Writers In Kyoto

Page 20 of 65

Writings about Kyoto, whether by Japanese or foreign observers

Lover of rugby and of learning

Edward Bramwell Clarke in Kyoto

December 9, 2021

By Yuki Yamauchi

Rugby in Japan, courtesy Wikicommons

Edward Bramwell Clarke (1874-1934), a Briton born in Yokohama, is remembered as one of the people who introduced rugby to Japan, and his name was often seen in news articles related to the 2019 Rugby World Cup.

A graduate of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, Clarke was also an intellectual giant. Having returned to Japan, he started his teaching career at Keio Gijuku University in 1899. He also taught at several schools including the First Higher School of Tokyo, where novelist Soseki Natsume was among his colleagues.

However, it was not until 1913 that the Tokyo-based educator got a foothold in Kyoto. His teaching career in the city started at the Third Higher School. In 1916, he was appointed, alongside Tatsuo Kuriyagawa as successor to Bin Ueda, who had taught English literature at Kyoto Imperial University (now Kyoto University).

Clarke dedicated himself to teaching students about English literature and its history. As recalled by his students, the Briton called himself a Victorian, liked to take a close look at books by Alfred Tennyson, George Meredith, Robert Browning and Rudyard Kipling, and esteemed Lafcadio Hearn, who had corrected Clarke’s compositions briefly in 1890 when the boy went to Victoria Public School in Yokohama.

A student of his recollects what the British professor was like at Kyoto Imperial University around 1919:

Unable to walk well, Prof. Clarke always went to school by rickshaw. Even during each ride, he could not stop reading. I never saw him there without dozens of books on the vehicle. The driver often yawned in the school yard while waiting for the return of his client. According to the rickshaw man, Prof. Clarke’s only hobby was to go just once every two weeks to his favourite barbershop on the premises of Kyoto Station in those days, and then dine at a restaurant on the second floor before going back home.
(Extract from an essay by Shuji Yamamoto in Kyoto Daigaku Bungakubu Gojunenshi (Fifty Years of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University) (1956)

Rugby was of much significance to Clarke until 1907, when he was forced to have his right leg amputated due to severe rheumatism. Thereafter his athletic vigour turned into energy to study English literature.

Meanwhile, a Japanese who studied under Clarke for 22 years wrote his recollection of the British educator:

I am sure that no one is as willing to practice self-sacrifice as Prof. Clarke, in order that everyone can know the enjoyment of learning and the pleasure of knowledge. However busy he was or whenever he was sick in bed, he took the trouble to welcome any student for as long as he could and talk and listen to his guest. Without getting bored in the least, he answered any questions however trivial or troublesome. He had only this one hobby. Probably because of this, he was always kind enough to lend anyone, if they hoped to read, various rare books he had collected with considerable passion.
(Extracted from an essay dated April 29, 1934, by Hojin Yano in Shikyucho: Zuihitsushu (1948))

In Kobe Shimbun (May 17, 2016), there is a further clue to the character of Clarke. According to an article, he made meticulous and detailed corrections to any English writing by his students, no matter how bad it was. In addition, the rugby-loving professor was extremely strict with students who cheated with their thesis; just as the sport fostered his sense of fair play, he could not tolerate any wrongdoing in the playing field or dissertations.

On April 26, 1934, Clarke suffered a brain haemorrhage and passed away two days later. It was just days before his move to Kobe – his daughter and her children lived in the city and Arima, one of Japan’s renowned hot spring resort areas, was his favourite summer retreat. His funeral ceremony was held at St. Mary’s Church, Kyoto, near Heian Jingu shrine, as reported on the front page of Kyoto Imperial University Newspaper (May 5, 1934). He is buried in the Kobe Municipal Foreign Cemetery, and his gravestone bears the following epitaph:

Life’s race well run
Life’s work well done
Life’s victory won
Then cometh rest

Though he sleeps in Kobe, Kyoto is still connected to the professor through the Clarke Collection – more than 5,000 books on English literature in the Library of Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University. There is also a bust, completed in 1935, of a man of such extraordinary knowledge that his friends nicknamed him ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica Clarke’ after the EBC initials of his name.

Edward Clarke, courtesy Wikicommons, a lover of rugby and of learning

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For an introduction to Yuki Yamauchi, please click here. For his piece on Portraits of Uji, click here. For his portrait of prewar academic critic, Tatsuo Kuriyagawa, click here. And for his piece on theatre and film director, Akira Nobuchi, click here. He has also written on the history of Gion Higashi.

Authors who belong to Writers in Kyoto

IN THE POOL

December 8, 2021

By Lisa Twaronite Sone

I had expected her.

I knew exactly who she was, when she came wandering into the old school one day.

She saw my janitor’s uniform and realized I belonged there, but she wasn’t quite sure what to say to me. They never are.

“Can I help you?” I asked as kindly as possible, putting down my mop.

“I…I work in the office tower next door,” she said haltingly, but of course I already knew that.

I had seen the young woman with the long hair standing next to the window, every day around lunch time, eating her apple and enjoying the view from the 20th floor. She was always looking at the mountains in the distance, with a little smile on her lips.

But then one sunny day, she looked down, and noticed them — the children, in the abandoned swimming pool on the roof.

After that, I saw her watching them, unable to believe her eyes. She didn’t tell anyone else what she saw, of course. They never do.

“This building…” she was asking me now, her voice slightly trembling. “When did they stop using it as a school?”

“More than 30 years ago,” I said. “There weren’t enough kids anymore, in this part of the city. So now it’s used for city offices, and storage.”

“There’s an old pool on the roof…” she started to say, but she didn’t know how to put into words what she wanted to say next.

So I helped her out.

“You see the children.”

“YES!” she said, in a loud exclamation of relief that surprised both of us.

“Most people can’t see them,” I said, “but you’re not the first. And probably not the last. You thought maybe it was just the way the sunlight was hitting the water, right?”

She nodded.

“But then you saw their faces. There weren’t any kids standing around the pool, and yet in the water, you could clearly see their reflections? Nine of them, and then ten, right?”

“I counted twelve,” she said. “Who are they? Are they ghosts? Did they drown in the pool?”

“No one ever drowned in this building’s pool,” I said. “I asked the people in charge about that. I don’t think those kids are alive anymore, but they all died somewhere else, not in the pool.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Look, all I know is that no one died in the pool. And in the 18 years I’ve been working here, you’re the ninth person who came to ask about kids in the water who aren’t really there. I can see them sometimes, too, and you know what I think?”

