A Dialogue on Sharing Japanese Sensibility with the World

English translation of the prose

AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Originally published: 2020-03-24

This material was published on the Japanese website. Dates and notices in the text reflect the original publication.

Dialogue: Sharing Japanese Sensibility with the World (1)

鈴木孝夫 — Professor Emeritus, Keio University; Chief Adviser to the Society
Seishu Hamano — President of the Society; former Professor in the Department of English, Japan Women's University

Introduction

There is a reason for bringing the Reiwa Online Manyoshu out before Japan today—indeed, before the world. Japan has traditionally had a spirit of loving poetry regardless of social rank. Even today, Japanese-language textbooks include not only poetry but also many richly narrative works by ordinary people.

Why do Japanese people love the poetic world so much? What is the sentiment behind this?

We invited the linguist 鈴木孝夫 to discuss these questions. Soon after the war, Suzuki went from Keio University to the University of Michigan on a GARIOA scholarship and specialized in structural linguistics. Later, at the University of Illinois, Yale and Cambridge, he examined European languages, religion and ways of thinking from a linguistic perspective. He viewed Japanese culture through that perspective and published many books. Among them, 『ことばと文化』, published by Iwanami Shoten, is a distinguished work and a long seller still read today. Beginning with the fact that one cannot address a superior as “anata” in Japanese, it discusses the power to communicate one's true meaning through high context.

Seishu Hamano, on the other hand, specializes in American literature. As a visiting professor at the State University of New York, he associated with postmodernist writers. He views Japanese culture from the perspective of a multiethnic nation and examines changes in modern and contemporary literature against the differing cultural levels of Japan and the United States.

The two first met half a century ago in an English-literature lecture room at Keio's Mita campus. Suzuki spoke with wide-ranging erudition about the composition of English, while Hamano was interested in the Zen philosophy of the Beat Generation on America's West Coast; sparks flew as they debated civilization. Hamano wrote fiction for 『慶応文藝』 and translated Rosenstone's discussion of counterculture for 『三田文学』. Their association began under the guidance of Professor 厨川文雄, a scholar of Old and Middle English, and the poet 西脇順三郎. Although their specialties differed, their unexpectedly shared perspectives on civilization ultimately led them to establish the present Society.

Both Turned toward Foreign Cultures through Their Wartime Experiences

Hamano: “Professor Suzuki, you encompass not only English linguistics but also French, German and Islamic cultures, and see Japan through those eyes. I studied Jewish people in America's multiethnic society, asking how Orthodox Jews of Russian origin became Americanized. Alongside that perspective, I have discussed Japanese and American cultures from the standpoint of Japanese immigrants. Neither of us belonged to the postwar black-market crowd or to the après-guerre generation influenced under the Occupation. Let us begin with our wartime experiences.”

Suzuki: “What did you do during the air raids? You survived, of course, which is why we can meet today.”

Hamano: “I was in southern Osaka, on the outskirts of Sakai—or rather, in a farming district. Every day, in the countryside south of Sakai, I looked up at the great formations of B-29s coming north from the sea south of the Kii Peninsula and kept firing imaginary antiaircraft guns: ba-ba-ba-ba… I was still a small child.”

Suzuki: “During the great Tokyo air raid on March 10, I climbed onto the roof and resisted America by putting out the incendiary bombs raining down, exactly as the military had taught us. I managed to extinguish them. The house survived the fire, and I survived too. But until around the end of the Showa era, I had no room to consider the importance of Japanese ways of thinking or the complex nonverbal elements of Japanese, as I have now written about in 『下山の時代を生きる』.” (Laughs.)

Hamano: “War leaves no room for dialogue. After the war, my father anticipated that our house would be requisitioned, so he invited Occupation troops over every night for dance parties. I operated the gramophone. Right before me, tall American soldiers danced with my mother in her kimono: the foxtrot, and even the Charleston of the twenties. My father put on white shoes and tap-danced. Watching them, my young heart felt deeply sad: so this is what happens when you lose… Yet there was dialogue there. They understood us. But when I brought the Hyakunin Isshu out of the storehouse and invited them to play, they looked completely blank. Aha, I thought: I have won!”

