stories, scholarship, essays, and overall support that perhaps exceeded these earlier events. Magazines like Bungei shunjū, Chūō kōron (Central Review), Shin joen (New Woman's Garden), Shinchō (New Tide), and others even published diaries about people's daily lives and emotional states on December 8, when they heard the news of Japan's new war.
3 Nishio Yō, “Dai tōa sensō to aikokushi,” Rōningyō (Mar. 1942), 12-13.
4 Kitahara Hakushū, Bungei shunjū (Feb. 1942), 105
5 The majority of poetry we consider was produced within two months of the Pearl Harbor attack.
6 In our transliterations, we made the decision to split each tanka into five lines according to syllable count. Where possible, we made each of those lines in their English renderings also 5-7-5-7-7, except when the original also diverged from this pattern or where poetic license dictated a shorter poem. While tanka (and haiku) tend to be printed in one line without spaces when published in Japanese, splitting up the lineation into five lines (or three, in the case of haiku) is conventional for many English translations of these works. Our decision to make English translations conform to this particular syllabic count, however, is not entirely the norm in translations of tanka. The Japanese mora (syllables) counted in tanka and haiku are different and often shorter linguistic units than English syllables, and so these poetic forms in Japanese contain less information than their English syllabic equivalents. This leads translations like ours to be wordier than the originals. We thought, however, in the case of these poems, that this kind of translation had several benefits. The first was to make the Japanese tanka into English tanka; there is already a long tradition of tanka and haiku written originally in English, with lines of five and seven syllables, and they comprise an established, recognizable and popular poetic genre. Our translations also emphasize that all these poets were working within the constraints of the same rigid form. Another useful side-effect of this decision was the flexibility it afforded us to make certain implications more explicit, and to add brief explanations of terms or concepts within the poems when necessary without always relying on glosses or subsequent commentary. This is important when a reference would be instantly understood by the average reader in Japan at the time, and leaving it overly opaque in the English translation would give an inaccurate impression of a similar opacity in the original.
7 An important exception is Donald Keene's work, but he focuses much less on poets than on fiction writers. And his work on tanka neglects the ways in which poetry was used to express opposition to war. See Donald Keene, “Japanese Writers and the Greater East Asia War,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Feb. 1964), 209-225; Donald Keene, “The Barren Years: Japanese War Literature, Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 1978), 67-112; and Donald Keene, Sakka no nikki o yomu Nihonjin no sensō (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 2009).
8 On December 8, Konoe went to the Peers Club in Tokyo and was unusually despondent, in stark contrast to the popular excitement among Japan's nobility. He told his aide and son-in-law, Hosokawa Morisada, “It is a terrible thing that has happened. I know that a tragic defeat awaits us at the end. I can feel it. Our luck will not last more than two or three months at best.” For Konoe's views, see Yabe Teiji, Konoe Fumimaro, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1952), 467; Yoshitake Oka, Konoe Fumimaro: A Political Biography (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1983), 161. On December 8, Matsuoka lamented his own role in the outbreak of war from his sickbed at home, telling an aide that signing the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy “was the biggest mistake of my lifetime … When I think of this, it will bother me even after I die.” Quoted in Jeremy A. Yellen, “Into the Tiger's Den: Japan and the Tripartite Pact, 1940,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Jul. 2016), 576.
9 Higashikuni Naruhiko, Higashikuni nikki: Nihon gekidōki no hiroku (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 1968), 103.
10 Ozaki Yukio, Minken tōsō shichijūnen (Tokyo: Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1952), 183.
11 Ibid., 183.
12 In the original tanka, there is a marked contrast between kishō, “unexpected victory,” and kika, “unexpected defeat.” Within the constraints of the poem, however, we thought it more important to emphasize Nobunaga's arrogance [ogori]. This necessitated leaving these parallel terms, which would have been much wordier in English, less apparent. The second line could also be translated (in seven syllables) as “Pride in his chance triumph at” Okehazama.
13 Ibid., 183.
14 Douglas H. Mendel, Jr., “Ozaki Yukio: Political Conscience of Modern Japan,” The Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 3 (May 1956), 343.
15 Nanbara Shigeru, Keisō: kashū (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 1948). See also Andrew E. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 109-113.
16 Nanbara, Keisō, 173. For separate translations, see Barshay, State and Intellectual, 111; see also Nambara Shigeru, War and Conscience in Japan: Nambara Shigeru and the Pacific War, ed. and trans. by Richard H. Minear (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). 117.
17 Ibid., 173. For another translation by Richard Minear, see Nambara, War and Conscience, 117.
18 Ibid., 173. Separate translations can be found in Barshay, State and Intellectual, 111; Nambara, War and Conscience, 117.
19 Leith Morton provides an excellent analysis of wartime tanka poetry. See Leith Morton, “Wartime Tanka Poetry: Writing in Extremis,” in Recentering Asia: Histories, Encounters, Identities (Global Oriental: Leiden, Netherlands; Boston, 2011), 256–284.
20 See Nambara Shigeru and Richard Minear, “Nambara Shigeru (1889-1974) and the Student-Dead of a War He Opposed,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Vol. 9, Issue 4, No. 1, January 24, 2011 (Accessed Oct. 31, 2016). See also Nambara, War and Conscience in Japan.
21 The classic study on this phenomenon is Hugh Byas, Government by Assassination (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1942).
22 For more on thought control, see Richard H. Mitchell, Thought Control in Prewar Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976).
23 For more on the subversiveness of Christianity, see Mark R. Mullins, “Ideology and Utopianism in Wartime Japan: An Essay on the Subversiveness of Christian Eschatology,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2-3 (1994), 261-80.