She didn’t encourage me to continue, but I did, anyway.

“I think that when people die, their strongest memories live on. When these people died, some of their happy childhood memories remained here. And that’s what we see now, in the water. These memories.”

This seemed to satisfy her. She nodded slowly, thanked me, and walked away.

I didn’t tell her everything. I never do. I didn’t want to upset her by telling her that usually, the only people who can see the children are those about to join them.

In fact, the only exception to this so far is me — I’m still here, and I don’t know why. The other eight people, though….they all passed on, within a few weeks of talking to me.

And I can still see all eight of them, too. Well, it’s nine now.

On bright sunny days, I can go up to the roof, and there’s the line of kids reflected in the murky green rainwater, in their old-fashioned swimsuits and bathing caps.

There’s 15 of them now. Their faces are laughing, and they’re eager to jump in — who wouldn’t be, on a bright, sunny day? It’s definitely a happy childhood memory they would keep for the rest of their lives, strong enough to linger on after them.

Then I look up at the office towers, and I can see all of the faces reflected in the windows. There’s that nice old man who was hit by a car, and there’s that chubby, middle-aged mother who dropped dead of a heart attack.

The weekend after she came to the school, the woman with the long hair was lost at sea, in a boating accident. I saw her picture on the news.

Now whenever the sun is shining, I see her there at her window on the 20th floor, eating her apple. She’s always looking at the mountains in the distance, with a little smile on her lips.

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For an interview with Lisa about her writing with Reuters, see here.

Featured writing

Masterpiece: Gardens as Art

December 4, 2021

by Stephen Mansfield

Once you introduce a concept, aesthetic ingredient, or color palette into Nature in the form of a garden, you stir the wilderness, the primal pot. A space probe does something like that with the universe.

It likely never occurred to eighteenth century European collectors and literati, entitled beneficiaries of a meticulous, favorably constructed civilization, to question whether gardens were works of art. It was assumed they took their assigned place alongside painting, sculpture, classic recitals, and more mystical forms of religious devotion. That colossus of Regency era English garden design, Humphry Repton, declared “Gardens are works of art rather than of nature.” The Japanese would doubtless define their most accomplished gardens as works of art, but with the proviso that they are always framed with a vision of nature in mind.

The condition defining almost every garden construct is that it be a place of repose and beauty, an alternative, transcendent world. Mention of the topic is unlikely to conjure images of the late film maker, Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness, stricken among rental allotments on the withering salt flats and shingle of the Thames Estuary. Jarman’s choice of recycled or requisitioned objects for his creation, were locally sourced, and included flint, driftwood, shells, rusty tools and mooring chains, the horticultural elements featuring cactus, gorse, elder, hawksbeard, and blackthorn. The garden’s borrowed views are lines of electric pylons and a nuclear power station. John Cage defined art as practically anything that stimulates an aesthetic experience. Jarman’s garden, with its magic circles made of dragon-toothed flint, charred driftwood sticks, and beds of scarlet pelargoniums is, indeed, a masterful creation, its beauty in the harmonizing of fantastically disparate elements.

Art, nature and landscape gardening are inexorably linked. In her book, Italian Villas and Their Gardens, Edith Wharton wrote that gardens, “must be adapted to the landscape around them.” Reflecting on the blending of elements in gardens, she comments on the “subtle transition from the fixed and formal lines of art to the shifting and irregular lines of nature.”

The persistence of Japanese gardens as a design form, embodies the notion that landscapes are not imitations of the natural world, but coexisting forms that harmonize art and nature. In so doing, the Japanese landscape gardener, an artist in nature, goes a step further, holding up a mirror to aspects of our own human nature. Constructing a Japanese garden provides the opportunity to create a form that might be called organic art, by reworking, reinterpreting aspects of encountered nature. A substantive diversity of forms, ranging from scenes created according to the strict directives of ancient garden manuals, to modern, iconoclastic designs, is reflected in the Japanese garden and its search for a place in the world of applied and fine art.

A feature of major, iconic works of art is their tendency to break with precedents. Designing within the parameters of tradition, emblematic landscapes, like the aristocratic Vaux-le-Vicomte, the temple installation of Ryoan-ji, and the circuit garden of Katsura Rikyu, both in Kyoto, are examples of older leaps in innovation associated with art. Among those who designed gardens were Buddhist priests, calligraphers, tea masters and painters, applying the common aesthetics of their disciplines to garden templates. Created in the 15th-century by Sesshu Toyo, a titan in the Japanese art world, the Joei-ji temple garden in Yamaguchi City, clearly replicates the visual vocabulary of his ink monochrome landscape canvasses. The placement of flat-topped stones, contrasting with upright rocks on a flat plain, creates an energetic imbalance, embodying the transition in Japanese landscape art from its restrained, static qualities to assertive, soaring peaks, rock faces and horizontal ledges. Much admired for their formal accomplishments, but also for a degree of refreshing abstraction, Chinese paintings were avidly collected by the ruling class during the Kamakura era. The more static, abstract gardens of the period were profoundly affected by these imported works. Inspired by Sung dynasty painters, nature in the garden gradually became subordinate to the vigorous standards of art.

The landscape equivalent of sculpture might be the stone garden, which has been compared to an art installation. The perdurance of the stone garden is a factor worth consideration. Like art appreciation, the hermeneutic aspects of viewing gardens vary. Loraine E. Kuck, reflecting on the enigmatic stone gardens of Kyoto, for example, concludes in her 1968 book, Japanese Gardens, that the usage of natural rocks in creating designs will be recognized as one of the most important art forms. Interestingly, many of the gardens with the strongest aspirations to art are, like Japanese woodblock prints and netsuke, the smallest. Sacheverell Sitwell, visiting Kyoto in 1959, declared its gardens, “the great works of little masters,” the results in his view, superior to those in Europe.

Like exhibits found in museums or galleries, gardens, like bonsai, are bequeathed, curated by generations of owners, custodians, and patrons. Like a painting by one of the old masters, a Titian, Schongauer, or Carracci, work requiring periodic restoration, gardens require sustained attending. Even the hard, sculptural forms within a garden, subject to air pollution, the effects of time, even vandalism, are vulnerable.

