English translation
AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.
Originally published: 9 April 2020.
Parts 2–5 of a question-and-answer conversation published in April 2020. Fees, activities, and meeting plans describe the situation then and are not current guidance. A separate historical document, “Meeting Information,” records the cancellation of the meeting planned for 1 November 2020.
Q&A 2: Membership fees, other costs, and how they are collected
Questions: an anonymous correspondent in Ehime Prefecture.
Answers: Seishu Hamano, President of the Society.
Payment methods, amounts, and possible additional charges
Q. I understand that the membership fee is ¥10,000. Is that paid annually?
A. Yes. Members transfer it once a year, in April.
Q. Does that allow unrestricted submissions? Is there an extra charge depending on how often one submits?
A. You may submit as often as you like, but lengths vary enormously, so reviewing and publishing long works entails costs.
Q. What do you mean by long? A long poem? Even a critical essay of about thirty manuscript pages?
A. No, work of that length needs no additional fee if the content is good. But novellas and novels of fifty pages or more, illustrated criticism, and works extending to a hundred pages incur costs for refereeing, editing, and electronic publication. We obtain your agreement before publishing them.
Q. Are fees collected by automatic debit?
A. No. Automatic debits can make members anxious, for example about larger amounts being taken without consent. We do not use them. Each member makes the transfer personally, including their membership number.
Q. Will you send a payment slip?
A. Such slips are often used for postal payments, but they can be lost and make administration harder, leaving uncertainty about whether payment was made. We therefore ask everyone to transfer fees independently to the Society’s account at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation’s Zushi branch. Be sure to put your membership number first when making the transfer.
Q. It is ideal for members to pay voluntarily, but might they forget?
A. Yes. We check at the end of April and send email reminders to anyone who has not paid.
Q. Surely many members fail to pay?
A. Surprisingly few. They have the aspiration to be included in the Reiwa Online Man’yoshu and a strong sense of belonging and responsibility, so there is no problem.
Q&A 3: What effect has the coronavirus had?
Questions: Writers’ Village Preservation Association, Omori district, Tokyo.
Answers: Seishu Hamano, President of the Society.
Literary associations in urban areas have had to suspend their activities
Q. Since the Society works online, has the coronavirus disruption been practically nonexistent?
A. Yes, exactly. Indeed, experienced writers are using the time at home to send us excellent manuscripts, so things are going very well.
Q. On a previous occasion we invited Professor Tomotada Iwakura, a schoolmate of the Heisei emperor when he was crown prince, to the Higashifushimi residence in Hayama. We enjoyed chamber music, his reminiscences, and the Izumi family’s Sanbaso. We look forward to doing something like that again.
A. Yes. We plan a Society gathering at that imperial residence on 1 November 2020. But unless the coronavirus is brought under control, we cannot yet say whether it will be possible. Online interaction alone also weakens personal ties, so once the pandemic subsides we hope to hold friendly gatherings like locally rooted literary associations. We cannot do that now. Precisely for that reason, however, we are treating this situation as a subject for everyone to consider and appealing to them to reflect on it.
Q. What do you mean?
A. An incomprehensible pathogen can cause someone who was perfectly healthy to die in an instant. This is exactly the “life like a bubble” spoken of since ancient times. It appears at the beginning of Hojoki. Drifting through a life without a secure foundation resembles the traveler’s destiny in Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi: whenever life ends, that too is life. Then make poetry from it. Do not shrink back or despair. The Japan Romanticism Society is striving to face this life like floating clouds directly and turn it into creative activity.
Q. So you are fundamentally different from literary associations throughout the country.
A. Yes. The online medium of publication is one difference.
Q. And the other?
A. Permanence and transglobalism, bestowed only on carefully selected works.
Q. What does that mean?
Q&A 4: How does my work differ from that of famous poets?
Questions: an anonymous correspondent in Oita City, Oita Prefecture.
Answers: Seishu Hamano, President of the Society.
It is a loss when outstanding poems from local associations are forgotten and disappear
A. My contact with literary associations around Japan makes clear how greatly the quality of works varies. Many people do not particularly aim to improve.
Q. That is why monthly gatherings are called commonplace—tsukinami.
A. Yet fine tanka and haiku are born at monthly meetings. Perhaps by chance, some are deeply philosophical or reveal utterly pure feeling. It is a shame when they become buried in the routine of the association’s activities. Even if their creators treasure them privately, they will eventually be pushed into oblivion and disappear.
Q. I thought that even after joining this Society, our work would ultimately meet the same fate. Is that not so?
A. No! That is why we founded it. We want outstanding poems to be read alongside other outstanding poems for centuries to come, preserving them in a time capsule and distributing and passing down their data. So—
Q. So?
A. Please continue composing within your own association. But from your many drafts, choose the ones you want to preserve and submit them to us. Let people throughout the world read them. They can soothe people’s hearts and become a cultural legacy.
Q&A 5: Should literary and poetic circles be distinguished from ordinary people’s culture?
Questions: an anonymous correspondent in Oita City, Oita Prefecture.
Answers: Seishu Hamano, President of the Society.
Bringing modern and contemporary work together, without distinguishing professionals from amateurs
Q. The Society treats an outstanding poem on the same level as one by a leading poet. Will that not cause confusion?
A. Why should it? Is every tanka by a famous poet necessarily better than one by an unknown person? Even talented writers, tanka poets, and haiku poets seldom produce anything worthwhile when their hearts are not engaged and they write only because a deadline is approaching. Conversely, an amateur with a pure heart may write a wonderful and moving work. That is true of both classical and contemporary literature.
Q. Still, placing my work alongside Mokichi Saito’s feels presumptuous—
A. That comes from modesty and is a natural feeling. But no one can decree whose mouth an outstanding poem will come from. We cannot say that famous people always produce fine poems and that unknown people’s work is always insignificant.
Q. Come to think of it, famous poets also write many ordinary poems.
A. Yes. Changes in mood often mean that only mediocre work emerges. Conversely, an ordinary person absorbed in a feeling may write a practice piece with an extraordinary conception. In compiling the Reiwa Online Man’yoshu, the Society wants to bring modern and contemporary work from the Meiji period onward together without ranking by status. Whether short fiction or songs, we want to discover works comparable to Yaso Saijo’s songs or Akutagawa’s stories. There is no need to feel embarrassed if your work appears alongside a famous writer’s practice pieces. The very desire to impose a hierarchy on art is mistaken.
Original wording, author credits, notes and source materials are preserved there.