24 It is difficult to find accurate figures on print circulation. That said, according to Yamazaki Yasuo, Bungei shunjū in 1940 had a print circulation of 200,000 copies. See Yamazaki Yasuo, Nihon zasshi monogatari (Tokyo: Ajia Shuppansha, 1959), 305. Bungei shunjū would be temporarily shut down by Occupation authorities in March 1946 owing to its consistent support for Japan's war.
25 The tanka poets we consider here were all men. This owes to a simple fact: the world of tanka was highly conservative and men dominated the ranks of the top tanka poets. Popular female poets like Yosano Akiko were the exception. Incidentally, Yosano, too, would come to support Japan's war. For an account of hershiftfrom prominent anti-war writer in the early 1900s to her later days promoting the colonial project in Manchuria in the 1930s, and finally to her pro-war yet melancholic tanka after Pearl Harbor, seeSteve Rabson, “Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One's Life or Not—A Question of Which War,”Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 25, No. 1 (1991), 45-74.
26 “Tanka,” Bungei shunjū (Jan. 1942), 108.
27 “Tanka,” Bungei shunjū (Feb. 1942), 105.
28 There was much to draw on. The rejection of the Japanese delegation's proposed racial equality clause at Versailles in 1919 and the so-called Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924 which barred Japanese immigration to the US served as constant reminders of the low regard for which Japan was held within the international system.
29 The English translation of the imperial rescript is taken from Japan Times & Advertiser, evening edition, December 8, 1941, 1. For the original Japanese-language document, see Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (JACAR), reference code: A03022539800.
30 Kitahara Hakushū, Bungei shunjū (Feb. 1942), 105.
31 Shaku Chōkū, Bungei shunjū (Jan. 1942), 108.
32 Toki Zenmaro, Bungei shunjū (Feb. 1942), 105.
33 Ibid., 105.
34 For more on uchiteshi yamamu, see David C. Earhart, Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media (Routledge, 2015), 309-32.
35 According to Donald Keene, this group “attack[ed] such varying targets as ‘art for art's sake,‘ freedom, Communism, and individualism. See Keene, ”Japanese Writers and the Greater East Asia War,“ 213.
36 The Japanese version was taken from Donald Keene, Sakka no nikki o yomu Nihonjin no sensō, 28-29. We are also making use of Keene's wonderful translation, found in Keene, “Japanese Writers and the Greater East Asia War,” 213.
37 Negotiations toward an understanding with the United States began in March 1941, and for all intents and purposes ended with the Hull Note on November 26.
38 A poem by an American soldier, Fremont Sawade, stationed at Honolulu at the time of the attacks, brings up many of the same themes from the other side: of America's victimization, the necessity of vengeance against Japan, and of the day of Pearl Harbor as one that will go down in history. John Wilkens, “Poem captured surprise, horror of Pearl Harbor,” The San Diego Union-Tribute, June 16, 2012. http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-a-poet-once-for-all-time-2012jun16-htmlstory.html (accessed Oct. 24, 2016).
39 Takamura Kōtarō, “Jūnigatsu yōka,” Takamura Kōtarō zenshū, Vol. 5 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1994) 50-51.
40 See Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 106-113.
41 Saitō Ryū, Bungei shunjū (Jan. 1942), 108.
42 Hiroaki Sato, “Gyokusai or ‘Shattering like a Jewel’: Reflection on the Pacific War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Vol. 6, Issue 2 (Feb. 1, 2008). See http://apjjf.org/-Hiroaki-Sato/2662/article.html (accessed on Oct. 24, 2016).
43 Gunjishi Gakkai, Daihon'ei rikugunbu sensō shidōhan kimitsu sensō nisshi, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kinseisha, 1999), 550.
44 Yoshii Isamu, Bungei shunjū (Feb. 1942), 105.
45 Of course, it is possible to read resistance into this and other poems in the Bungei shunjū collection owing to the ambiguity of the language. But it would be misguided to do so. The tanka poets considered here were typical in that they wrote poems meant to express support for Japan's war for Asia.
46 Kawada Jun's two volumes, Shika Taiheyō sen (Historical Tanka from the Pacific War) and Shika nettai sakusen (Historical Tanka from the War in the Tropics) were both released in 1942. His wartime tanka are considered in depth by Leith Morton in “Wartime Tanka Poetry,” 262-269.
47 Kawada Jun, Bungei shunjū (Feb. 1942), 105.
48 Poet Takamura Kōtarō, for instance, wrote that December 8th “was a date to be remembered, one truly full of deep emotion” (jitsu ni kangeki ni michita kinen subeki hi to natta). See Takamura Kōtarō, “Jūnigatsu yōka no ki,” Chūō kōron, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Jan. 1942), 110.
49 Several passages of this essay appear in translation in Leith Morton, “Wartime Tanka Poetry,” 267-268. Original essay first published in Kawada Jun, Shika nanboku sakusen (Tokyo: Kotori Shorin, 1943), 135-40.
50 Kawada Jun, Bungei shunjū (Feb. 1942), 105.
51 Yoshii Isamu, Bungei shunjū (Feb. 1942), 105.
52 Onoe Saishū, Bungei shunjū (Feb. 1942), 105.
53 Itō Shizuo, “Ōmikotonori,” Kogito (Jan. 1942), 16.
54 Donald Keene notes that this “festive mood” (omatsuri kibun) continued for one year after the attack on Pearl Harbor. See Keene, Sakka no nikki o yomu Nihonjin no sensō, 40.
55 Kamiya Shigeru, “Jūnigatsu yōka no kokoro,” Bungei shunjū (Feb. 1942), 119.
You have
Access
Open access