The aesthetics of Japanese gardens and the more spiritual aspects of art, converge in Tokyo’s Nezu Museum. Built to exhibit a fine art collection of tea ceremony utensils, Chinese bronze ware, and Buddhist sculpture, its garden feels a little like hallowed ground, a dense, spiritually-infused plot of greenery ingeniously disassociated from the city. Adding to the sense of entering a verdant sanctuary, is an air of profound antiquity, emanating from the placement of beautifully carved and incised Buddhist stone work throughout a garden that doubles as an open-air gallery. Here, we randomly encounter a sandstone Standing Buddha Triad dating from China’s 6th century Northern Wei Dynasty, a Seated Bodhisattva, precisely dated 1466, or a Muromachi era Japanese Ksitigarbhas carved panel.

A sub-division of visual art, Japanese gardens present a natural, even cosmic order that is not immediately apparent to the casual visitor. When we talk about the art of gardening, the emphasis is not on gardens as art objects, but the process of designing and making a landscape, which requires an order of skill that is artistic.
Japanese gardens are by definition, both restrictive and liberating, delineating space and setting out permissible routes through them, while at the same time expanding our perception of interpreted nature. Some visitors, accustomed to a different set of aesthetics, have questioned the authenticity of Japanese gardens, which are intended among other things, to manipulate our senses. This, of course, is precisely what art does when we allow it to enter our lives. The art of gardening is the art of life itself.

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In After Act, Stephen considers virus related literature in a pandemic world.

For a review of his life in writing, given as a lunchtime talk for WiK, see here.
For a review by John Dougill of his book, Stone Gardens, click here.

For a short treatise on light and dark in Japanese culture, see here. For a review by Josh Yates of Stephen’s book on Tokyo: A Biography, see here.

For Stephen Mansfield’s review of the WiK Anthology 3, Encounters with Kyoto, please click here.  For his amazon page with a list of his books, please see this link.

Writings about Kyoto, whether by Japanese or foreign observers

Robert MacLean

November 26, 2021

Isobar Press is not only a specilist publisher of poetry, but of poetry with a Japanese connection in particular. According to its website, it “publishes poetry in English by Japanese and non-Japanese authors who live (or have lived) in Japan, or who write on Japan-related themes.”

One of their recent publications is by former resident Robert MacLean, and here is the blurb…

“Waking to Snow by Robert MacLean tracks twenty-five years of living in Kyoto. The poems are arranged roughly chronologically, in four sections, following the rhythms of the seasons, of Zen practice and sesshin retreats, along with poems about brief returns to Canada to visit aging parents, childhood memories, and academic and married life. Throughout, many poems attempt to decipher ‘the lost languages’ of nature: rice-seedlings, snails, chickadees, flowers, cicadas, heron, crickets, a bush warbler, an abandoned kitten, stars, trees, weather, wind, snow. At the very heart of the book is ‘Still’, a stunningly powerful sequence of eighteen poems describing the anguish of a stillbirth.”

Isobar and Robert MacLean have kindly given permission to post here one of the poems in its entirety, and I think those of us who love Kyoto will readily relate to dog-walking along the Kamogawa.

My First Guide to Kyoto

Next-door neighbour’s
pug-nosed Sakura
tied up all day
whimpering beneath
the stairwell: no
way to treat the
earliest cherry blossoms

in Kyoto.
So I take him for a walk –
rather he takes me,
charging like a stunted
rogue elephant
to the Kamo river’s
ecstasy of in-

visible smells where
he poops three times, each
with more strain,
panting and slobbering as
he drags me along
at the end of his
taut leash. Oh

we’re sailing now
past some thin old folk
playing a kind of croquet
near the bridge in the ancient
newborn sun,
past some kids crouched
bouncing a ball and chanting,

past endless blocks of
jumbled houses,
blue-tiled roofs glinting
like dragon scales. By now,
Sakura’s zonked, able
to scrawl his faint
signature only at irresistible

spots, so we wend
our way home:
small dun dopey boggle-eyed
dog with fur
radiating in tufts,
deep gaze thank you
to each other.


Featured writing

Memoirs of a Japanese Nurse pt 3

November 24, 2021

The Memoirs of a Japanese Nurse on the Western Front (pt 3)

Hajimeko Takeda’s Notes by a Japanese Nurse Sent to France

Translated by Paul Carty & Eiko Araki, edited by Freddy Rottey & Dominiek Dendooven

In Stand To! 122 (April 2021), the introduction, context and postscript of Hajimeko Takeda’s memoirs as a Japanese nurse in France were published, and in Stand To! 123 we presented the first part of  then full translation of her account. This is the second and final part, as originally published in the local newspaper Fukuoka Shimbun between May 25 and June 6, 1919.

[8]

       We tried every means to comfort patients who could not move at all. We gave them every sort of daily necessities and amusements. Things to eat and drink, a variety of cigars or flowers were also given to them as presents. Some gifts were sent to them by benefactors both from home and abroad. Others were given from volunteer nurses in the hospital or contributed from members of our own corps. Mr. Ishida, former Japanese Ambassador to France, donated newspapers and magazines. Newspapers contributed by every newspaper office situated in Paris were distributed by a baroness Loulou Lasole(?) with her own hands to every sickroom and office inside the hospital every day. On top of that, an enormous amount of books and magazines were incessantly coming from every quarter. One volunteer nurse was always supplying flowers as did some others. Those were distributed to every sickroom and were used to decorate every bedside, which comforted disabled patients. Toys and other items to entertain the patients came in one after another and relieved the tedium of patients who had nothing to do.

       Raphia, horsehair, glass beads, and gassed yarn were contributed by the Society for the Wounded, which also taught patients how to make elaborate things such as baskets, coasters, watch bands, rings, and bracelets. Sometimes a woman in charge from the Society bought those things made by patients at a certain price and displayed them at a certain place to sell to kind people. This was a good idea to relieve the tedium of patients and also make some profits. The stalls displaying and selling the products of the patients were also set up opposite our hospital. Many of the passersby bought them. School girls bravely hawked those products on the streets with a basket filled with the goods hanging from their shoulders.

       On Christmas Eves volunteer nurses made Christmas trees and decorated them with something like ‘pipe purses’ and ‘knife handkerchiefs’ wrapped in paper. Sometimes, we made handicrafts in Japanese style or played the game of drawing lots and sometimes separately comforted patients. Besides, we gave them shirts and socks, and when they lacked them at the time of leaving the hospital, French volunteer nurses would give those items to patients or Japanese nurses used money from our charity collection to buy those goods. Picture postcards of our hospital, which we gave patients when they were discharged from hospital, were appreciated as the only memento.

