Modern poetry, popular song and their dangerous liaisons

Japan Forum ISSN: 0955-5803 (Print) 1469-932X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjfo20 Modern poetry, popular song and their dangerous liaisons Tsuboi Hideto & Translated by Alexander Murphy To cite this article: Tsuboi Hideto & Translated by Alexander Murphy (2018) Modern poetry, popular song and their dangerous liaisons, Japan Forum, 30:3, 313-336, DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2018.1427775 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2018.1427775 Published online: 03 Jul 2018. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjfo20 Modern poetry, popular song and their dangerous liaisons TSUBOI HIDETO Translated by ALEXANDER MURPHY Abstract: In this article, Tsuboi Hideto examines the mutually entwined pursuits of modern poetry and music in interwar Japan, focusing especially on the work of Nakahara Chuya, Kitahara Hakushu, and the People’s Poetry group. Cutting across their respective distinctions within the poetry establishment, Tsuboi draws attention to these figures’ shared investment in symphonic, folk and popular music. In so doing, he identifies among them a prevailing concern for curating a poetic voice that might harmonize the conflictual registers of individual and collective expression and thereby attune the work of the poet to that of the ‘people’ more broadly. Meanwhile, the essay traces the currents of modernist and avant-garde thought in Japan and Europe that framed these poets’ engagements with music and sound. Tsuboi then illustrates the varying degrees to which these voices, forged within the cosmopolitan milieu of the Taisho period, bent toward the nationalizing project and later gave way to the chorus of wartime fascism and imperial expansion. Keywords: modern Japanese poetry, literary history, music and composition, history of the senses, orality, modernism, Nakahara Chuya, Kitahara Hakushu, people’s poetry 1. The poetry of Nakahara Chuya and Suruya Sasaki Mikiro’s Nakahara Chuya was the first publication of its kind devoted to delving earnestly into the question of popular song (kayo) in the poetry of Nakahara Chuya, and in so doing generated a considerable amount of interest and discussion (Sasaki 1988). Inspired by Fujii Sadakazu’s identification of the relationship between ‘celestial maiden tales’ and lullabies, Sasaki stated that Nakahara’s ‘songs’, grounded in a feeling of loss, occupied precisely the position of the celestial maiden’s ‘feathered robe’, and credited the ‘lullaby form’ as that feeling’s urheimat. The origin First published in Japanese as ‘Kindai no Shi to Kayo to sono Kiken na Kankei’ In: Tsuboi Hideto, Kankaku no Kindai: Koe, Shintai, Hyosho. Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2006. This English translation is published with permission of the author by arrangement with Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, Nagoya. Japan Forum, 2018 Vol. 30, No. 3, 313–336, https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2018.1427775 Copyright Ó 2018 BAJS 314 Modern poetry, popular song, and their dangerous liaisons of poetry, taken as the wellspring of this ‘feeling of loss’ embraced by ‘abandoned children’, is summoned from beyond the threshold of modernity. And if we follow the thread of Sasaki’s argument in positing ‘song’ as this origin, we might place poetry along a shared trajectory with the appropriation and domestication of the premodern tale, or the course through which tales that had been hitherto narrated with free discretion become homogenized as fixed, standard forms. Of course, Sasaki Mikiro was not the first to turn his attention toward the ‘songs’ of Nakahara Chuya. Ooka Shohei had already worked to establish such an image of Nakahara Chuya as a kind of companion’s testament to the poet. Concerning ‘Circus’, Ooka recalled that, as [his poems] were easy to sing, anyone who encountered Nakahara for the first time was likely to hear a recitation. Nakahara turned his face and, with his eyes closed, opened his mouth and sang in his own peculiar way the onomatopoeia ‘yuan, yuyon, yuyayuyon’. (Ooka 1974, p. 125) Here we find the characteristic gesture of the poet as he equates the recitation of his work, ‘Circus’, with singing. The uniqueness of such an embodied gesture brought into focus an image of the singularity of the singing voice that vanished as soon as it emerged. With this, Ooka had indelibly etched the definitive image of the poet with a ‘good ear’, the poet ‘who hums his poetry’, and the poem-as-song. Sasaki, following Ooka, concludes that ‘Circus’ confronts the modern era with an inversion that verbalizes a body-sensory ‘song’ left behind from a non-literate (non-lexical) vernacular culture. And yet, such a conclusion may be somewhat premature; while Ooka emphasizes the musical qualities and characteristics of children’s verse in Nakahara’s poetry, he does not necessarily suggest, as Sasaki does, the atavistic reversion to something prior to modern poetry. And although Ooka’s perspective intriguingly situates Nakahara and Tominaga Taro’s classical poetry as a ‘reaction against Taisho vernacular poetry’ and ‘a revival of the symbolism of Kanbara Ariake and Ueda Bin’, he contrasts the avoidance of difficult kanji found in that style of classical poetry with the approach of Tominaga as well as Kobayashi Hideo, looking instead to the influence of the language of Horiguchi Daigaku’s Gathering in Moonlight; Ooka perceives the emergence of the style of Gathering in Moonlight, which blended vernacular, refined diction and Sino-Japanese, as one merkmal (milestone) in the history of modern Japanese poetic writing. This fact does not directly account for the origin of popular song in Nakahara’s poetry. But at the very least, Ooka suggests, with regard to the importations of Western poetry or, in short, poetic refinement of this modern moment, the notion of ‘song’ cannot possibly be so pure and unspoiled. Minato no ame no furu gotoku Ware no kokoro ni namida furu Kakumo kokoro ni nijimi iru Tsuboi Hideto 315 Kono kanashimi wa nani naran? Like city’s rain, my heart Rains teardrops too. What now, This languorous ache, this smart That pierces, wounds my heart? (Shapiro 1999, p. 79) This is one of Verlaine’s notable poems from his collaboration with Debussy, Ariettes Oubli ees, titled by Horiguchi ‘My Heart Rains Teardrops’. In this narrative voice, the clear affinity with that of Nakahara’s musical poetry lends support to Ooka’s argument. Indeed, this kind of narrative voice, which Horiguchi Daigaku based on the literary translation of arietta, cannot be situated in opposition to modernity simply because it too was one of the styles brought forth (or discovered) by modernity. If we were then to invoke Sasaki’s argument from this contrasting perspective, we might well consider the ‘feathered robe’ of Nakahara Chuya’s ‘song’ as a kind of camouflage, feigning the return of modern poetry to a stage ‘prior to the modern [poem]’ and a search for an origin therein. Based on this premise, I would like to take seriously the notion that the figure of Nakahara presents us with one of the very prototypes for modern poetry. ‘Easy to recite, and good to sing’ – Ooka Shohei regards it as symbolic that, two years before Goat Songs, Nakahara’s poetry was included in a volume of the ‘Japanese Song Collection’ in Shunjusha’s 1932 World Music Anthology (Tanaka 1932). Based on Nakahara’s poetry, compositions by Moroi Saburo and Utsumi Seiichiro are included within this volume; ‘Morning Song’, ‘Deathbed’ and ‘Empty Autumn’ by Moroi, and ‘Vanished Hopes’ and ‘Homecoming’ by Utsumi. During their first meeting in 1927, Nakahara deposited a manuscript in front of Moroi ‘with a mountainous thud’, from among which Moroi made several selections and set them to music (Moroi 1970). These selections were then sung at the second concert of the musical group Suruya, with which Nakahara had become involved. They were later printed in the second Suruya pamphlet, marking the first occasion that Nakahara’s poetry appeared in print (Akiyama 1975, pp. 6–12). It is significant that ‘Morning Song’, remembered as Nakahara’s substantively pre-eminent work, in which he had ‘nearly fulfilled his design’, as well as ‘Deathbed’, first emerged as music meant to be mediated by the voice (Nakahara 1938). With ‘Homecoming’ as well, insofar as the version that was ultimately recorded in Goat Songs appeared with the final two lines excised due to the compositional needs of Utsumi (in Utsumi’s composition, this section contains a cello interlude), we can see the process whereby a work undertaken in collaboration with a composer generates the text of the poem. The members of Suruya, including