The First Modern Japanese: The Life of Ishikawa Takuboku

Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture

A series of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Carol Gluck, Editor

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Copyright © 2016 Donald Keene

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Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Keene, Donald, author.

Title: The first modern Japanese : the life of Ishikawa Takuboku / Donald Keene.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Series: Asia perspectives: history, society, and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015050684 | ISBN 9780231179720 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231542234 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Ishikawa, Takuboku, 1885 or 1886–1912. | Poets, Japanese—20th century—Biography.

Classification: LCC PL809.S5 Z72755 2016 | DDC 895.61/4—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050684

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COVER IMAGE: Courtesy of Kushiro Public Library and Shinchosha

COVER DESIGN: Chang Jae Lee

To my son Asazō,

who has made the last years of my life the happiest.

Contents

1. Takuboku, Modern Poet

2. Takuboku in Tokyo

3. Takuboku the Schoolteacher

4. Exile to Hokkaidō

5. Hakodate and Sapporo

6. Takuboku in Otaru

7. A Winter in Kushiro

8. Poetry or Prose?

9. Takuboku Joins the Asahi

10. The Romaji Diary

11. The Sorrows of Takuboku and Setsuko

12. Failure and Success

13. Takuboku on Poetry

14. The High Treason Trial

15. The Last Days

16. Takuboku’s Life After Death

Notes

Bibliography

Index

1

Takuboku, Modern Poet

Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912) probably ranks as the most beloved poet of the tanka, a form of poetry composed by innumerable Japanese poets for well over a thousand years. Takuboku’s tanka stand out less for their beauty than for their individuality; his poems are as surprising today as they were for the first readers. His poems borrowed from no one but managed always to transmit the striking freshness of his thoughts and experiences. Countless poets before him had conveyed in the thirty-one syllables of the tanka such subjects as their perceptions of the changes brought by the seasons or the yearning evoked by the poet’s love. Takuboku’s poems seldom touched on these familiar subjects, but he had no intention of destroying the traditions of the tanka with his originality. Instead, he clung to composing his poems in thirty-one syllables, just as other tanka poets had done for two thousand years. And although his essays often urge poets to write in the language of the day, his tanka were always written in the classical Japanese language, even when he described the thoughts of an unmistakably modern man. He rather resembled the French modernist poets who, though determined to wreck the old poetry, continued to use rhyme and traditional forms like the sonnet.¹

The tanka was often beautiful in its imagery and rich in overtones that gave depth, despite the few syllables available to the poet. The language permitted to the poets consisted of a vocabulary that had been established centuries earlier by members of the court in order to maintain elegance of diction, but it limited the subjects. Tanka poets borrowed openly from the poetry of their predecessors; indeed, a poem without reference to the past was not praised. Tanka poets, with no thought of startling, hoped that their variations on familiar themes would be admired for the delicate shifts of older poems or a barely hinted freshness of expression.

The sameness of subjects in the collections of tanka does not apply to the dozen great tanka poets whose poems are unforgettable, even when the subjects are conventional. Although the rise of linked verse in the fourteenth century and of haiku in the seventeenth century gave poets greater freedom of subject and language, they did not eliminate or greatly change tanka. Not until late in the nineteenth century was there a serious call to reject the heritage of the past and create poetry suitable to men of the enlightened Meiji era.

The poems of Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), the leader of this new movement, were rarely about the beauty of cherry blossoms or colored autumn leaves and the other lovely but exhausted subjects of poetry. Instead he described in his poems what he had perceived and felt, without worrying whether they might seem unpoetic to readers of traditional poetry. Shiki’s insistence on writing his poems in modern Japanese resulted in bringing tanka and haiku into the new age and saved both forms from being demolished by the European influences that swept over Japanese poets beginning in the 1880s.

This in itself did not make Shiki a modern poet. He rarely revealed, as a modern poet usually does, his deepest emotions, and he seldom referred to himself in the first person. His best-known tanka sequence requires an understanding of unspoken background poems: Shiki did not reveal that he wrote these poems when he was almost completely paralyzed from an illness that eventually killed him.

Unlike Shiki, Takuboku was a truly modern poet. About sixty years ago, Kōsaka Masaaki, a professor of philosophy at Kyoto University, told me he was convinced that Takuboku was the first modern Japanese. This statement lingered in my memory, though at the time I did not know Takuboku’s work well enough to understand what made him modern.²

Although it is difficult to name the qualities that make a poet appear modern, Takuboku’s poems make their modernity clear without needing further explanation. Here are a few examples:

Surely no earlier tanka poet ever wrote a poem that included a dead man, a man released from prison, and still another who was sick; and Takuboku resembled all of them:

This poem likens the torment flashing through Takuboku’s mind to a train that is momentarily visible as it rushes through a wilderness. Surely no one before Takuboku had used such a simile:

The word sand occurs in all of the first ten poems of A Handful of Sand, Takuboku’s most celebrated collection. This poem suggests the passing of time, like sand in an hourglass. Even though Takuboku does not tell us what he felt on seeing the weeping man, he makes us feel almost unbearable sympathy.