        At the time of Easter, French people made it a practice to give eggs and sweets, so in our contingent we gave egg-shaped confectionaries together with cigarettes at this time of the year. We were often invited to a tea party privately or by various organizations such as the supporters’ association of the sick and wounded soldiers. Music is one of the most favored activities of the French people. Therefore, patients were invited to concerts and various entertainments by the President, the government-general in Paris of the Ministry of War, various newspaper offices, and supporter groups. At the time of invitation Japanese nurses and French probationary nurses accepted the invitations and accompanied the patients. In addition, free admission tickets to plays, variety shows, and films were given freely to us–far too many to accept.

[9]

        I will write about my curious fate with my girls’ school teacher from France, Sister Borcha. After I finished elementary school, I entered Hakkaikan, the predecessor of the present Hakkai girls’ school in Kumamoto City. Sister Borcha was president there. Besides being my teacher, she took great care of me besides being my teacher. While I was a student there, I practiced making handicrafts like embroidery. So after I became a nurse, I went to the school to help make some embroidery.

        When I was going to Paris this time, Sister Borcha gave me a lot of advice. At Kumamoto Station where I departed, she said, “You, Takeda san, are like my daughter. You are going to my country”. Far from her own country for forty years, she has devoted herself to charity work in Japan and will continue to devote the rest of her life. With her eyes filled with tears, thinking about her dear country, she said, clasping my hands, that her nephews as many as six had gone to the front.

        I may meet her nephews after I arrive in France, and would tell them how Sister Borcha was doing, I thought. Fortunately I chanced to meet one of them! On one of our first days in Paris, snow lay as deep as 2 shaku (about 60 cm) on the streets of Paris, and the tall buildings were all mantled in snow. We received about 10 newly wounded soldiers and our Japanese Hospital was busier than usual. There was an extremely gallant young man in my charge. We were talking about the stories of our life to pass the time. To my surprise, he was one of the nephews of my respected Sister Borcha, called Lesker(?) ! He clasped my hands, shedding tears and anxious to know how she was doing. He was overjoyed as if he had met his own aunt.

        There is another moving story of Mr. Lissel, a young officer aged 25. He was living in a quiet village, four kilometers to the north east of Paris, writing books and working at a newspaper publishing company in Paris. In the same village lived one of the most beautiful girls, called Mirla. who was 22. They were deeply in love and their parents allowed them to be engaged while they were very young. The couple was waiting for Mirla’s graduation from girls’ school and their happy life together afterwards. Young people living near Paris talked about them walking happily together around the park. The couple were waiting for the days when they would laugh at being an object of envy.

        Unfortunately, however, the Great War hindered their long awaited marriage. This war brought a sad dispatch to the couple who were playing in their own paradise: Call-up papers were sent to Lissel. However much they hated to be separated, Lissel had to cope with the emergency of the country and was to stand at the front exchanging his accustomed pen with a bayonet. Lissel distinguished himself everywhere on the battle field and was applauded as a brave soldier in the French Army. Being at the same time tenderhearted, he always dreamed about following the winding path of a Paris park, even after sleeping in the battlefield far from home. Though tired with the afflictions of war, he always cherished his memories of Mirla. At midnight in the camps when even insects stopped humming and buzzing, he never forgot to write a beautiful letter to Mirla filled with his emotions.

[10]

       Every time his sweetheart Mirla saw wild geese coming, she spent night after night missing her Lissel, I hear. Both of them prayed for the day to come when church bells would ring out announcing the coming of peace and they could talk again happily holding each other’s hands. I don’t know what God thought about looking down at the couple, but Lissel lost both his eyesight due to some shells launched by the German Army, and was sent to our JRC Hospital. How Mirla was grieved by this bad news! She was inconsolable when she came to the hospital in great haste.

       She could never have dreamt of her lover blinded thus lying on a pure white bed. Over the past few days, they embraced their happy memories together. Tears welled up in our eyes when we saw pitiful Mirla clinging to Lissel and crying loudly. Her dream of seeing the day of his triumphant return proved vain. Who could have imagined that she would shake hands again with her lover by the help of us nurses from a foreign country? It was when I was changing a dressing, as it was my turn, Mirla pounded the door like a mad woman and rushed into the room crying “I am Mirla!” That image of Mirla sobbing heartbroken haunts me even now.

 Mirla didn’t like the idea of her lover being tended by foreign nurses, and at the countess’ permission she put on a white nursing uniform with a red cross on the day she came to see Lissel. She devoted herself to nursing  Lissel night and day, but Lissel ’s eyesight was pronounced incurable. It is hard to describe their grief and sorrow.

Though his wounds were completely cured, both of his eyes remained closed, but nevertheless he was allowed to leave hospital as he was. Young Parisiennes frivolously adored a flamboyant life, but Mirla flatly gave up her life in such a world. Fully understanding that she had already devoted herself to Lissel, she bravely held a wedding soon after he left hospital. This news spread to the world of Parisian ladies so that the movie entitled Sacrifice to the Blind was produced. Here I will write down Mirla’s letter to myself which I received back in Japan:

“Dear Mademoiselle Takeda, how have you been getting along lately?

   Please remember Paris sometimes. The photo of our wedding I gave you in 

memory of us must be still in your wicker trunk, and every time you see it you must recall us and tell Japanese girls about us. Lissel and I always talk about you and our dear memories. When you come to Paris some day, don’t fail to visit us, and see how we are living. Lissel ’s eyes are not opened, but he is very good at playing the violin. Please write to me also. If I read your letter, how happy he will be. I wrote these sentences as Lissel told me. Please let me know the address of your chief doctor. Bye now. Mirla”

     This is all written in her letter. If they knew that all this was written in a Japanese newspaper, how would they feel! I will hand down this tale as a “Romance in Paris.”

[11]

       At 2:00 a.m. on January 28 th, in the 4th year of Taisho [1915][1], a car ran at full speed in the streets of Paris, sounding the emergency alarm. This alarm was to announce an air raid by German airplanes, and at this all the city became completely silent.