Moroi Saburo, were mostly student musiclovers at Tokyo University (many of them were members of the Tokyo Orchestra), and held five concerts between 1929 and 1930. The five aforementioned pieces based on Nakahara’s poetry were sung at the second concert of this series. As Akiyama Kuniharu recounts, paraphrasing Moroi himself, it is worth noting that 316 Modern poetry, popular song, and their dangerous liaisons movements such as the Children’s Song Movement, established in the early Taisho period by the partnership of Kitahara Hakushu and Yamada Kosaku among others as a challenge to the contemporary music world, were borne of this sort of ‘amateurism’ (Akiyama 1975). It can therefore be no accident that Nakahara’s poetry should be connected to these currents. Here, Akiyama’s location of the rift between Taisho and Showa within this context of poetry and music is crucial. Among the compositions based on Nakahara’s poetry, the trio of ‘Morning Song’, ‘Deathbed’, and ‘Homecoming’ feature the unique arrangement of obligato cello atop a piano accompaniment. This is consciously modeled after the duo concertantestyle concerto, and in Utsumi’s ‘Homecoming’ the cello part is especially striking. In Moroi’s two compositions as well, the vocal assignment is specified for a baritone, intending for a melancholic dialogue with the similarly deep voice of the cello. These choices also reflect the fact that there were baritones and cellists among the members of Suruya, an outcome that we can attribute to their intimate bonds. In fact, as the critic Yoshida Hidekazu would later recall, Nakahara Chuya himself enjoyed singing the musical adaptation of ‘Morning Song’ (Yoshida 1962). In the piece, a simple arpeggio on the piano underlies the basic theme, and the cello part strangely avoids entrance into the melody, instead remaining restrained to an understated figure (in the key of C major no less). Likewise, the structure is simple to the extent one could call it plain; the rhythm is composed of eighth-note blocks, and the legato melody is sung nearly in-tempo with the isochronic beat. It is surely an easy piece to sing, whether for Nakahara or anyone else. The very same moment at the end of the 1920s saw the arrival of the era of Nakayama Shinpei and Koga Masao, whose popular compositions, such as ‘Habu Harbor’, ‘Tokyo March’, and ‘Yearning for Your Shadow’ followed one another in quick succession, buoyed by the popular diffusion of records. Despite its plain adornment, however, Moroi’s ‘Morning Song’ differed from both the generation-older Yamada Kosaku’s experiments in classical (kakyoku) and children’s songs (doyo) as well as the musical trends that ushered in the consumption and mass culture of the current era. Instead, it seemed to have found a kind of precarious, liminal place between them. The main theme of the first half of the song is written in the somewhat eccentric meter of 5/8, an element that, in spite of demarcating it from the simpler rhythms of children’s songs and popular ballads, certainly does not invite much difficulty in singing. Tenjo ni To no suki o Hinabitaru Te nite nasu aka kiiroi de more iru hikari, gunka no omoi nani goto mo nashi. Across the ceiling in reds and yellows light seeps in through a crack in the door, With thoughts of rusticated military music I turn my hand nothing there. Tsuboi Hideto 317 The text, deriving its use of one blank space per line from Iwano Homei, is clearly intent on a 5-7 form. In order to put them into agreement, however, Moroi makes each eighth note correspond to a single character; the form proceeds by partitioning each seven-syllable row into five and two, and the final note is lengthened to a half note. This reveals a thoroughly realized impulse to restore a 5-7 pattern even at the level of the note. For all of its ease of singing, however, this sort of faithful correspondence to the meter of the text cannot but invite a monotonous, mechanical delivery. Yet it is possible to view the vocal figure, restrained here from excessive theatricality, as approaching a ‘narrative-type style’. This reflects the special characteristic of Nakahara’s poetry that Ooka Shohei described as ‘easy to recite, and good to sing’. Meanwhile, one also detects a conscious reaction against the preceding children’s songs and school music in its evasion of an easy melodic flow. Moroi’s composition constitutes the latter half of the text, which was written in sonnet form, by joining together alternating meters of 3/4 and 4/4. But, here as well, according to the syncopation of phrases such as ‘jushinokani/asawanayamashi’, he stubbornly preserves the oneto-one correspondence of character to note. This final section (molto tranquillo) leaves a strong impression, ending quietly on a fermata as if to express the loss of ‘so many dreams’ (samazama na yume). 2. Dadaism and folk song To return to the question of the musical in poetry in light of the substantive intimacy with music seen in these collaborations, how might we evaluate what Sasaki Mikiro and others call ‘song’ in Nakahara Chuya’s poetry? In Nakahara’s early Dada poetry, we find the work ‘Dada ongaku no kashi’ (Lyrics for a Dada Song) that begins with the lines ‘uwaki wa hamigaki/uwabami wa uroko’ (the sportscoat is to toothpaste what the boa is to scales) (Richard and Riley 1981). As Akiyama Kuniharu also observes, even this way of affixing ‘lyrics’ to the title is unique, and symbolic in its foretelling of the course of Nakahara’s poetic interests. But then, given the connection between Dada and sound, this should not strike us as especially strange. Dada founder Tristan Tzara’s negation of meaning and foregrounding of the aural dimension in the text and performance of poetry was an underlying element of Nakahara’s Dada poetry as well, having been introduced into Japan by way of Takahashi Shinkichi. In turn, this aural orientation in Dada was an inheritance of the modernist forbearers in Futurism who extolled the use of noise and onomatopoeia. At issue, however, is not the commonality between Dada and Futurism, but rather what has been described as the disparity between the two according to their divergent roles in the First World War (Hamada 1994). For indeed, it is conceivable that the particular character of Dada exposed therein casts a considerably long shadow over Nakahara’s embarkation as a poet. 318 Modern poetry, popular song, and their dangerous liaisons If we cast the Futurists – who exalted technology and glorified war as its apotheosis – in the role of aggressors in modern civilization, Hamada Akira observes that ‘the Dadaists were the war’s victims’ (Hamada 1994). This stance of victimhood renders it difficult to assess Dada as a modern intellectual trend, but it also suggests a crucial connection in considering the basis for this feeling of loss in Nakahara’s poetry from ‘Morning Song’ onward. In passages such as ‘thoughts of rusticated military music’ in ‘Morning Song’, or ‘for a number of eras / there was a brown war’ in ‘Circus’, there is a sense of distance from war that derives from the ‘postwar’ sensibility of a generation who came of age with the construction of a twentieth-century order for which the First World War served as the impetus. Unlike the Dadaists, Nakahara was neither a victim nor an opponent of the war, but inasmuch as he found no position whatsoever to empathize subjectively with it, he was at the very least furnished with the minimum conditions necessary to share in their outlook on the period. Incidentally, Tsukahara Fumi notes that the acoustic poetry that Tzara seemingly devised to rid language of meaning in his ‘creation of pure sound’ was in fact based on the poems of indigenous peoples of Africa and Oceania that had filled his notebooks during his time in Romania (Fumi 1994, pp. 129–132). Tsukahara confirms that Tzara culled the poems of these various indigenous peoples from the linguistic anthropology journal Anthropos that he had read in Bucharest. Prompted purely by his interest in their sounds, he then transliterated the poems and abstracted their semantic content, ‘quoting’ them as his own original poetry. This can be taken as an instance of Dadaist opposition to the Futurists’ worship of technology, but insofar as it bespeaks orientalism and even colonialism, it is certainly just as much a product of the ‘modern’ as the former. Precisely paralleling the concern with psychoanalysis and the unconscious that directed Andre Breton and the Surrealists toward the method of automatic writing, we must assume that this retroactive equation of sound-as-primordial origin to non-meaning was motivated by a specifically modern problem of self-definition. This notion of self-definition posited the discovery of the other within the self as an intermediary, or in other words, the discovery of phylogenetic ‘savage’ culture, and thereby the discovery of the ontogenetic unconscious. Here, it might be sufficiently illustrative to recall ‘Impressions of Ancient Earthenware’ from among Nakahara’s early works. Ninshiki izen ni kakareta shi Sabaku no tada naka de Watashi wa dojin ni tazunemashita ‘Kurisuto no kotan shita zenjitsu made ni Karakane no Uta wo utatte tabibito ga Nannin koko wo torimashitaka’ Dojin wa nani mo kotaenaide Tsuboi Hideto 319 Toi sakyu no ue no Ashiato wo miteimashita Naku mo warau mo kono toki zo Kono toki zo Naku mo warau mo A poem written prior to cognitionin the middle of the desert I asked an earthen figure, ‘Up until the day before Christ was born, how many travelers singing songs of bronze have passed through here?’ The earthen figure, with no reply at all was looking at the footprints atop a distant sand dune Crying, laughing, at this very time at this very time crying, laughing How many travelers have passed through? Here, to pose this question, and to offer a reply, implies that one has apprehended the history of the ‘BC era’ as an origin. In response to this question, however, the ‘earthen figure’ does not reply, but merely looks at the footprints atop the sand dune. This failure of dialogue speaks closely to the subject of ‘precognition’ in the text; to act with a response to the question in mind (to be cognizant of it), is thereby contrasted with intuitive, immediate seeing. This motif of ‘precognition’ anticipated the following poetic theory that Nakahara, in his later years, wrote as his ‘Memorandum on Artistic Theory’: Art is the work of the world before names, and life is the negotiation between various names. (Nakahara, Unfinished Manuscript, 1934) If we apply this formula to the above poem, ‘Impressions of Ancient Earthenware’, the silent action of the ‘earthen figure’ gazing at the footprints corresponds to art expressing that which comes ‘before names’. In turn, the ‘history’ of how many travelers had passed through corresponds to ‘life’ as ‘the negotiation between various names’. In line with the critique of reason put forth by Tzara and other Western modernists of the period, Nakahara conflates ‘primitive’ culture and the unconscious (before names) as the motif of ‘Impressions of Ancient Earthenware’. At the point where phylogeny and ontogeny overlap, the pre-historical ‘BC era’, taken as ‘precognition’, is sought out as an origin. Of course, among Nakahara’s poetic texts that followed his Dada period, the ‘primitive’ was converted to ‘childhood’, 320 Modern poetry, popular song, and their dangerous liaisons and the appearance of the unconscious in turn assumed an increasingly complex array of manifestations. But as it represented the search for personal origins, Nakahara’s poetic method ultimately could not help but bring aurality and musicality into convergence. And it was through this method, above all else, that he charted a course entirely separate from the anti-modern modernism of the Dadaists and the Surrealists who sought the destruction of associative meaning in their pursuit of the unconscious. In his ‘Memorandum on Artistic Theory’ as well, Nakahara criticized the superficial bustle of representational modes that he took for modernist movements at home and abroad, coldly regarding ‘many of them’ as ‘little more than temporary contrivances emerging from the ruins of the European War’. In ‘Debating the Stagnation of Recent Art’, he extended his critique to the Surrealists and the Dadaists, including Tzara, for their ‘lack of intuition’ (Nakahara, Unfinished Manuscript, 1935). At least in terms of poetics, then, he had clearly taken a critical stance toward the modernism of the period. In ‘Debating the Stagnation of Recent Art’, he took aim at Guillaume Apollinaire in particular, acknowledging his ‘new spirit’, yet making the rather severe appraisal that its true essence was ‘characteristic of the last century’. This view may have readily extended to a critique of the contradiction apparent in Apollinaire’s monumental 1917 treatise on poetics, The New Spirit and the Poets, in which he actively advocated the new in the postwar era while still adhering persistently to national-literary expressions such as ‘The French bring poetry to people of all countries’ (Apollinaire 1975-76). Nevertheless, while he deemed Apollinaire ‘last-century’, such a critique might have certainly applied to Nakahara himself. Nakahara was involved with the memorializing movement led by the journal Rekitei, and was one of the first literary figures to recognize the work of Miyazawa Kenji. From the outset, one section of the aforementioned ‘Memorandum on Artistic Theory’ held up Miyazawa as a poet ‘before names’, a phrase to be recycled in 1939 as a sentence in The World of Miyazawa Kenji, which served to unearth Miyazawa Kenji’s own theory of art. In 1935, in the first volume of Studies of Miyazawa Kenji edited by Kusano Shinpei, Nakahara wrote a short piece entitled, ‘Miyazawa Kenji Collection’ as a record of his impressions regarding the volume of the same name that had been first printed by Bunpodo, the same publisher that undertook to publish Goat Songs. In it, he states that in Miyazawa’s works ‘the spirit of our folk songs truly takes the form of the ordinary’. And in another short entry entitled, ‘Upon the Publication of the Miyazawa Kenji Collection’, he appraises Miyazawa’s poetry as ‘closer to devotional poems, or even folk songs’ (Nakahara, January 1935). Although this likening of Miyazawa’s poetry to ‘folk song’ (minyo) fits within the typical characterization of Miyazawa Kenji as ‘regional’ and ‘provincial’, it is of course characteristic of Nakahara as well. In order to differentiate Miyazawa Kenji’s children’s stories and the ‘children’s songs’ incorporated therein from the children’s songs and fairy tales of the Tsuboi Hideto 321 journal Akai tori that catered to an upper-class readership, Nakahara had to engage in a certain privileging of ‘folk song’. With regard to Nakahara’s children’s song melodies, there has long been a view in line with that of Ito Shinkichi that looks to the influence of Kitahara Hakushu (Ito 1968). But just as with Moroi Saburo and others’ activity in Suruya, the musical quality of Nakahara’s poetry stood apart from both the mass diffusion of ‘commercial popular music’ and other popular songs as well as the artistic system of children’s songs proceeding from Akai tori. At the same time, however, it is important to note that this entailed taking a critical step away from conventional modernist movements as well. In this sense, it is clear that there was something preventing Nakahara from becoming more intimate with Moroi and others’ endeavor to move toward a new art form. At the moment when the phrase ‘folk song’ appears, we can clearly perceive the projections of the period. And in this sense, Ito Shinkichi’s view, which seeks out points of connection with Kitahara Hakushu, becomes even more suggestive. For therein arises the image of a poet undertaking to extend the lifespan of the ‘Taisho-esque’. 3. Merkmal (Milestone) 1918 – ‘National Poetry’ selection and the people’s poetry group The term ‘Taisho-esque’ in poetry encompasses a spectrum that ranges from vernacular free-verse poetry to anarchism. If one were to venture to summarize the salient features therein, however, it may well come down to two points: a growing conception of poetic language as intimately linked to community, in turn stratified into such groups as the masses, children, and so on, and a concomitant revival of a gesamtkunstwerk-esque fusion of music, popular song, dance, and performance. And upon consideration of these characteristics, it seems that its defining year was 1918. The year 1918 marked the passing of exactly one half-century since the Meiji Restoration. On a global scale, however, it was also the year of a new world order; as the protracted event of the First World War drew to a close, preparations began for the colonial redivisions (by League of Nations mandate) that allowed for the embrace of national self-determination. For Japan, with its hardline economic policy toward China and intervention in post-revolutionary Russia, this marked an opportunity to assert itself in the redivision plans as a country that ‘did not possess’ resources and territory. Yet while Japan joined in the chorus of the global establishment in support of the great moral causes of democracy and nationalism, such noble terms in fact functioned domestically as a heading for the dynamics of nation-state ideology and a foundation for imperial expansion abroad. With the rise of the anti-Japanese student movement in China, the