When my wife Satsuki and I were translating the wartime senryū poetry of They Never Asked, we came across one poem that we found puzzling at first. The translation itself was fairly straightforward. What puzzled us was trying to determine the poetic intent of the author, Masaki Kinoshita, who wrote under the pen name of Jonan.
no longer heard —
my father’s
happy drunken songs
The event described in this poem is presented as a nostalgic memory. Reflecting on my own experience, however, I found myself asking what could possibly be nostalgic about listening to one’s father shamelessly belting out a few songs — from his misspent youth, no doubt — that may or may not have had meaning for anybody else in the room.
They Never Asked: Senryū Poetry from the WWII Portland Assembly Center
Shelley Baker-Gard, Michael Freiling, and Satsuki Takikawa; Foreword by Duane Watari. Published May 2023; OSU Press (Oregon State University), ISBN 9780870712357 (paperback).
They Never Asked (Amazon link) presents an English translation of senryū poetry written by Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in Portland, Oregon during the Second World War. The manuscript of this poetry was smuggled out of the prison camp and only discovered in 2017. See the related WiK article.
The reason behind this reaction is that many years ago I had had an almost identical experience. My father had come up from the Bay Area for a visit to Portland, Oregon, where we were living at the time. We took him out to dinner at a popular European restaurant in town. In the middle of the main course, he decided to entertain the clientele by standing up to serenade them with a few drinking songs in their native language — songs with which he seemed to be intimately familiar. I was seized by a deep desire to hide my head under the table.
I don’t feel any nostalgia for that incident — I seem condemned to relive the embarrassment every time I remember it. Jonan himself must have felt such embarrassment at listening to his father sing his favorite drinking songs. Nobody likes to see his own father “in his cups.” Even the Bible talks about the shame involved (Genesis 9:20-27). So by what magic could Jonan have been induced to feel nostalgia for the event, so many years later?
Granted, Jonan’s situation at the time he wrote this poem was unusual. Along with over 100 other Japanese-Americans, he was forced to live in the cattle stalls of a livestock exhibition hall as he awaited transportation to the camps further inland, where he would remain throughout the war.
Amid the squalor of the Portland “Assembly Center,” as it was euphemistically called, Jonan might easily have been tempted to wax nostalgic about nearly anything, regardless of how he may have felt about it previously. At the time, he might have wanted to duck his head under the table too. But now, in a different context, his memory seems to take on a sort of golden glow. After all, it does represent a snapshot of family life, a snapshot in which at least one of the participants (his father) are happy. So Jonan calls it to mind, likely in an effort to summon up positive memories as an antidote to his current travails.
This is what we call the “paradox of nostalgia”: no matter how negative or distasteful an experience might be at the time, in different circumstances it can become imbued with a halo of nostalgia, offering warmth and comfort to the one who remembers.
Psychologists have recently begun to study this phenomenon, which was labeled the “positivity effect” in a 2013 paper. Ironically consistent with Pound’s characterization of poets as “the antennae of the race,” Jonan was not only aware of it, but was using it poetically some sixty to seventy years before the psychologists stumbled upon it.
About two weeks after the first poem, Jonan produces another poem which shows how well he has mastered the paradox, putting it to use in an even more sophisticated way:
someday after
Center name cards just might
become nostalgic
Analyzing the paradox in this case is a bit tricky, so bear with me. In essence, the paradox links the times representing two events, a past event about which one is likely to become nostalgic, and a present event, representing the experience of nostalgia. What Jonan accomplishes in this poem is a sort of “time shift,” as he pushes the present event out into the future, and the past event up to the present. The present event becomes a future event, and the past event becomes a present event.
In the light of this new context, the present event represents an unwelcome experience. This certainly applies to life in the livestock stalls of the Assembly Center. But Jonan’s point is that they will survive this experience, however horrific, and in the light of that future time, the former prisoners are quite likely to look back and experience a glow of nostalgia, even about their present unfortunate circumstances. It’s not hard to conclude that Jonan’s intention is to lift the spirits of the prisoners a bit by means of this concept.
Jonan’s poem, then, represents a brilliant piece of psychology. But it also represents a bit of prophecy, one which turned out to be surprisingly accurate. At the Japanese American Museum of Oregon, where we held the book launch for They Never Asked in 2023, their exhibit about the Japanese-American incarceration includes a display case with — you guessed it — name cards from the Portland Assembly Center. And as the visitors were browsing through the exhibit, this one display case easily garnered the lion’s share of attention, with comments like “There’s Yoshida san!” and “Anybody see Yamamoto?” Jonan’s speculation had come true.
Once one recognizes a phenomenon of course, it becomes easier to spot in other contexts. This was certainly the case with the paradox of nostalgia, as we discovered when working on our second book of translations, the classical Heian poetry of the Hyakunin Isshu [read the WiK review]. Fujiwara Kiyosuke (1104–1177) articulates essentially the same paradox in poem #84:
I will survive and persevere —
these current agonies
becoming fond and secret memories
as early times of tribulation
now I lovingly recall.
Here, Kiyosuke demonstrates the capability of the tanka poetic form (5-7-5 || 7-7) to explicitly outline the way in which this paradox works, as opposed to the more constrained snapshot afforded by the shorter senryū (5-7-5). Nevertheless, one is still forced to admire the brevity and conciseness of Jonan’s senryū. They really pack a punch.
How many other poets, from different ages and different cultures, have known and employed this paradox in their own work? I have no way of knowing, but from our few examples, one thing stands out clearly. If Jonan was ahead of the psychologists by some sixty to seventy years, Fujiwara Kiyosuke was ahead of them by more than 800. The antennae of a poet can be very long indeed.