        On that day I was on duty. In the hospital, all the lights went off at the sounding of an alarm which announced an air raid. It sounded like a notice of death. Curiosity overcame fear, and I rushed to the eighth floor in the pitch-darkness to have a look around from the railings. Not a sound was heard on the streets of Paris covered with snow as deep as 2 shaku, and snow was still falling from the dark sky.

        At this time while I was watching, there came a dark shadow far away in the north-east of the sky. Hardly had I noticed it before the French defense airplanes searched, with blue fierce searchlight, for the German airplanes every corner of the sky. Meanwhile the German airplanes tried to flee from the searchlight, approaching Paris at one time and taking turns of flying for a while and retreating. Even British airplanes, trying to attack German airplanes, were recognized in the far distance when the searchlight happened to shed light clearly. Even the dark sky was thus heavily guarded.

        In front of our Japanese hospital was the l’Arc de Triomphe, where the soldiers were garrisoning the city of Paris. They fired guns in midair, and at the sound of gunfire the German planes, exhibiting adroit piloting, disappeared into the clouds.

        Even though it was wartime we had never thought about hearing the roar of gunfire at midnight in the city of Paris. We all felt relieved as the German airplanes retreated, but again the emergency alarm rang out even harder than before. Not only inpatients but we nurses felt done for, and some of us even wrote a letter home intended to be the last. I also thought I might not be able to set foot on the soil of my mother country again. I may be killed by an enemy bullet in a country far away from home; me, a woman working just as a nurse for philanthropy! Though I was prepared to die, hot tears streamed down my cheeks.

        We nurses all gathered in the same room, and in low voices with our faces pallid we discussed the possibility that we might not return home. When I remember it now I cannot but tremble. At the second sound of the emergency alarm we struck our heads out from the window, and found the city was like a scene of carnage. More than ten German planes were flying this way and that way dropping bombs all over the city, while French garrisons were shooting gunfire in return.

        Fortunately our hospital escaped damage, but according to the survey next day, ten places in the city were bombarded and presented a terrible sight from which we must avert our eyes. We saw one of these horrific sites near our hospital, which was a house of a police lieutenant. His wife and three children, and two policemen who happened to be staying there were miserably reduced to ashes without any traces of flesh. Neighbors who dared to look at the site or heard about the tragedy all trembled with fear.

       After that, the air raids continued, but one of the best French aviators shot down many German planes. Unfortunately, this courageous French aviation officer’s plane was shot down by a German plane and he fell to the ground. He was sent to our hospital, but after completely recovering he showed his experience and skill again. We heard with joy that the very next day after leaving our hospital he brought down two German planes. While this aviation officer was in our hospital, we heard a detailed account of airplanes, but here I will refrain from writing that down.

[12]

       How our relief corps impressed French people both high and low I hesitate to tell, but I will try to give you some idea. Our arrival was reported by Paris newspapers and the flag of the Rising Sun fluttered on the top of Hotel Astria. From that day people came to our hospital continuously to have a look. The reason why so many people visited seemed to me that, as they did not know much about Japan, out of curiosity many people came to see what the newly established Japanese hospital was like. They found out that many kinds of medical items—more than they had expected—were arranged in good order and that those items had been brought from Japan. All the visitors were impressed by the fact that, from the operating room to the wards, order and cleanliness were maintained, and that all the patients wore clean white Japanese-style gowns. They heard from patients themselves or volunteer French nurses how our corps were nursing the patients kindly, and visitors left our hospital quite pleased at what they had seen.

      Thus, those who were satisfied with our hospital fetched their friends or people involved in nursing. In this way people came to see our hospital continuously. Among them there were some who brought their friends or acquaintances and guided them around as if it were their own hospital. When we were making the rounds with a doctor, they accompanied us and admired our skill at dressing. I don’t know how the news spread, but the Italian Red Cross came to us especially to find if there was any special way of dressing. So our chief doctor explained to them how to bandage a head or a joint which were difficult places to bandage.

        Well, this is almost all I want to tell you about our corps, but I would also add an episode in the ward. At that time we had a patient called Henri Gibier, corporal of the artillery, wounded at Douaumont (Verdun) and brought to our hospital. Wounded by a shell on the chest, his heart was damaged. The only way to save his life was a dangerous operation.

Dr. Shioda asked,

 “Is his family living far away?”

 “In a place called Hiji Gueillet.” 

 “How far is it?”

“… kilometers.”

 “Then we have time.”

He ordered someone to call for his parents. That was midnight. Immediately a car departed but it was delayed as there was an accident on the way.

        While doctors were waiting impatiently, we nurses pressed down on his heart. Each nurse worked for five minutes and the work continued for nine hours. The next morning his parents arrived in a car and could embrace their son. They agreed to the operation. The corporal of the artillery, lying down on the glass operating table, narrowly escaped death.

[13]

        Ten months after we came to France, which was November in the fourth year of Taisho, there came a rare opportunity of the enthronement of the Emperor of Japan[The enthronement ceremony was delayed for various reasons]. When I came to this foreign land, I was thinking fondly of the country where I was born, sometimes shedding tears either in the long autumn nights or at frosty early mornings. I was a champion of homesickness in our corps, as myself and others recognized. When I looked up at the sky from the window during a sleepless night, stars were glittering like silver sands sprinkled, but no lights or voices at all on the streets or in the buildings. It was Paris in wartime, dreary and soundless in every corner of the city.

　     The battle situation was reported every day in a newspaper extra. When I watched some family members gathering around the extra edition to find out how the father or the husband was doing, I could not but shudder at the miseries of the war. Hotel Astria, now a Red Cross flag flying over it, used to be a meeting place of ladies and gentlemen from all over the world, who drank tea or wine night and day. There you could always hear a mixture of foreign languages under the bright lights. That hotel was long gone. Isn’t it extremely ghastly that the hotel was now a place where soldiers, bathed in blood, were hospitalized?

        In the meantime we Japanese relief corps were invited to the delightful ceremony of the enthronement held at the Japanese embassy in France. All the members of our corps gave three cheers for the Emperor in Japanese, which must have been conspicuous even in Paris where foreign languages mixed in confusion.