Takuboku believed that the tanka was the ideal form for a poem. Disagreeing with the poets of his day who, under European influence, found the tanka’s brevity an obstacle to their expression, he insisted that the shortness allows the poet to write a poem the moment an inspiration comes into his head. The brevity of the tanka keeps the poet from exaggerating his emotions, as there is no second stanza repeating what has already been expressed.

Takuboku sometimes used modern Japanese when he wrote poems that were not tanka, but all his tanka were in the classical language. Although this sometimes makes them difficult to understand, especially today when the classics are no longer an important part of Japanese education, Takuboku did not hesitate to use unusual characters or obsolete meanings. But even when a poem is difficult to parse, the general meaning can usually be sensed.

When we read Takuboku’s poems and diaries today, we are likely to forget that he died a century ago, because even though Japan changed enormously during this time, no gap separates Takuboku from ourselves. We may be startled at times by his candor, especially in his diaries where he reveals even his faults more openly than do most writers today. The following passage from his Romaji Diary (1909) illustrates his modernity: Why did I decide to keep this diary in roman letters? Why? I love my wife, and it’s precisely because I love her that I don’t want her to read this diary. No, that’s a lie! It’s true that I love her, and it’s true that I don’t want her to read the diary, but the two facts are not necessarily related.⁶

Although less widely read than his poetry, Takuboku’s diaries are his most unforgettable works. Because they were written day by day and were not rewritten at a later date, they inevitably contain passages of only ephemeral interest, but hardly a page is without literary interest. Takuboku did not hesitate to show himself naked even when his actions were plainly foolish or deplorable. He did not keep the diaries with possible readers in mind, nor was he making a confession. He occasionally did use material from his diaries in his works of fiction, but never long passages or successfully. The diaries must have taken considerable time to write each night, and they were Takuboku’s most precious possession. When he had lost everything else, he saved his diaries. Then, when he realized he might die before long, he ordered a friend to burn them after his death, but he never attempted to burn them himself. He also ordered his wife, Setsuko, to burn his diaries after he died, but fortunately she did not.

When Takuboku died in 1912, he was not well known to the public, but in the years since then, more than a thousand books and monographs have been devoted to his life and writings. He is now recognized as a major figure of modern Japanese literature.

Takuboku was born in the tiny village of Hinoto in Iwate Prefecture. He is usually thought to have been born in 1886, but some scholars, based on a memorandum in Takuboku’s hand and the recollections of an elder sister, insist that he was born in 1885.⁷ His father, Ishikawa Ittei (1850–1927), was the priest of the Sōtō Zen temple in Hinoto, but Takuboku never referred to Hinoto as his birthplace. Even after monuments had been erected at other sites where he had lived, there was none in Hinoto until 1955. The existing monument bears an inscription written by Takuboku’s close friend from his school days, Kindaichi Kyōsuke (1882–1971). He was the first to declare that biographers were mistaken to believe that Takuboku was born in Shibutami, the village he frequently described as his home.⁸

A probable reason why Takuboku was reluctant to mention Hinoto was uncovered about twenty years after his death. His father had left Hinoto under a cloud after the villagers accused him of having usurped money sent by the sect’s main temple as a gift for indigent parishioners. Ittei was accused of using the money to make loans on which he charged interest. He was also accused of having sold trees belonging to the temple and using the proceeds to buy valuables that he took with him to his next post.

Saitō Saburō, who visited Hinoto in the 1950s, reported that some elderly villagers were still indignant over Ittei’s offenses and that their dislike extended to Takuboku, his son. It is difficult now to judge whether or not Ittei was guilty of these allegations, but even his biographer admitted that he was loose with money. He suggested, too, that Takuboku had inherited this trait from his father.⁹

Takuboku’s birth certificate did not identify him as Ittei’s son but as Kudō Hajime, the illegitimate son of Kudō Katsu (1847–1912), his mother. Although Buddhist priests, celibate in accordance with the rules of most sects, were given permission by the government in 1872 to marry, disapproval and even contempt of married priests lingered among parishioners. At the time of Takuboku’s birth, Ittei, who had taken the Zen tonsure at the age of ten, held the lowly position of priest of a minor temple. Still young and unsure of his future, he may have decided, in the interest of keeping his job, to conceal the marriage, even though this effectively branded his children as illegitimate. Two older sisters of Takuboku were accordingly registered at birth as fatherless.¹⁰

Then in 1887, the superior of the Hōtokuji, a Zen temple in the more prosperous village of Shibutami, suddenly died, leaving only children too young to succeed him. Ittei was appointed as his successor, a promotion arranged by Katsurahara Taigetsu (1826–1910), the Zen priest under whom Ittei had been ordained and whose sister Ittei had secretly married. Some parishioners felt that Ittei was too young and inexperienced for an important temple. Others felt sorry for the family of the previous superior who, forced to leave the temple, had been reduced to poverty. Ittei’s bookishness and his fondness for composing poetry also displeased the parishioners.

