Idly Scribbling Rhymers by Robert Tuck

Author:Robert Tuck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

CHAPTER FIVE

The Unmanly Poetry of Our Times

Shiki, Tekkan, and Waka Reform, 1890–1900

This final chapter of the book returns to the question of who could—or should—write poetry in the Meiji nation-state. Where the previous four chapters have focused on the boundaries of poetic community for kanshi and haiku, however, this concluding chapter addresses waka, Japan’s third major traditional poetic genre.1 On the face of it, waka might seem the most promising genre from which to fashion a national poetry, for it was uniquely and unarguably Japanese. It had been practiced in Japan for more than a thousand years, for much of that time the preserve of emperors and court nobles, and so had none of kanshi’s air of foreignness or haikai’s problematic associations with “commoners.” Waka also had an impressive intellectual pedigree, boasting an extensive body of theoretical and exegetical writings produced by Edo-era National Learning scholars such as Keichū 契沖 (1640–1701), Kamo no Mabuchi 賀茂真淵 (1697–1769), and Motoori Norinaga 本居宣長 (1730–1801), one of Japan’s most brilliant scholars and philologists.

These factors, in particular the strong association with the imperial institution, meant that waka seemed almost tailor-made as a tool with which to imagine a national community during Meiji. Among the raft of new ceremonies and (re)invented traditions centering on the imperial institution during early Meiji, for instance, was the utakai hajime (New Year’s poetry party), a ceremony marking the New Year in which the emperor and courtiers composed waka, the best of which were then read aloud. There was a precedent (though by no means a continuous tradition) of emperors issuing poetic compositions to mark the new year throughout Japanese history, but the Meiji utakai hajime was something new in being both regular (held every year) and nationwide in scope. Revived in 1868, the Meiji utakai hajime initially allowed only courtiers and those close to the emperor to submit verses. In 1874, however, participation was opened to all Japanese subjects, allowing them to send in their verses for consideration. The ceremony therefore took on a modern, national-symbolic significance, presenting a spectacle of people and emperor alike joined together through the composition of an ancient and uniquely Japanese poetic medium.2

The utakai hajime, which continued throughout the twentieth century and is still practiced to the present day, has been seen as symbolic of a successful effort to link waka poetry and national identity in the modern Japanese nation-state. Murai Osamu, who has written extensively about the “nationalization” (kokuminka) of waka, argues that Meiji waka contained a “utopian discourse of ‘one sovereign and myriad people’ ” (ikkun banmin) and that in the Meiji nation-state, the very act of writing waka came to entail a kind of “subject formation” (shutaika). Amplified by Japan’s print media, which reported and commented on the emperor’s own utakai-hajime verse and the selected commoner compositions, the utakai hajime, in Murai’s view, played a critical role in Meiji state and subject formation; the ceremony, he argues, helped to create the modern imperial institution, not the other way around.3 Other critics have drawn broadly similar conclusions.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.