        After the ceremony we went back to our hospital, and soon various kinds of entertainment began. Parisians were surprised at the performance of a sword dance by doctors: above all Dr. Mogi’s “Sutego” eclipsed most professionals. Nurse Sone borrowed a dress from a countess and performed a dance which she had never learned. All the patients hailed her with cheers of “banzai” childishly. We all had a hilarious time. When Shoji-san,

Araki-san, and Sone-san played “Tokiwagozen”, the mother of Yoshitsune, the audience was so noisy that we could hear nothing, but when Araki-san clung to the sleeve of Tokiwa crying “Mommy, mommy”, shivering with cold, there was a burst of applause on the floor. Everybody was so excited that even a patient with maimed legs fell from his bed.

     The entertainment over, we all gave three cheers for the Emperor in Japanese including the patients.

[14]

        After passing seventeen months in a foreign country, finally there came time for us to return to Japan. On July the 10th, in the 5th year of Taisho [1916], we were to leave Paris. We each put our things into wicker trunks which we had brought from Japan and closed them using all our strength while joy spilled out in spite of ourselves. For the first time in my life the depth of the expression “to long to fly like an arrow back home” was fully understood

        The Governor of the French Red Cross, His Grace Duke of Novogue[2]. came to our hospital with Mr. Bertain, and presented each member of our corps with a letter of appreciation. He also gave us the most moving and friendly words on behalf of the Red Cross. Our chief doctor Shioda thanked with deep sincerity the French authorities, and vowed that he would certainly report the kindness of the French Red Cross to the Japanese Red Cross and Japanese people. Though the Duke was ninety-five years old at that time and could not see clearly, he took the trouble of coming to our hospital himself, to which we were deeply moved.

        At our farewell party, Mr. Godard, vice minister of the Army, conferred a French decoration on us all. When the dining room was opened at seven thirty p.m., we were all seated including the one hundred and twenty-five representative guests from French civil and military officials. When the dessert was served, Dr. Shioda made a speech. He was followed by His Excellency, the Ambassador, and the last speaker was the vice minister, Godard. Both of them said in sincere flowing eloquence that our Japanese hospital was one of the most excellent hospitals in France and expressed deepest thanks for our effort to the country.

        On June the 27th, our chief doctor and other medical staff, were received in an audience by the President of France, and shook hands with him. The President said to them courteously, “I know you all as I met you in the hospital. I thank you who came all the way from the Far East to engage in relief work of our wounded soldiers. I want you to express my thanks to other members of your corps staying here, to the head office and Japanese people when you go back to Japan.’ This much I have heard.

        On June the 30th a memorial service for those soldiers who died in our hospital was held in the chapel of the hospital. At seven thirty in the morning we gathered at the chapel, and were moved to tears by the emotional speech of lieutenant Wisneg, who was in charge of the ceremony. On the evening of that day, a farewell tea party was held in appreciation of the services of the orderlies and general employees. All the orderlies sang together “Kimigayo”, Japanese anthem translated into French, and in response to this we nurses played “La Marseillaise”. It was a joyful banquet indeed. After the banquet some orderlies were overjoyed with tears and were so grateful to us for being treated so hospitably. We nurses wept with them in sympathy.

       On July the 6th, His Excellency the Ambassador Matsui treated all members of our corps with a sumptuous Japanese-style meal. While we were in France nothing was more pleasing than eating Japanese dishes. Whenever we ate Japanese food, we wept longing for our country.

[15]

       　We thus spent the last few days and on July the 10th it was time for us to depart. We got on a 16:50 train at Saint-Lazare Station heading for Le Havre. Ambassador Matsui and his wife, Secretary of the Japanese Embassy, Military and Naval attaches to the Embassy, Dr. Sŭre the medical section chief of Paris Government-General, Mr. Bertin the president of French-Japanese Association, Baron Sakatani, all voluntary nurses, all nurses of military service and Japanese residents in France sent us off. Surprisingly many wounded soldiers who had difficulty in walking came to see us off leaning on a stick: they had been treated first in our hospital and then were moved to a hospital further north.

       I thought, “Once we part today when can we meet again? This may probably be the last time we see each other.” I felt yet more deeply a heartbreaking sorrow. All the French volunteer nurses, reluctant to part from us, said with tears, “Don’t say such a sad thing as never coming back to Paris, but tell us that you will come back some day—if it is only to comfort us.” Like a child would, they clung to us tightly. All of us left Paris feeling brokenhearted.

        Next day, at 14:00, we arrived in London by ship, and on July the 17th we embarked on “Fushimimaru” which we had boarded on our way to Paris. Heading for Japan, we arrived at the Cape of Good Hope on August the 7th, and via Singapore safely returned to Kobe on August the 13th.

        It took twenty-two months or six hundred and seventy-six days for us to depart from Japan and back again. First of all, it was a great pleasure to have safely done our duties. Finally we heard the sounding of whistles and signals to announce the arrival of our ship at Yokohama Port. Without having the same experience no one could understand how we felt at that time. When we departed from Yokohama, it was freezing winter, but on the day of our return it was midsummer. Summer clouds whirled high above, and even the frightening peal of thunder sounded like a drum from the sky welcoming our return home. When we saw the mountain shadow in the far distance, we were all overjoyed with tears streaming down onto the back of our hands.

        We heard big cheers of “banzai” from welcoming people at Yokohama Port, and I thought there might be a general stir in Japan at our coming back. The Emperor was greatly interested in our duties in France, and made a poem for us, which was the greatest pleasure to us. The honor we received from the Imperial family was more than we deserved.

***********************

[1] As she was not yet in Paris on this date, “the 5th year of Taisho〔1916〕” is correct. There were aerial bombardments above Paris on 27 January according to Wikipedia, not on 28.

[2] Actually the Marquis de Vogué

Featured writing

Memoirs of a Japanese Nurse pt 2

November 24, 2021

The Memoirs of a Japanese Nurse on the Western Front (pt 2)

Hajimeko Takeda’s Notes by a Japanese Nurse Sent to France

Translated by Paul Carty & Eiko Araki, edited by Freddy Rottey & Dominiek Dendooven

In Stand To! 122 (April 2021), the introduction, context and postscript of Hajimeko Takeda’s memoirs as a Japanese nurse in France were published. This is the first part of the translation of her account, as originally published in the local newspaper Fukuoka Shimbun from May 25 to June 6, 1919.