domestic movements in opposition to intervention in Russia, as well as the rice riots, the year also saw the equilibrium of capital and imperialism begin to waver at home and abroad, and their contradictions laid bare. And with the explosive 322 Modern poetry, popular song, and their dangerous liaisons growth of print media in newspaper and magazines that occurred in and around this year, one can also apprehend 1918 as a turning point for mass media in Japan (Suzuki 1997). The modern poetry of the early Taisho period is often collapsed into a composition that depicts the parallel schools of symbolist poets Kitahara Hakushu and Miki Rofu standing abreast of one another. But with the rise of the People’s Poetry group and its critique of Miki and other Symbolists, the juncture of 1918 also saw the denouement of this Hakushu/Rofu era and a major re-drawing of the map of modern poetry (Okazaki 1918). In January 1918, an open call for ‘national poetry’ in the Tokyo Nichi Shinbun coincided with the inaugural issue of the People’s Poetry group’s magazine Minshu, followed in July by the first issue of Akai tori. The year also marked the rise of the liberal children’s arts and education movement, comprising myriad subjects including stories, songs, poetry, composition, and free drawing. While the extension of college education was initiated under the official promulgation of the University Ordinance, the unification of ‘national language’, in line with the advancing vernacularization of newspaper language, also served to broker the promotion of nationalized education (Shindo 1981, pp. 261–265). The progress of modern civilization has given forth a tremendous jolt to our thought. As modern people, our interests have become complex, quick, and extremely nuanced. In order to express these relentlessly dynamic ideas, the appropriate means can be none other than poetry. … And yet, what kinds of ideas? What kinds of concerns? And what kind of form to take in order to express them? To wit, should we look to short-verse for this, and its conventional 17 or 31 characters, or long verse, with its 7-5, 57 verses, as the ultimate form? Or, might there be the possibility of an entirely new form elsewhere? Such questions are the afflictions of the contemporary poet. … In this, our company brings these questions to the world, and here solicits new poetry. And to those who pride themselves as defenders of older forms, we welcome their contributions as well. On New Year’s Day of 1918, the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shinbun published the above call for national poetry directed to the nation’s readers, ‘soliciting new poetry that captures the national language’. With what language (that is to say, national language), and in what style should one express ‘the interests of modern people’ that had evolved into such ‘complexity’, ‘quickness’ and ‘nuance’? The newspaper media naturally took up this task from the standpoint of calibrating the national language. And with such a ringing call for national poetry, this conception anticipated reforms in print layout and, in turn, national language reform to be undertaken by the media. In this form, however, it also harbored a surreptitious demand that the new national poetry would assume the form of ‘new Tsuboi Hideto 323 poetry’, or vernacular free-verse poetry, that substantively reflected ‘the interests of modern people’. At the end of the previous year, poets’ organizations rallied together and arranged the Poetry Discussion Society (Shiwakai), from which the poetry establishment took shape, setting the stage for a more intensive concern for poetry as a literary form. In sum, the print media, approaching a period of prosperity, set out to reformulate its national readership as ‘The People’, a new subject saddled with the dual tenets of culture and education. Accordingly, the morality of ‘accessibility’ was afforded primacy in order to lay the foundation of this shared education and culture. What was therefore demanded was a form of national poetry that would serve as an aggregation of this morality and the transparent, plain language necessary for its realization. Kitahara Hakushu, overseeing the review of submissions, claimed that national poetry should be expressed with ‘the national language that we are presently using in everyday life’. At the same time, however, the solicitation declared a broader expectation for the new poetry of a collective ‘we’, raised on the landscape, lullabies and soil of Japan, with Japanese blood, and serving to embody a ‘Japan rooted in the spirit as well as the body’. It followed that Japanese poetry must therefore be rooted in the ‘pure, unadorned voice of Japan’, and should accordingly distinguish itself from affected imitations of Western poetry (Kitahara 1918). And yet, this (perhaps excessive) expectation regarding a national readership was utterly betrayed by the unchanged content and level of quality among the poetry submissions. Kitahara reacted to this underwhelming outcome by abandoning the seeds of potential among the contemporary ‘average people’ and, appointing himself as a mouthpiece, resolving to continue along the path of the ‘national poet’. Since I have dealt with this in detail elsewhere, we will not retrace it here (Tsuboi 1998). Nevertheless, it bears noting that his energetic involvement with the field of children’s poetry education, children’s song and folk song, stemming from his commentary experience in the inaugural 1918 issue of Akai tori, is inextricably linked to his disappointment with the People’s Poets and his own subsequent trajectory. Kitahara’s activity in the latter half of the Taisho period, foregrounded in ‘Liberal Arts Education’ and ‘Poetry and Music’, may therefore be a matter worthy of reconsideration. For indeed, it is clear that Kitahara’s own prolific course as an author was of a piece with his attempt to form a widespread youth readership through children’s education; in so doing, he might then take the lead in converting them into a class of authors or, in other words, developing the future ‘people’s poets’ and thereby abetting the nationalization of children. Among the three winning submissions of the Nichi Nichi Shinbun’s national poetry contest, two works, Fukao Hironosuke’s ‘Painting on the Wall’ and Saito Kiyoshi’s ‘The Dancer’, were full-length vernacular free-verse poems that took visual art and dance as their respective motifs, in addition to musical subject matter (Fukui 1914). Both works are rather banal, but one can see a reflection of the tastes of the period that welcomed the linking of poetry with other artistic 324 Modern poetry, popular song, and their dangerous liaisons domains. And Shimazaki Toson, working with Kitahara as a member of the reviewing committee, quite accurately noted the striking preponderance of Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter-esque free-verse poems among the selections (Shimazaki 1918). This observation seems to gesture to the aforementioned premier issue of Minshu, and substantiates the pervasive influence of the so-called People’s Poetry Group, a trend that surely contributed to Kitahara’s dissatisfaction with the submitted works. ‘Is the appreciation of the arts among the contemporary Japanese people so crude and unrefined’, he lamented, ‘and even in the realm of creative capacity, so incompetent and low-grade? I am at an utter loss’ (Kitahara 1918). In one sense, this frank confession registers as a slight against ‘the advocates of People’s Arts’. Kitahara was not alone, however, in seeking to overcome the degree of estrangement between this conception of ‘the People’ (and People’s Arts) and people in reality. Rather, his was a part of a larger, emergent effort to do so via a return to an illusory national body (or imagined community) symbolized in the form of a ‘pure, unadorned voice of Japan’. The activities of the People’s Poetry group, which had seized hegemony over the Shiwakai, unfolded as an effort to suture the split between the consciousness of this nation-state ideology and that of People’s Arts theory, which might account for the unprecedented degree of reach that they attained. In an essay entitled ‘Where are the People?’ Kato Kazuo, a contributor to Minshu, offered a tepid portrait of populist idealism in the January 1918 issue of Shincho, stating that ‘the People are namely those who can live without regret as humanity… what we call those who attempt action that frees the humanity of all mankind’. Issues of class and popular movements taken up in Honma Hisao, Osugi Sakae and others’ discussions of People’s Arts theory are of course abstracted (Onishi 1918). This apolitical, vacated image of the People was henceforth reiterated through the discourse of the People’s Poetry group. I would like to note, however, the following observance from Kato during the same period: Nowadays, once again, as one effect of the war, the conditions for workers have improved considerably, and there are plenty who make as much as 3 or 5 yen in a day; their lives are immeasurably better than our own. And yet, in spite of this, it still should be noted that they cannot create their own true lifestyle. They lack the self-awareness. They have yet to become fully human. As such, while we might call them commoners or workers, it does not immediately follow that we can call them the People in the true meaning of that term. It is clear that this sense of middle-class identification set against the backdrop of the post-war bubble allowed Kato to posit this homogeneous image of the People. What this also clarifies, however, is the separation of ‘them’ from ‘us’ in accordance with the hygienic and personalist moral reform of the People. The democratic notions of the People’s Poetry group assumed an apolitical and neutral stance and espoused the notion of ‘humanity’, but the more they extolled a Tsuboi Hideto 325 universality that extended ‘mankind’ beyond the threshold of the nation, the clearer their service to nationalism and the imaginary national body became. When the bubble burst, recession and panic set in, and in the face of the realities of workers’ strikes and other movements, the image of a peaceful, safe, and neutral People broke apart and required reassembly. Needless to say, the People’s Poetry group could not cope with such a transformation in the image of the People. Printed on the cover of the first issue of the magazine Minshu was the declaration ‘We are one of the People. The People of the World. The People of Japan’. Here, Japan and the World are fundamentally equated under the transparent sign of ‘the People’. While intoning ‘We are one of the People’, it is clear from Kato’s language that the People’s Poetry group took the position of one who discovers, and in turn objectifies and represents, the People. ‘The People’ was not, however, a tangibly existing class or movement, but rather a value to be sought; ‘Where are the People?’ Indeed, as Kato suggests, ‘the true People do not yet exist’. As such, the positions of the People’s Poetry group and Kitahara’s aforementioned sense of the People, although situated in fervent opposition, were in fact roughly parallel to one another. The image of the People in line with Kitahara’s notions of national language and ‘national people’ cannot be seen in Kato’s remarks. But, for instance, Fukuda Masao’s preface to the first volume of the 1916 poetry collection Farmer’s Language – compiled around the time of Honma Hisao and others’ People’s Arts theory – reveals the resonance of these notions with the ‘popular arts’, understood as endowed with a virtuous degree of ‘accessibility’: Fukuda proclaims the dictum of ‘Purity and Simplicity, for the Comprehension of All People’. At the same time, however, he makes no effort to disguise his nationalist rhetoric when he asserts that ‘we will not relent in our urge to issue forth the immortal poetry that expresses the unique spirit of the Yamato people, and in turn, the burning desire to become the global driving force that inspires the power of the national ethnos’. Elsewhere, Tomita Saika, in his 1917 essay ‘Poetry as People’s Art’, followed Johann Gottfried Herder and Walt Whitman in defining poetry, understood as a People’s art, as ‘the fruit of ethnonational spirit’ (Tomita 1917). And in ‘Awaiting the National Poet’, Shiratori Seigo, perhaps looking askance at the concurrent national poetry selections mentioned earlier, asserted that People’s Arts ‘should favor the popular over the national in poetry’ on the basis of ‘the unique characteristics of the country’, and anticipated the entry of ‘the truly oriental poet’ (Shiratori 1918). In ‘The Democratic Movement and The Awakening of the New World of Poetry’, he wrote that ‘the poet has roots in the traditions of his countrymen, makes the most of their original goodness, and should sing of the correct feelings, intentions, and desires of the national people’. As such, against the backdrop of the First World War, both Fukuda and Shiratori freighted the empty signifier of ‘the People’ with the expansive categories of ethnos and nationality that channeled the globalism of the era, and, moreover, in 326 Modern poetry, popular song, and their dangerous liaisons the case of Shiratori, suggested that the majority of the People were ‘unsinging poets: those who are less keen than artists, lack the capacity for expression’, and therefore require the poet to serve as a ‘representative’ (Shiratori 1919). Here, we do see an attempt to avoid Honma’s stratification of People’s Arts into elite belles-lettres and commoner arts. Nevertheless, in placing the level of the People below that of the Poet, they do not diverge whatsoever from the stance of Kitahara Hakushu in his adjudication of national poetry. 4. The ‘National Poet’ and popular song Here, I would like to focus on the ‘unsung’ element of the aforementioned apprehension of the People as ‘unsinging poets’ that became bound up with the discourse of the People’s Poetry group and the selections of national poetry. If we can think of 1918 as a turning point of the ‘Taisho-esque’ milieu in which Kitahara Hakushu and the People’s Poetry group came to share the position of fashioning poetry to reimagine national unification, at its center was the question of popular song. It is well known that the origin of the dispute between Kitahara Hakushu and the People’s Poetry group dates back to Kitahara’s 1922 critique in his magazine Shi to ongaku. Generally, this dispute is described as one concerning the assessment of the free verse poetry of the People’s Poetry group. Therein, one can summarize the opposition between the two as being concerned in a broader sense with the question of popular song in poetry. A striking example of this was the controversy over the course of the folk song movement (a point I have addressed elsewhere) regarding the opposition between Shiratori Seigo and Kitahara. In contrast to Kitahara’s staunch emphasis on the immutable elements of folk songs as things to be ‘sung’, Shiratori critiqued what he saw as the mere entertainment value and lack of sociality in Kitahara and Noguchi Ujo’s folk songs, and called for a new style of ‘reading (or “reciting”) folk song’ (Tsuboi 1997). Shiratori’s conception of ‘reading folk song’ bore his and others’ unruly linkages with free verse poetry which had received criticism from Kitahara, as well as their relationship with the poetry recitation movement that had been promoted in the Shiwakai. Neither can we neglect the connection with the ‘Poetry Dramas’ that had been created and actively sustained by the People’s Poetry Group. But common to the cases of both recitation and poetic drama in ‘Reading Folk Song’ was the struggle of Shiratori and others to adapt orality and musicality to the print culture of the period. On the side of Kitahara Hakushu, there was hardly any consideration of this kind of roundabout practice, and to that extent, his was a conservative adaptation to the times. But with regard to the vernacular domain of folk and children’s songs, the grounds of Kitahara’s argument, intimate with rhythm and voice, clearly had more validity. Interest in the creation of folk songs increased into the 1920s, building upon the precedent of children’s songs in Akai tori. In turn, both movements witnessed Tsuboi Hideto 327 the establishment of a modern genre of popular song during this period that served to breathe life into a stagnant poetry. Particularly interesting in this regard are the ‘Selections from Poetic Discourse and Criticism of Taisho 10’, reprinted at the end of the 1923 publication of the Shiwakai’s annual poetry collection Anthology of Japanese Poetry. Among these selections, Kawaji Ryuko’s ‘A Look Back at The Poetry World This Year’ found the author reflecting on the world of poetry in 1921. Here, as if to compensate for readers’ disappointment with the turn toward prose in free verse poetry, Kawaji emphasized the development of ‘a turn toward children’s songs, folk songs, and short music’. Other entries included Fukuda Masao’s ‘Essential Currents of Literary Arts’, in which the author appealed to free verse poetry to become ‘true folk song’ and ‘a new song of the nation’. Meanwhile, Shiratori Seigo, who conceived the aforementioned ‘Reading Folk Song’, wrote ‘Folk Song and the Village’, and Shimota Shiko contributed ‘The Literary Value of Folk Song’, amounting to a striking increase in interest in the form. At the same time, however, the introduction of Dada was being advanced in tandem with the importation of Futurism by Hirato Renkichi and others, as evidenced by the inclusion in these selections of a reprint of Hirato’s ‘First Manifesto of the Japan Futurist Movement’ (a handbill Hirato had distributed that year on the street in Hibiya), as well as Kawaji’s ‘What is Dadaism?’ The publication of The Poetry of the Dadaist Shinkichi came shortly thereafter, which would in turn influence Nakahara Chuya. As stated earlier, Futurism and Dada, seemingly divided by their roles in the First World War, nonetheless entered Japan in a state of unruly overlap, owing in large part to the time lag between Japan and Europe. It is important to note, however, that, in contrast to Dada in Europe, which emerged from the injuries of the Great War, the case of Japan exemplified a kind of bipolar breakdown; on one side, there was the harmonious poetic world that appealed to the nationalist communality of People’s Poetry, children’s songs, and folk songs. Meanwhile, in the wake of Hirato and others’ efforts, the modernist movement attracted a younger generation of writers through the novelty of its methodological consciousness. In turn, it sought the entry of the Japanese poetry establishment into global simultaneity and an overcoming of the time lag with the West. This is precisely the juncture where we must locate the birth of Nakahara Chuya’s poetry, which wove its way through the borders of folk song and Dada that we encountered above. We might also note that the first era of the folk song movement began in the Meiji period, toward the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Just as the word ‘minyo’ itself was a translation of the German Volkslied originating with Herder, the folk song discourse of this moment was largely modeled upon the European ‘People’s Poetry’ movement, and was not immediately inclined towards musical composition or the creation of original folk songs. Nonetheless, this folk song revival, framed in the context of the aftermath of the RussoJapanese War, materialized in clear consonance with the swelling of national 328 Modern poetry, popular song, and their dangerous liaisons consciousness, a pattern in turn re-inflected in the 1920s folk song movement. In ‘Outline of Japanese Folk Songs’, Shida Gishu argued for the necessity of folk song research as a basis for the ‘reform of national poetry’, ‘improvement of the national language’, and the ‘improvement of national music’ necessary to overcome ‘the destruction of national character’ brought on by the indigestible influx of Western European culture (Shida 1906). And in the concurrent special ‘Folk Song Issue’ collections covering six editions of Shirayuri from November 1906 to April 1907, Shida linked the significance of folk song collections to a ‘moment of genuine self-awareness of the entire national body’ that had arisen in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War (Shida, November 1906). The songs from the ‘Folk Song Issue’ series of Shirayuri came to fuller fruition in Japanese Folk Song Anthology, edited by Maeda Ringai. The songs were collected from across the country and divided according to region, with the anthology’s scope extending as far as the Ryukyus and Taiwan. As can be seen in Shida’s regard for them as ‘dialect poems’, folk songs were attended by a presumptively natural linguistic and climatic sense of locality (Shida, December 1906). Upon first glance, such an emphasis on regional specificity might seem to be at odds with the ongoing drive for the linguistic homogenization of the nation. But in fact, the transliterations of Ryukyuan, Ainu, and Taiwanese ‘aboriginal songs’ captured in this aggregation of literalized folk music actually ended up painting a portrait of the empire to its fullest extent. This affair corresponds to the nationwide dialect survey undertaken by the National Language Research Committee at roughly the same time. And as with the relationship between standard language and dialect, Shida’s aforementioned ‘Outline of Japanese Folk Songs’ reveals that the folk songs of innumerably diverse regions were, in spite of differences in language and subject matter, condensed into a single lineage. The categorization of folk songs therefore served, ‘by emphasizing difference, as a strategy to posit a standardized collective’, and directed the project to ‘encompass such a collective within national boundaries’ (Osa 1998, p. 169). In this sense, the cataloguing of both folk songs as well as dialects gives rise to the same issue: by identifying a folk song from each respective region as a ‘variant’, one produces a web of such variants with mutual resemblances, from which emerges the illusion of a single, overriding prototype. While fundamentally carrying on in kind with the folk song revival found in Shirayuri and elsewhere, the post-war folk song movement of the 1920s came to establish folk song as a stable genre according to the theoretical and practical service of folk music studies in line with the ethnology of Yanagita Kunio (and by extension, Orikuchi Shinobu), the compositions and transcribed arrangements of Yamada Kosaku, Fujii Kiyomi and others, and Kitahara Hakushu, Noguchi Ujo, and Shiratori Seigo’s original folk song verse. Indeed, the circumstances surrounding the folk song had decidedly transformed within twenty years’. While Shida Gishu and others had needed to borrow the very concept of modern folk song from the German Romanticist School in order to explain its instance in Tsuboi Hideto 329 Japan, the 1920s generation took for granted its existence as a clearly defined genre. In fact, in its very givenness, it seemed almost inevitably to produce a sense of its own distance from contemporary existence. The apprehension of folk song as a conceptual apparatus generated in/by modernity was thus suppressed in favor of the notion of a fixed entity occurring naturally in the villages and countryside. Further, the perception of its present condition of variation and loss engendered the illusion of an ‘Ur-form’ which in turn served to symbolize an ‘originary pre-modernity’ as the foundation of a collective nature. Meanwhile, like the hometown dialect that Takuboku Ishikawa sang of in ‘Yearning for my Native Accent’, it became the object of nostalgia for city-dwellers. From this point, there seem to have emerged two stances in the fields of literature and music with regard to folk song and children’s songs. The first was a preservationist lament over the modernization and urbanization of the ‘natural essence’ of popular song, and the attendant loss of that very nature due to changing systems of agriculture and labor. The second was, conversely, an impulse to positively invoke popular song’s natural and collective essence, and in turn create a genre of folk song that could reinvent that nature within a modern framework. These two stances were of course mutually entwined, and cannot be neatly separated from one another. It might, however, suffice to say that the former corresponds to Yanagita Kunio’s ethnological position, while the latter is representative of Kitahara Hakushu and others’ folk song compositions. Yanagita was, above all else, exceedingly ambivalent toward the term ‘folk song’. In his 1929 work Folk Song, Past and Present, he wrote that if one were to ask people in a village who sang folk songs, what it was they were singing, ‘they would probably reply that it’s simply a song’. This seems, in fact, to precisely summarize Yanagita’s own view of folk song. When script was unfamiliar to commoners, he continued, insofar as the voice was the central storage format of emotion, ‘song’ (uta) was infinitely more significant than ‘our literature’. Still, he argued, ‘we are unable to resist the transformation of that significant notion in this day and age. With each passing year we move further from it, and soon it will have vanished entirely, and we will sing no longer’. What emerges in light of this situation is the essence of Yanagita’s ethnology as ‘the sentiment of one who values the past’. But if we take into account the fact that this sense of nostalgia and grief for such imminently obsolete things also carries over into his ‘Peripheral Dialect Theory’ from the same moment in the 1920s, the root of the issue goes quite deep. Indeed, an analogous issue arises in ethnological research with regard to what Suzuki Hiromitsu notes as ‘an internal orientalism organized around the subject of observation (the intellectual of the center) discovering the object (dialect)’ (Suzuki 1993). This ‘internal orientalism’ attended the era of ethnological collection following the Russo-Japanese War, and as Suzuki goes on to argue, the turning of this introspection toward Asia was also inherent to the study of folk song and ethnonational musicology. I hope to explore this point further on a future occasion. 