Harry Guest (1932–2021)

After the destruction left by the Pacific war (1945), Japan’s poets were stunned, demoralised and left coming to terms with the shock of total defeat. The first poets to raise their heads in this bleak period, had to look hard at what they saw and along with their nation reinvent themselves. One of the earliest of the new groups to appear was “Arechi” (Wasteland) taking their name from the T.S Elliot Poem, translated by Nishiwaki Junzaburo (1894 – 1982) which received great critical acclaim. The name of the school chimed with the desolation of the landscape and the doom-laden atmosphere of those first years of peace. The Arechi poets mixed the influences of T.S Elliot and W.H. Auden with the Existentialist musings of writers such as Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre to express their perception of themselves and through that their country; prominent amongst this group were the poets Miyoshi Toyoichiro, Kitamura Taro, Kuroda Saburo, Tamura Ryuichi. Tamura’s writing from the early post-war period, rejected the Modernist Ideas of distance and art, replacing them with direct communication through the simplicity of mundane everyday speech as a way of dealing with the prevalent social and political world view, expressing vividly the destructive nature of the nations poetry in the late 1940’s. The Poet Ooka Makoto has written about this period stating that..

“The key subjects for poetry in this period were devastation, anxiety, desperation and death; this reflected the social circumstances just as prose writing does. Poets, living in grim uncertainty and suffering the horrifying aftermath of the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, generally expressed their pessimistic vision of the future of humankind through their works.”

Four Thousand Days and Nights
In order for a single poem to come into existence,
you and I have to kill,
have to kill many things,
many lovable things, kill by shooting, kill by assassination,
kill by poisoning.

Look !

Out of the sky of four thousand days and nights,
just because we wanted the trembling tongue of one
small bird,
four thousand nights of silence and four thousand days
of counterlight
you and I killed by shooting.

Listen!

Out of all the cities of falling rain, smelting furnaces,
midsummer harbours, and coal mines,
just because we needed the tears of a single hungry child
four thousand clays of love and four thousand nights of
compassion
you and I killed by assassination.
Remember!
Just because we wanted the fear of one vagrant dog
who could see the things you and I couldn't see with our
eyes
and could hear the things you and I couldn't hear with our
ears,
four thousand nights of imagination and four thousand days
of chilling recollection
you and I killed by poison.
In order for a single poem to come
you and I have to kill beloved things.
This is the only way to bring back the dead to life.
You and I have to follow that way.
RYUICHI TAMURA

By the early 1950’s Japan, as a nation, had begun to emerge from the poverty and the deprivation of the immediate post-war years and was starting to reappraise the Japanese values hastily abandoned with the post-war surge to western idealism. Although by the beginning of the 1950’s the mainstream had coalesced around the Arechi group, by 1954, according to one of their founding members (Kuroda Saburo) they were losing their intensity. These changes were reflected in the poetry, in 1952 Tanikawa Shuntaro published The Isolation of Two Billion Light Years, hailed as the the first poet of the post-war generation. The following year he founded Kai (Oar) group with fellow writers such as Yoshino Hiroshi, Ooka Makoto & Kawasaki Hiroshi. Members of the Kai School were lyric poets, expressing the new hopes of the Japanese at this time and acting as a counterpoint to the nihilism of the Arechi poets. In 1959 Wani (Crocodile) a neo–surrealist magazine and group came into being, co-founded by Yoshioka Minoru, Ooka Makota & leading surrealist poet Iijima Koichi and from the 1960’s Shintaishi (New Style poetry*)Poets extended their interests beyond the usual confines and into the areas of radio & television, specifically writing for children (Poetry & Stories) and also publishing works of criticism & translation. Also with the governments lifting of restrictions during this period, the possibility for poetry further opened up, allowing interaction with poets from other nations via travel and cultural exchange visits. At this point American poetry, in particular the Beat writers such as , Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder ( who learnt Japanese & translated Miyazawa Kenji ) were themselves being influenced by traditional forms of Japanese poetry. Another major factor since the sixties is that the number of women poets has grown rapidly, poets like Isaka Yoko, Ito Hiromi, Ibaragi Noriko and possibly one of the better known Shiraishi Kazuko, who published her first collection of poetry in the early 1950’s & in the seventies developed as a performance artist. Most of these poets share a concern with language and the idea of creating new words and sounds, attempting to circumvent standard thought processes and create new ideas.

The 1989 the death of Emperor Hirohito is considered the official end-point of the post-war period. What was originally a reaction to the birth pangs of a new Japan, rising from total annihilation of the pacific war, became a liberation and released a creativity that could redefine itself how it saw fit, opening up new forms and experimentation. What it also did was give a literal and a metaphorical ground zero with the image of Japan as perceived before and after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the atomic bomb.

http://parrishlantern.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/post-war-japanese-poetry.html… (meer)