Takuboku, still an infant, was carried from Hinoto to Shibutami. In 1892 Ittei, perhaps emboldened by his new authority, revealed that he was married and bestowed the family name Ishikawa on his wife and their children, despite pretending that the children were adopted and not his own. Ittei’s confession of marriage may have strengthened the opposition. Some parishioners accused him of being less interested in their welfare than in rebuilding the temple, which had been severely damaged in a fire. Before long, there was gossip that Ittei was making private use of temple funds, though he strongly denied any wrongdoing. Most parishioners accepted his solemn declaration of innocence, but the dispute between Ittei’s adherents and opponents smoldered for years.

Takuboku entered school at the age of five. Although he was registered as Kudō Hajime, a year later his name was changed to Ishikawa Hajime. The Shibutami Elementary School had been founded as the result of a government proclamation, issued in 1872, requiring every child in Japan to attend school for at least four years from the age of six (five by Western count). Of course, schools had existed before this order was given, but the schools attended by the children of commoners taught little beyond basic reading and writing, along with enough arithmetic to enable a shopkeeper to keep his accounts. For boys of the samurai class, there were academies where they spent much of their time pondering Confucian thought. This knowledge of classical Chinese, essential to the study of Confucian writings, came to be a mark of a man’s samurai background.

With the opening of Japan to foreign countries after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, it became evident to the government that Confucian wisdom alone would not enable the Japanese to obtain a place in the modern world. At the outset of his reign, the young emperor promised that knowledge would be sought throughout the world to strengthen the foundations of imperial rule. The Rescript on Education of 1872 materialized this promise with the decision to build schools throughout the country where children, regardless of class, would be taught science, geography, English, and other untraditional subjects.

By Takuboku’s time, some fifteen years later, even schools in remote parts of the country were providing elementary education comparable to that offered in advanced countries of the West. This great diffusion of education enabled Takuboku to acquire the knowledge that would enrich his poetry and his life, and it is astonishing that he learned so much so quickly.

The elementary school that Takuboku first attended was within the grounds of the Hōtokuji, the temple where he lived. In the haste to provide classrooms where the new learning could be taught, Buddhist temples (the largest available buildings) were often turned into schoolhouses. At first, Takuboku did poorly in his studies. Perhaps an inborn resistance to conformity and a love of the outdoors kept him from obeying school discipline. But his marks gradually improved, and by the time he graduated, he stood at the head of his class.

In fact, Takuboku’s marks were so much superior to those of his classmates that they spoke of him as a genius, an epithet that clung to him for the rest of his life. Occasionally he even referred to himself as a genius, but he grew increasingly aware of the bitter contrast between the bright future expected of a child prodigy and the life he would be forced to lead. He expressed the contradiction in these terms:

Takuboku’s boyhood years in Shibutami, however, were happy for the most part. He was worshipped by his mother and had many friends, but his happiness came less from people than from the mountains and fields. He was a child of nature, as his sister Mitsuko described him.¹¹ He often recalled the pleasures of his boyhood:

He remembered with nostalgia the songs of the Shibutami birds:

He particularly enjoyed the sounds of woodpeckers in the trees around the Hōtokuji. In 1902, when he was sixteen, he published a sonnet on the woodpecker, experimenting with a foreign poetic form. Indeed, Takuboku was so captivated by woodpeckers that he took Takuboku as his poetic name (gagō) from the two characters used in writing woodpecker.¹²

He was once asked why he had abandoned an earlier, more poetic, name in favor of woodpecker, a bird not celebrated by Japanese poets for its appearance or song. He replied,

Outside my window is a dark wooded place. From its depths, irrespective of the season, I can always hear the sound of woodpeckers steadily pecking at the bark of the trees. The sound, from the heart of the forest, continues at all hours, a soft drumming like an echo from ancient times, a most endearing sound. It cures my spring ailments, whether I am resting on a pillow with a headache or reciting poetry to beguile tedium, or even when I am reading something about my beloved Wagner.¹³ The sound comforts me day and night, and when I hear it, whenever that may be, I feel an overwhelming desire to compose poetry—a pure joy that spurts up inside me, a pleasure that blots out the tedium of writing. That’s why I took Woodpecker for my name.¹⁴