330 Modern poetry, popular song, and their dangerous liaisons Yanagita cited the ‘invasion’ of shamisen music and early popular songs (hayariuta) as the direct cause of the vanishing of folk song, but no less compelling was his firm rejection of the original poems and new compositions of folk and children’s songs that deviated from his conception of folk music as ‘songs created and sung by commoners themselves’. This aversion is likely due to the features of these original songs that resembled the invasive nature of the transregional circulation of hayariuta. Perhaps he was also averse to the coercive notion of songs that one ‘ought to sing’, or else ‘should be made to sing’. Here as well, Yanagita staked his view in the supposed singularity and spontaneity of local people and children who sang in response to the inherent dictates of their time and place. He took issue with the circulation of hayariuta by means of ‘the machinery of rapid transportation’, as well as the inability of regularized patterns of movement, production, and work to synchronize to commodified, standardized ‘new’ songs. Of these two points, the former case in which folk songs and hayariuta, buoyed by the diffusion of records, wiped out regional difference and became ‘catchy listening’ likely mattered more for Yanagita. In the case of the latter, it is perhaps just as necessary to consider the dimension of a homogenizing bodily regulation of everyday life, including the mechanization of labor. The significance of reframing Kitahara Hakushu, Shiratori Seigo and others’ original folk song compositions and children’s songs from the viewpoint of Yanagita’s folk song research should be readily apparent, if only from these points alone. Among the members of the People’s Poetry group, Shiratori engaged most energetically with folk and children’s songs. Just as Kitahara had done with his publishing venture Ars, Shiratori established the publishing company Daichisha, and – in the final years of the Taisho period that saw the dissolution of the Shiwakai – issued the magazine Chijo Rakuen. In addition to poetry, he continued the movement to catalogue and research regional folk songs and compose original folk works, and worked within his own coterie to publish numerous folk song anthologies. The ten years of folk song research that spanned the pages of Chijo Rakuen were compiled in volume one of ‘Investigation of the Folk Songs of Various Nations’ (Toen Shobo 1936). As evidenced by the (re) printing of Yanagita’s essay ‘Sumire dialect and others’ in the preface, we can say that Shiratori, compared with Kitahara Hakushu and others, held a stance faithful to the Yanagita’s view of folk songs. And if we were to supplement the People’s Poetry group as a whole, we should stress the importance of Shiratori, Fukuda Masao, Inoue Yasufumi, Nan’e Jiro and many others’ passion for the genre of poetic drama and its connection with popular song. The morals of transparency and clarity of expression in the transmission of meaning found their cause in People’s Poetry, drawing criticism from Kitahara from a rhythmic standpoint for their prosaic quality. Indeed, based on the very name itself, it seems natural and almost inevitable that People’s Poetry would become intimate with either Shiratori and those who took the world of folk song to its logical extreme, or with the field of poetic drama that incorporated performance and dance. And Tsuboi Hideto 331 within this field of poetic drama, the ‘dance-poetry drama’ that Inoue and Nan’e modeled after Noh and Kabuki can be seen as an effort to supplement poetry with popular song by introducing dancing and staged elements. The kind of gesamtkunstwerk-esque conception that incorporated this embodied quality can also be seen for a period of time in Yamada Kosaku’s notion of ‘Dance Poetry’, and was in fact connected to Kitahara Hakushu as well through his collaborative work with Yamada. Take, for instance, the 1929 work Collection of Dance Lyrics Composed by Hakushu, printed through Kaizo Bunko. The same publisher also released Collection of Children’s Songs Composed by Hakushu, as well as Collection of National Popular Songs Composed by Hakushu. They comprised songs and ballads for dance pieces and stage productions (folk songs, Kiyomotostyle joruri pieces, etc.), and were collected as ‘composed pieces, popular pieces, or pieces to be performed as dance’. The most notable examples appear in ‘Matsushima March’, ‘Chakkiri Song’ and others. Elsewhere, pieces such as the prefatory ‘Thousand-shrine tag’, which was composed as a Kabuki Shosa-mono, could be fairly taken as a certain variety of poetry drama. In many of these works, traditional choreography appended the compositions, which were in turn cut to records. This process produced an artificial synthesis of the embodiedness and musicality of folk song, yielding a finished work that was, needless to say, quite far-removed from what Yanagita considered the spontaneous, improvisatory form of folk song. ‘Chakkiri Chakkiri Chakkiri-yo/Kyaru ga nakunte amezurayo’ – ‘Chakkari Song’, considered a masterpiece of Hakushu minyo, is so familiar to today’s ear as to be taken for a standard folk song. Because of its skillful collage of traditional ballads, Machida Kasho’s composition and Hanayagi Tokutaro’s commendable utilization of Kitahara’s poetry in his choreography, whereby text and music were given a single fixture in embodied motion, this piece disguised itself as a seemingly natural folk song (specifically, a tea-picking song), and created an extremely artificial image of native place. The same is largely true of his children’s songs as well. As Kitahara notes in the preface to his own 1919 work Dragonfly Eyes and elsewhere, there are a great many works that possess a children’s song and koutaesque character dating back to 1911 with Memories. Matsunaga Goichi has rightly noted the significance of the relationship between the concerted regression to childhood in the Memories section of the author’s own My Upbringing, which he considers an autobiographical ‘history of the senses or history of sexual desire’, and the ‘principle of the child’s heart’ in his post-1919 children’s songs (Matsunaga 1973). As Matsunaga suggests, he concealed and repressed in many works the parts of those sentiments that dealt with this history of the senses or history of desire. But behind the public face of the representative ‘national poet’ of the national community, he also held an internalized desire to return to an ontogenetic origin. And yet, even that desire contained a complicit movement 332 Modern poetry, popular song, and their dangerous liaisons toward phylogenetic retrospection. This seems to be one central aspect of the modern system of popular song that Kitahara Hakushu exemplified. Goshoki me’e rankan, Ynae ga kamiyui fute matsu toru ban. Goshoki me’e rankan, Tera no yoake no hosomichi ni. Kane ga naru Kane ga naru. Au te nake to no kane ga naru. Come ‘long to the temple for morning prayer, For there waits a lover, combing her hair. Come ‘long to the temple for morning prayer, Light out on the path at the break of the day. The temple bell tolls, the temple bell sings, With the cries from encounters, the temple bell rings. ‘Rokkyu’, which begins thusly, was originally a part of Memories, but was also reprinted in the 1919 Hakushu Kouta Anthology that marked the first of his song collections. Three years later, Yamada Kosaku published a corresponding musical score in Shi to ongaku. This chronology forms a perfect counterpart to the course of ‘Red Spider Lily’ from its reprinting in the children’s song collection Dragonfly Eyes to its subsequent scoring. Moreover, through its incorporation of dialect and economical language, the piece produces a rich rendering of the account of eros viewed through a child’s gaze in My Upbringing. Yamada Kosaku’s composition likewise stands out as one of the finest of the pair’s many collaborative works, resolving subtly with a folk-verse line that mimics the sound of a bell in the pairing of the piano’s right-hand with the final inflection (the ‘kan’ of ‘me’e rankan’). Although Kitahara’s poetry partly fills the role of the native informant of Yanagawa, it still retains an objective gaze toward the marginalized Rokkyu district and its people. This strange balance brings out in this song a sense of division between the space of public and private that seems to disappear in his later popular songs. What imparts such a profound impression in the song is perhaps its retention of those individual breaths of passion and