Suzuki: “What a delightful story. On the tatami—in other words, you were unconsciously doing what I now call 「タタミゼ」. You had the support of a Japanese spiritual climate that teaches the Hyakunin Isshu from childhood. Unlike the countries of Europe, Japan has not been conquered by another country for thousands of years. Being placed under another people's rule makes a people into liars, outwardly obedient and inwardly defiant. Yet when the Occupation troops saw even a little child inviting them to play with his own distinctive culture, they must have thought: this is not a people we can conquer carelessly. You gently admonished the Americans in a way different from 白洲次郎's.” (Laughs.)

Hamano: “But until just the day before, as it were, we had been strafed by P-51s on the paths between rice fields. In my case, fragments of earth hit my forehead and the back of my head… There was tremendous bleeding… Yet seeing the Occupation troops dancing, I felt no resentment. When they brought us huge, thick pieces of ham and treated us kindly, I was utterly disarmed… They gave me empty Camel tins to smell, and salty biscuits—crackers—and all I felt was that we had lost. Years later, when I was at the Poe Museum in Richmond, I stepped out into the blazing sun and there, straight ahead, loomed a Pall Mall factory. Its powerful tobacco smell brought back that empty Camel tin, and I walked on tormented once again by the feeling of defeat…”

Suzuki: “That is a visceral memory: America as empty cigarette tins and peanuts.”

Hamano: “Japan, meanwhile, remained much the same after defeat. In an auditorium with its windows shattered, we sang 「蛍の光」 and 「仰げば尊し」, and all of us wept…”

Suzuki: “People's hearts did not change after the war.”

Hamano: “There was an extraordinary incident. A teacher demobilized from the southern front said democracy meant boys and girls walking hand in hand, and forced me to hold a girl's hand. I was embarrassed and hesitated. Then that former soldier ran over, shouted, ‘You don't understand democracy!’ and slapped me. I talked back—‘You defeated soldier!’—and he kicked me, leaving my nose streaming blood. When I told my mother afterward, she said it was my fault. She went to apologize and thank him for beating me.”

Suzuki: “Nowadays it would be the teacher who apologized. But what a comical story.”

Hamano: “Comical?”

Suzuki: “Both that teacher returned from the war and your mother still had wartime morality stuck in their heads. They could see it only as a superior training a recruit with his fists. Isn't that comical? Japanese people value harmony and cherish compassion more deeply. Yet they were still acting in a way far removed from that tradition.”

Hamano: “I see: Japanese people in their true nature do not practice that kind of Spartan education. Seen from that deeper perspective, it certainly is comical.”

Suzuki: “Exactly. Their gaze rests more on the natural world, and their thinking originates there. 千代女's concern for nature in 朝顔に釣瓶とられてもらひ水, or 一茶's sense that a fly is begging for its life in やれ打つな蠅が手を擦る足を擦る—I think these express the original Japanese sensibility.”

Hamano: “I understand, very much so. But in Japan, especially in the countryside, when there is nothing to eat, people chase wild rabbits, club them and eat them, as in the song's 「うさぎ負ひし」; they catch small crucian carp and eat those too. The school song 「故郷」 does not face squarely the reality of what extreme poverty brings about, but has us sing it to a tranquil melody. Listening, I always feel how contradictory those emotions are.”

The Harshness of Circumstances in Postwar Japan and America

Suzuki: “Still, if you had come to Keio earlier, you would not have encountered such brutal scenes.”

Hamano: “I heard that during the war, Keio laid straw mats where people took prone firing positions. Is that true?”

Suzuki: “Yes. The Naval General Staff was borrowing Hiyoshi, so they showed some restraint. They were taking it easy on us, you might say. By the way, your undergraduate years were right in the midst of the 1960 Security Treaty protests, weren't they?”

Hamano: “Yes. The area around the Diet was grim… There was an uproar that the Japan–US Security Treaty would drive us onto the battlefield again.”