[1]

     It was on November 3rd, 1914 when I received a summons: “Order of Dispatch to France as a relief nurse in the Japanese Red Cross (JRC) contingent”. As far as I remember, it was in the autumn evening when tinged maple leaves seemed to measure the loneliness of the passing season while people were talking about the chrysanthemums just beginning to bloom. I had become a member of JRC nurses hoping to contribute my life to humanitarian and philanthropic work and to the relief of suffering patients. I did not expect to receive this summons, and I was filled with a surprise and happiness which I had never experienced before. Strange emotions stole upon me, ruffling the blood flowing through my heart.

       I went to the Kumamoto Branch of JRC without delay, and was warned not to tell anyone about this mission, and these warnings were delivered in great detail. As the nurses were summoned to the Tokyo headquarters of JRC, I hurriedly packed my wicker trunks to travel to France. It is easy to say “packing wicker trunks”, but I was very anxious about traveling to Paris far away from Japan, crossing many miles of blue seas, and did not know how to begin packing. Members of Kumamoto Branch and my friends helped me pack, and on November 8th my heavy wicker trunks were sent from my house.

        I had already experienced relief work in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 as a member of Nisseki Relief Corps. My father told me that this new mission would be a great honour not only to myself but also to our family, the Takedas, for many generations to come. He also said that it would be gratifying to work behind the scenes of the Great War, an unprecedented event in history. Encouraged by his words, I took the first step toward France from Kumamoto Station at four o’clock in the late afternoon of that day.

　 　　The autumn sun, setting early, started to lean toward Mt. Hanaoka, and the treetops of colored leaves were brightened by the evening sun. Even the sight of a few mussels moved me with a sense of pathos. When I thought of leaving my beloved hometown Kumamoto for a strange foreign land, tears welled up in my eyes.

        At Kumamoto Railway Station, I was sent off with a shout of “banzai” [cheers] and blessings from people of Kumamoto Branch of JRC and its prefectural hospital. Encouraged by their words, I was filled with hope, but at the same time was overwhelmed with emotion when I heard the steam whistle of the train. All I could do was silently nod my head in assent.

        At eleven o’clock on the 10th of the same month I safely arrived at Tokyo Station, and visited the main branch of JRC to find the details of the dispatch. The JRC contingent to be dispatched to France consisted of one head doctor, two assistant doctors, and twenty nurses. We were to board the ship “Fushimimaru” from Yokohama Port on December 16th. Until December 15th, we prepared for departure and learned some French. At 8:00 a.m. on the 16 th seen off by many people including members of the nobility, we boarded our boat “Fushimimaru” due to depart at 10:00 a.m.

        That day as the howling north wind mixed with snow, we looked at the flag of the Rising Sun fluttering on the ship as if it were the only living thing. Mr. Torayoshi Irisawa (Irie?) was going to be the captain on the Fushimimaru’s maiden voyage. In fact, the ship just recently had its launching ceremony. The paint was so fresh that it seemed as if our fingers would stick to it if we touched it. It was really comfortable to be on board the ship. Captain Irisawa was very pleased to have this rare occasion, on the maiden voyage of the ship, to transport Japanese nurses to Europe where they were going to serve. 

        At last the whistle of departure blew in the snowy sky. The sound of the engine made us sad, and our team of maidens, with a twenty-one-year-old as the youngest, started on a long journey. We all felt the sorrow of leaving the mountains and rivers of our country, though our cheeks were hot with excitement.

[2]

        The ship began to sail slowly and smoothly. Closing my eyes, I remembered my father’s remonstrations, the image of my mother, and the warm-heartedness of my friends. These memories were inscribed indelibly on my mind at this solemn departure. On the other hand, when I imagined the big city of Paris and the background of the Great War, I was filled with hope, satisfaction and curiosity, and could not sleep soundly on the first day on board. The sound of the waves lapping against the side of the ship often broke our dreams. Other members seemed not to have slept either, and we sat up the first night talking, with bright eyes, about Paris, which none of us had seen yet.

        On board the ship we continued to study French. In our leisure time we enjoyed playing cards and karuta [Japanese card game]. When the sea was calm we almost forgot that we were out on the sea, but one time, struck by a strong wind, the ship rolled heavily. As we were not used to sailing, we grew pale and thought we were done for. To show our resolve we tied towels around our heads, but even then, we vomited. Despite our best efforts, we actually were a comical scene. When the sea was calm again, we forgot our recent suffering. We sang songs or like children romped about on the deck. When the ship was passing the Suez Canal, several nurses on the deck who had been singing ‘Hato Poppo’ [a song from school] rushed to the cabin. We asked them what had happened. They said they had heard the rumble of a cannon and seen an airplane in the sky. At this we all went on deck attracted by these fearful scenes. To be sure, we clearly saw the skillful piloting of planes and heard the distant roaring of guns. We all were hushed and the ship anchored temporarily in a bay out of harm’s way.

        Though shuddering at the rumbling sound of the cannon, we relied on the Red Cross flag hoisted high up at the bow. The ship endeavored to pass through the turmoil of war, and finally after fifty-one days of sailing we reached the port of Marseilles in the dawn of February 4 th, 1915. We were all eyes and ears at the exoticism of the city we saw for the first time. The Japanese Embassy, local officials and the people of Marseilles gave us a hearty welcome. The city prepared a special train for us to go to Paris. At eight o’clock on the morning of February 5 th, we arrived at Lyon Station, Paris.

       Here again we were greeted with a firm handshake by many people including the staff of Japanese Embassy and a baroness so-and-so. We departed in a long string of cars to Hotel Astoria[1] near the Arc de Triomphe, which was appointed as a Japanese Hospital. When we finally arrived after a long journey, all the members of the contingent were allocated to the rooms on the 6th and 7th floor of the main building. After a little rest, we began unpacking our wicker trunks.

        Feeling happy that we all arrived safe and sound, I renewed my firm resolution to do my duties of philanthropy in this unfamiliar country. I passed the first night in Paris, dreaming of my hometown and praying (to God) that we would fulfill our responsibilities.

[3]

        Hotel Astoria where we were stationed had been used by the British Red Cross for treatment before they went up to the front line. This hotel was situated on the left of la Place de l’Étoile where the uphill Champs-Élysées , starting from la Place de la Concorde in front of le Palais du Louvre, reached. The hotel, having eight stories, towered above the rest of the surrounding buildings, but was not equal to the height of the Tour Eiffel. As the hotel was on higher ground, we could have a good view, from our sitting room on the eighth floor, not only of the whole city of Paris but of the surrounding hazy mountains. This hotel was the subject of gossip among Parisians. The hotel, which had been run by Germans before the war, was rumored to install wireless telegraphy on the rooftop which was causing inconvenience to the French government. Another rumor was that the German Kaiser, after the defeat of Paris, planned to have a dinner party at this hotel, even arranging its date and menu.