pathos that cannot be buried within the collectivity. And yet, many of the songs produced by the Kitahara Hakushu/Yamada Kosaku partnership after the 1920s were in fact realized upon the extinguishing of these very breaths. And such was the concurrent realization of the ‘Taisho-esque’ in poetry. Nakahara Chuya appeared in Suruya at the end of the 1920s with ‘Morning Song’ in hand, the work he had penned in the final year of Taisho. And indeed, his countenance was that of a poet out of step with the Showa period. Nakahara sang the melody of ‘Morning Song’ in the hushed, restrained manner of Tsuboi Hideto 333 ‘narrative recital’, seemingly striving to reclaim the distinctive breath of life that had since vanished from Kitahara and others’ popular songs. The lyrical, narrative voice in the works of Moroi Saburo, meanwhile, was bathed by the wave of modernism, and took on a kind of defiant youthfulness in contrast to Yamada Kosaku’s maturity. And yet, as we can faintly detect in ‘Deathbed’, which wound up as an art song by virtue of its Scriabin-esque tonal color, Moroi’s music draws out a voice based in Nakahara’s musical poetry. Moroi also recounts, however, that Nakahara, having taken a critical stance toward Western modernism, could not adhere to this compositional training. It would be fair to say that Nakahara Chuya got off to a strange start at the end of the 1920s, continuing to sing with a look of discomfiture that bespoke a sense of abandonment from the assurances of the ‘Taisho-esque’. And yet, this was neither a mark of his privilege nor of his limitation (as a poet with a fondness for singing), for indeed, the persistence of Nakahara’s brand as the poet of ‘song’ came with a considerable amount of epochal baggage. But if he could not quite attain the status of a national poet like Kitahara Hakushu, what kind of poet was he? Although songs today struggle to survive within their vacuum-sealed confines of the karaoke box, it is my secret hypothesis that such sealing off and standardization of song may in fact go as far back as the Kitahara/Yamada era of modern popular song in the 1920s. And yet, I still find it especially difficult to locate Nakahara Chuya within that frame. Since embarking in earnest in his endeavor to cultivate the genre of original folk song compositions, Kitahara Hakushu continued to maintain his position both at the forefront of this domain alongside his poetry until nearly the end of his career. However, Ifukube Takateru, known for promoting the anachronistic notion of ‘agrarian art’ in works such as ‘The Bankruptcy of Modern Art’ and ‘Critique of Modern Urban Culture’, criticized the original folk song trend to which Kitahara belonged as ‘consumerist, narcotic songs of the modern city’ that he termed an ‘artificial folk song craze’ (Ifukube 1930). Indeed, the trappings of Kitahara’s status as a national poet were no different from the works of the modern, urban literary industry that were mass-produced expressly for mass consumption. One work that illustrates, for better or worse, a high point of Kitahara Hakushu’s later years as a national folk poet is ‘Expedition by Sea to the East’, which was collected, along with ‘Swift Impetuous Susa-no-o’ and ‘Epic of the Mongol Invasion’, in the 1940 work New Eulogies, the last volume of poetry to be published within his lifetime. Because it was written as a commission for the ceremonies surrounding the ‘2,600th Anniversary of the Founding of the Japanese Empire’, Kitahara, nearly blind by this point, had to complete it by dictation. Of the work, he wrote with immense pride that, ‘among my poetry volumes thus far, the cantata ‘Expedition by Sea to the East’ in this collection serves as their synthesis, and as my long-awaited, crowning accomplishment’. The work was a text for a cantata to be performed in the ‘Festival of Arts in Celebration of the 334 Modern poetry, popular song, and their dangerous liaisons 2,600th Year of the Empire’. It was a majestic epic poem in eight parts, employing 5-6 and 7-7-5 meters in its recounting of the mythic narrative of the emperor Jimmu from his initial eastern voyage to his enthronement at Yamato. And in what can be regarded as the culmination of his musical works thus far, it brought together a diverse spectrum of vocal types, including male and female soloists, choral sections, and boys’ choirs, and incorporated a range of folk forms ranging from children’s songs to sailor’s songs. Kami to mashimasu ohomiitsu takashiraseba, Amenoshita hitotsu ie to zo. Harukanari sono hatsukuni, Hatemo nashi ametsumi waza, Iza shirase yamato koko ni, Otakebiso, iyasaka wo warera. To tell of his divine majesty’s august reign, It is but one roof for all corners of the land. From the distant age of its founding, And through the boundless endeavor of the heavenly sovereign, It is Yamato that now extends its reign, Letting forth a martial cry, for our enduring prosperity. Given the purpose of its staging, not to mention the style and content of the text, no further explanation seems necessary regarding the celebratory occasion for which this ‘cantata’ was expected to function. The score was written by Nobutoki Kyoshi, the same composer behind the infamous military song ‘Umiyukaba’ and a professor in the newly opened composition department at the Tokyo Music School (he praised the work of Moroi Saburo highly in Suruya). The poem itself, in comparison to ‘Swift Impetuous Susa-no-o’, whose narrative voice was imbued with a sense of tension, employed an undeniably flaccid and anachronistic literary style. However, upon listening to the extant recording of the piece in view of the full score housed in the collection of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, the ear confirms a sense of being witness to the ultimate desire of modern popular song for assimilation into the national community on the grandest scale. By this time, Nakahara Chuya had passed, giving way to an era in which the voices of military songs flooded every street corner with echoes of the refrain, two–thousand–six–hun–dred years. Acknowledgments The translator, Alexander Murphy, would like to thank Michael Bourdaghs for his invaluable support and assistance, and the British Association for Japanese Studies (BAJS) and the Wadham College Conference Series for their generous support of the BAJS Translation Workshop 2016. The translator and the Tsuboi Hideto 335 editorial team at Japan Forum would also like to extend their heartfelt thanks to Tsuboi Hideto and the Nagoya University Press for giving permission to publish this translation of their work. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. References Akiyama, K., 1975. Nihon no sakkyokai no hanseiki. Tokyo: Ongaku geijutsu. Apollinaire, G. 1975-76. L’esprit nouveau et les poetes. Trans. Kubota Hanya, In: Yuriika rinjizokan go: sekai no shiron. Tokyo: Seidosha. Fukui, K., 1914. Nihon shinshi shi. Tokyo: Tachikawa Bunmeido. Fumi, T., 1994. Kotoba no avangyarudo: dada to miraiha no 20 seiki. 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Gendai shiso, July. Suzuki, K., 1997. Nashonarizumu to media: Nihon kindaika katei ni okeru shinbun no kozai. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Tanaka, T., 1932. Sekai Ongaku Zenshu. Tokyo: Shinjusha. Tomita, S., 1917. Minshu geijutsu toshite no shiika. Waseda bungaku, February. 336 Modern poetry, popular song, and their dangerous liaisons Tsuboi, H., 1997. Koe no shukusai: Nihon kindai shi to senso;. Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku shuppansha. Tsuboi, H., 1998. Kokugo, kokushi, kokumin shijin: Kitahara Hakushu to Hagiwara Sakutaro. Bungaku, October. Yoshida, H., 1962. Nakahara Chuya no koto. Bungei, September. Tsuboi Hideto is a professor of Japanese literature at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. His current research focuses on body politics and representation of the senses in modern Japanese culture. His publications include Koe no shukusai: Nihon kindaishi to senso (Festival of Voices: Modern Japanese Poetry and War), University of Nagoya Press, 1997; Kankaku no kindai: koe, karada, hyosho (Modernity of the Senses: Voice, Body and Representation), University of Nagoya Press, 2006; and Sei ga kataru: 20 seiki Nihon bungaku no sei to shintai (Sexuality Speaks: Sex/Gender and Body in the Literature in Twentieth-Century Japan), University of Nagoya Press, 2012. Alexander Murphy is a PhD candidate at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago. His research interests center on the transnational terrain of popular performance and media culture in modern Japan, with particular attention to theories of voice and orality across music, poetry and literature. He may be contacted at Murphya1@uchicago.edu.