Japanese Poetry and Its Publics by Dean Anthony Brink

Author:Dean Anthony Brink
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Relying on the intertextual echoes—practically any phrase that is used in classical poetry or common in modern tanka—to naturalize these enunciations, these poems suggest a perfect embodiment of the socio-political-poetic assemblage with the soldier. For instance, in the first verse we find that while “cannon” might not be common within the established associational matrix, being woven into the verse with ordinary poetic language and classical grammatical markers, it rings more true and natural as a poem. Similarly, in the second verse, while “the people of my country” is rather jarringly modern in diction, framed by vaguely Buddhist language echoing the impermanence of life and the standard nationalist cliché of “scattered” (like cherry blossoms), it reads as poetry, if not great poetry. The young man seems to find meaning in the ubiquitous clichés of the war: “scattering,” “shining,” “going up in flames”, and being “just a boy,” young as the “scattering” cherry blossoms. For a soldier, Christopher Coker writes, “what was an ‘authentic’ death other than one that conformed to the belief that death threw life into relief, war as a transcending moment, even if a short-lived one.”9 The young man can be understood as attempting to justify the pending sacrifice of his own life in terms of images of transcending death not in anger, which might leave the soldier haunting the world as a ghost, but dying willingly—scattered at the point of engaging in some violent act. Such poetry sustains an associational matrix within which any phenomena may be nested and naturalized, imbuing it with an expected, conventionalized nationalist affective response in the wartime context. The associational matrix within this poetics of allusion functions ideologically in two distinct senses: as a habituated structurally more or less assumed and ubiquitous extreme intertextuality which naturalizes any detail in its semiotic web or frame generally, and through specific allusions, symbolic associations or identifications (such as chrysanthemums with the emperor). It provides emotional triggers to justify the sacrificial vision of these young and older men.

In contrast, Suzuki Akira (鈴木 明), a sergeant in the military police, died May 6, 1947, in Guangdong (廣東), likely wrote the following as a prisoner of war:

Though fallen into some sort of sin in the realm,

having nothing to be ashamed of I can go on!

如何ならむ罪に墜おつとも天あめ地つちに恥づるものなき我が歩みかも10

Ika naramu tumi ni otsu tomo ametuchi ni haduru mono naki waga ayumi

kamo

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