Long after he left Shibutami and the woodpeckers, Takuboku continued to express nostalgia for this village, though his longest unbroken stay was only from 1887 to 1903. His attachment grew as he increasingly sensed that his years in Shibutami were likely to be the happiest of his life. The poems about his boyhood are his most cheerful:

Yoru nete mo kuchibue fukinu

kuchibue wa

jūgo no ware no uta shi arikeri

even whistled

in my sleep—

in fact, at 15

whistles

were my poems¹⁵

Takuboku’s family in Shibutami consisted of his parents, himself, and Mitsuko, his younger sister (1888–1968), whose recollections of Takuboku are filled with complaints about the unkindness and even cruelty with which Takuboku treated her. She obviously resented her mother’s greater affection for her brother.

Takuboku seldom wrote about his boyhood relations with his parents, but his poems suggested that he and his father were not close:

oya to ko to

hanarebanare no kokoro mote

shizuka ni mukau

kimazuki ya na zo

father and son

minds apart

face to face

in awkward silence

why—?¹⁶

Despite the distance between them, Ittei was pleased to have a son, though he seems not to have hoped that Takuboku would succeed him as a Zen priest. Takuboku, living in a temple, often heard his father’s prayers, but he does not mention receiving any instruction in Zen teachings or even learning the importance of worshipping the Buddha. Before long, he was calling himself an atheist.¹⁹

It is possible, however, that his father was unintentionally responsible for Takuboku’s awakening to poetry. Ittei was a tanka poet of the old school who left close to four thousand poems.²⁰ He also subscribed to several poetry magazines, quite unusual for a rural priest. Takuboku may have first thought of writing poems after getting a glimpse of the magazines or else his father’s poetry, but no childhood poems survive.

Probably the person Takuboku loved most in the world was his mother, though his diary never directly expresses love or even gratitude. His mother came from a better family than his father did, and she had done well in elementary school, but her education stopped after her marriage. At the time that Takuboku wrote his longest account of his mother (in the Romaji Diary), she was all but illiterate. He quoted a letter she had sent describing how much the family needed money. Begging him for even one yen, she wrote, If we don’t get an answer from you, we’re finished. Takuboku commented,

My mother’s letter, full of shaky, misspelled kana. I don’t suppose anyone but myself could read this letter. I’ve been told that when Mother was a pupil at the Senboku Street School in Morioka, she was the brightest in the class. But in the forty years of married life with my father, I doubt that she ever wrote a letter. The first letter from her was in the summer of the year before last. . . . Today was the fifth I have received since coming to Tokyo. There are fewer mistakes than at first, and the characters are better formed. How sad—a letter from my mother.²¹

Based on the number of times Takuboku mentions his parents in his diaries, Saitō Saburō concluded that Takuboku loved his mother at least seven times as much as his father.²² But Miyazaki Ikuu (1885–1962), who played a major role in Takuboku’s life, found something unhealthy in the relations between Takuboku and his mother, though he did not elaborate. He was unfavorably impressed when he met her in 1908:

His mother looked like an old harpy. She was extremely small and painfully bent. Seated, she looked no bigger than a girl, but her features were regular. Her forehead was prominent, like Takuboku’s. Her pale face was gourd shaped, the nose and the mouth average. Her most attractive feature was her white hair. I thought, looking at her face, that she might have been pretty when she was young, but whenever anything displeased her, she revealed in her expression an unyielding nature I didn’t like.²³

Despite her tiny size, his mother never hesitated to voice her likes and dislikes, but she was devoted above all to keeping Takuboku happy. This concern probably went back to Takuboku’s infancy. He was sickly at birth, and his mother was so afraid of losing her only son that she permitted him to do whatever he pleased, fearful that scolding him might cause a tantrum or even death.

Mitsuko characterized her mother’s affection for Takuboku as blind love. She recalled that in order to strengthen Takuboku, her mother fed him delicacies that no one else was allowed to eat. She never complained, no matter how mischievously Takuboku engaged in pranks. His father was somewhat more severe, and on one occasion, he scolded Takuboku harshly. The boy shrank with fear at this unexpected show of parental authority, but Mitsuko confessed she was overjoyed to see her brother punished. She admitted that she hated him because he kept calling her stupid and hitting her.²⁴

Mitsuko envied Takuboku, who, as an only son, was at liberty to do as he pleased. Her parents did nothing to protect Mitsuko from Takuboku’s willfulness. He was always well dressed, but if whenever she asked her parents for something to wear, they would give her clothes that he had discarded. She wrote these unpleasant recollections of Takuboku after his death but insisted she did so not in order to reveal how her brother had made her suffer but to rebut books about