Suzuki: “A return of 『きけわだつみのこえ』. There were stories of liberal Keio students dying in special attacks; warnings to keep out of the underground shelters because the Hiyoshi campus housed Combined Fleet headquarters; or talk that this was the atomic age, and soon a hydrogen bomb would appear over Tokyo… It was a time when the image of America pressed upon us intensely.”

Hamano: “Being Japanese was itself acutely painful then. 大江健三郎 wrote 「死者の驕り」 and 『ワレラノ時代』, intensifying the mood of aversion to war. 『三田文学』 published a translation of Norman Mailer's ‘The White Negro.’ The translator was Professor 大橋吉之輔, an American-literature scholar. In class he would tell us how, as a University of Tokyo student, he had been arrested by the Special Higher Police merely for carrying Dante's 『神曲』, dragged into a tent and slapped. Someone would roar out in class, and we too gathered in Shimizudani Park and joined demonstrations at the Diet.”

Suzuki: “Mailer's ‘The Naked and the Dead’ was based on his own experience as a soldier, wasn't it? Although postwar Americanism leaned considerably to the right, Mailer criticized his own country head-on.”

Hamano: “Yes. He wrote that young Americans would either become zeros in the great cities or die instantaneously in an atomic explosion. It shocked me that such a pessimistic essay could come from Americans who had conquered the world. This kind of despair precedes questions of national tradition or national character: death clings to the circumstances themselves. If instant death rules everything, I kept feeling, nothing young people do can have any point.”

Suzuki: “Then America entered the Vietnam War. Harvard, Yale, the University of California at Berkeley—all the major universities became critical. The Americanism of the US–Soviet Cold War in the fifties rapidly collapsed.”

Hamano: “Yes. At that time, as a teacher, I was trying to reason with students rushing off to demonstrations with Beheiren… At 『新日本文学』, I found common ground with 野間宏 and 中野重治 and, from quite far to the left, wrote introductions to American writers such as Vonnegut and Cheever that exposed America's contradictions. But in Meiji's evening division I became caught up in arguments with young people from Zengakuren and Minsei… In other words, even in the Showa forties, the traces of wartime had not been swept away, and discussion of circumstances always took precedence.”

Suzuki: “Perhaps it was in the seventies that we recovered our composure at home and could begin to appreciate Japanese culture at leisure.”

Hamano: “Yes, but I published a novella in 『三田文学』 called 「若者よ、明日香の国は」. I asked readers where in Japan there was any path to salvation—surely there was none. Around then the State University of New York invited me to teach. In the English graduate program at Buffalo, I lectured on Jewish literature, developing a J&J discussion: a comparison of Japanese and Jews. Both were ethnically small, isolated peoples… While I was talking about such things, the place I lodged turned out to be a hippie hideout. I did underground poetry readings with Federman and Sukenick, and Fiedler read a poem about Momotaro for me… That period was the height of chaos. Yet realizing that Japan was not the only sick country actually gave me heart.”

Suzuki: “So it was only from the eighties onward that you finally escaped the dominance of circumstances.”

Hamano: “It took forty years for Japan to recover a culture true to itself.”

Suzuki: “But your home region is central to Japanese history, isn't it?”

Hamano: “Yes. My mother was born in Takatori, Nara, and grew up in Kume. My father grew up in Shukuin, Sakai, the same locality as 鳳晶子's Surugaya yokan shop. I was born in Kawachi and steeped in the Hyakunin Isshu. From my wartime childhood, karuta, composing tanka and Kawachi ondo were entirely ordinary parts of life. Asuka, Oka and Kashihara Jingu all felt as familiar as our garden; yet I continued to be tossed about by the intense circumstances of Japan and America. In this respect, Professor Suzuki, it is admirable that you awoke to comparative cultural study so much earlier.”

Japan Has Many Poets

Suzuki: “One thing I often like to say at the beginning of public talks or university lectures is, ‘Do you know that Japan today has more poets than any other country in the world?’ I enjoy the surprised murmurs: ‘What? Why?’ or ‘How absurd!’”

Hamano: “One hardly sees poets, after all. When many Japanese people hear ‘poet,’ they vaguely picture someone reciting poems aloud, so they must be surprised to hear that there are many poets close at hand.”

Suzuki: “The English word ‘poet’ comes from the ancient Greek ‘poietes,’ meaning an artisan who makes something. A person who works inventively with words to create something new is therefore also a poet.”

Hamano: “Japanese people have exchanged their feelings through waka since antiquity.”

Suzuki: “Even today, men and women of every age, social class and occupation can all be called poets who exercise real ingenuity. Japan is certainly the only country where ordinary people are still all poets in this way.”

Hamano: “Go to Kusatsu hot springs and there is Kusatsu-bushi; to Kushimoto harbor and there is Kushimoto-bushi; to Miyazu in Tango and you hear 丹後の宮津でどうしたとか…”

Suzuki: “No, I mean the verbal arts: waka, haiku and senryu.”

Hamano: “At gatherings that welcomed a master, Basho too would travel from place to place offering instruction, and people showed extraordinary hospitality, putting him up free for as many days as he wished.”

Suzuki: “Yes, and that continues today. Every newspaper and weekly magazine has a tanka, haiku or senryu section. Radio and television are no less active.”

Hamano: “In warrior society, these became linked-verse gatherings and apparently served as occasions to exchange information. Even 真田信繁, confined at Kudoyama…”

Suzuki: “A linked-verse gathering could deceive the guards.”

Hamano: “Exactly. When he was summoned to Osaka Castle, he left Kudoyama by way of Kimi Pass under the pretext of a linked-verse gathering… The guards knew and let him pass.”

Suzuki: “That is chivalry—male romanticism, perhaps—like Benkei and 富樫's exchange at the Ataka barrier.”

Let Us Compose Tanka for Each Once-in-a-Lifetime Encounter

Hamano: “The poetic world enriches character. Leaving a death poem at the end of life must involve something of the resolve Kukai called entering meditation. It prevents a battle from remaining merely a battle. Apart from friend and enemy—people have many positions, of course—we compose poems that cherish the eternity of the heart beyond those positions.”

Suzuki (nodding): “The emperor's New Year poetry ceremony has an extremely long history. The present practice of inviting waka widely from the public and having distinguished poets select them began in the second year after the war ended. A literary occasion open regardless of the status of one's occupation is an excellent example of how Japan has grown into an open cultural nation.”

Hamano: “I created the Reiwa Online Manyoshu to pursue just such an artistic world, free of distinctions of rank. But I also want it to aim at eternity in time.”

Suzuki: “What do you mean?”

Hamano: “Composing a poem does more than record what one feels at each moment of life. I think it is an encounter that comes only once. Rather than thinking that the time allotted to a person passes through youth, middle age and old age, with the last moment being what matters, I believe that at any point the state of mind one has reached is a once-in-a-lifetime encounter.”

Suzuki: “I see. Unlike singing a song already composed, it is an utterance that bursts out of oneself…”

Hamano: “Yes. Whether tanka or poetry, a line that bursts forth from intense feeling is one's entire body and soul.”

Suzuki: “That state of mind is what matters in composing a poem. One must not write carelessly.”

Hamano (nodding): “What we write remains. People all over the world will read it online. Indeed, that is precisely what makes it worth composing.” (To be continued.)

That concludes this installment. To put it more precisely, the linguist Professor 鈴木孝夫 specializes in a theory of civilization from the perspective of linguistic ecology. By developing this approach, traditional theories of civilization retain their relevance to contemporary conditions, and the position of Japanese culture in the world becomes clear of its own accord. At ninety-three, 鈴木孝夫 still shows no decline. His thinking on civilization marks an epoch; please look forward to what follows.

Seishu Hamano

Translation note: roles, ages and historical assessments reflect the source published in 2020. Quoted poetry and lyric fragments remain in Japanese; their source spellings are retained. The expression 「タタミゼ」 is retained without assigning an unverified foreign-language spelling. The source's evaluative claims are the speakers' own.