        On February 14th in the 4th year of Taisho (1915), two poles were hoisted resolutely on the rooftop of the hotel; on one pole was fluttering the flag of the Rising Sun and that of the Red cross, and on the other the tricolor flag of France and the flag of the Red Cross. The four flags fluttering from these two poles could be seen from l’Arc de Triomphe and also as far as la Concorde. Our fellow countrymen looking at these flags must have felt overjoyed. These flags invoked in us compatriots some pleasant feelings which were hard to explain and they seemed to give good impression beyond description to French people.

        The opening ceremony of our hospital was held in the name of His Excellency Ambassador Ishii and our senior doctor, Dr. Shioda. Many important officials and people including Japanese residents came to the ceremony. Its grandeur reminded me of the annual celebration of the first Emperor Jinmu held in Nara on April 3rd.

         In wartime Paris banquets or dancing parties went out of fashion among society circles. Instead, those society ladies were keen on doing jobs related to the war, especially tending the honorably wounded. They prided themselves doing service for the country, which prompted every society lady to be engaged in such relief work as a voluntary nurse. To our hospital too many ladies applied for nursing. Dr. Shioda seemed to have a very hard time choosing as he did not know their ranks in society. As the reputation of our hospital was affected by that of the ladies working there, he asked so-and-so baroness who was well acquainted with the situation in Paris to select suitable persons. Among those ladies who wanted to extend a warm helping hand in relief work were those who had a long experience of working as a nurse and also those rich ladies who taught nursing as a retirement job because they enjoyed teaching. Nevertheless, almost all the rest were those who got a license only after doing a brief course lasting a few months.

       Observing these things every day we were deeply impressed by the fact that we shared the same feelings both in the East and the West. Is it not praiseworthy that all men should render devoted service to the country by going into battle while we women who are not permitted to be at the front devote ourselves to the relief of wounded soldiers?

[4]

        The four flags hoisted high on the building have been bathed in light from both the rising and setting sun. Time has passed; we have gradually settled down in our new circumstances. As I wrote before, it is praiseworthy how the French ladies who had volunteered were so enthusiastic about nursing. Even fifty- or sixty- year old ladies, who were as rich as Croesus and waited upon by many servants, came to our hospital early in the morning and went home when the stars were out, commuting to and from the hospital without the use of a vehicle. We were very worried, as some slipped down on the icy streets of a winter morning when the wind was piercing cold, and some lay down from exhaustion on a bench where many people were passing by. These were not rare events.

　　　　We finally made an arrangement like this: We, the Japanese trained nurses, would do the nursing work for the patients, while the society ladies would attend to their meals and comforts. As a result, it so happened that there were some graceful young ladies working in a dimly lit pantry and other ladies carrying a plain tray with many dishes; each dish had a piece of meat and a bit of salads. We were moved to tears when we saw those ladies taking every care to comfort solitary patients who had few to rely on, or to wash their feet, or help them put on the shoes.

       Another impressive thing is that the French Red Cross employees including the staff, doctors and nurses are all working unpaid. When they went as far as Africa or Greece, they were unpaid though provided with travelling expenses, bed and meals. It seemed that there were no rules about allowance or compensation if they were injured or died. Taking all this into consideration, these people engaged in relief work had not only a certain amount of property, but were filled with a philanthropic spirit of sacrificing themselves for the love of others to help the weak. This was always the topic of our conversation, and we Japanese all renewed our wish to have the same philanthropic spirit.

       By the way, there appeared a novel which had a Japanese woman called Madame Chrysanthème or Madame Kikuko as a heroine.[2] Entitled as “At a Japanese hospital on Champs-Élysées”, it explains in detail how our hospital impressed the author, admiring the cleanliness of our operation room, tidiness of our stock rooms of medical stuff. It also praises our senior surgeon’s adroitness at operations comparing it with cutting jewelry and polishing ivory. After this there are some comments on us nurses, so I will write a little about them in passing…

　　　　　　　　

[5]

       On May 25th, 1916, the newspaper Figaro published the following article:[3]

   When I entered the bandage preparation room, I saw a Japanese nurse. She was dressed in nursing clothes, wearing a big cap like Savoie confectionary and seemed to be preparing bandages. When I said “Hello”, she paid monotonous respect with a smile. She had a round face and very dark eyes. Whenever she smiled, her false teeth twinkled golden. She looked very young, but when I asked her if she had experienced aid work in the Russo-Japanese War, she said yes. This explains she must be more than thirty years old, though she really looked like a young girl.

       “She is very different!” said Mr. Girard, an aviation officer, who was hospitalized here five times due to a variety of wounds. I also asked him what feelings these women had when they left home: Did they feel compassion common to women all over the world or did they have patriotic feelings and self-confidence? Do they want to share with French people the advancement of Japanese medicine as an intelligent nation, or did they want to satisfy their curiosity for academic reasons? He guessed they had some of all these feelings anyway. He continued as follows: “What we should not forget about these women is that they are professional nurses paid about six hundred francs (two hundred yen) a month. They are delegated from the Japanese Red Cross as the most valuable medical workers representing Japan. They also had a firm belief in their mission as well as duty and patriotic feelings. The fact that they did not even have a look around the city of Paris even after living here for one year explains their sincerity and lack of any frivolous curiosity.”

       The only pleasure they had, I have heard, is that in the evening after they are off duty they change from European nursing uniforms they don’t like into Japanese kimono and play with dolls they brought from Japan. These things, however, cannot possibly be enough to judge Japanese women. Those child-like women are very intelligent, know their duties as nurses, and are strict, devoted and faithful. They are always kind and gentle to patients.

   Sometimes, however, they are not suited to those bearded soldiers cracking jokes, because they do not understand innocent jokes. If patients should make flattering jokes, those ‘musume’ [young women] did not pay any attention, which took away all the fun. They had the character of young girls reared in the countryside.”

        “Patients’ fiancées and sweethearts living in France must be worried about their lovers being tended by beautiful nurses in a Paris hospital, but those fears are utterly ungrounded when the patients are under the care of Japanese nurses. Japanese women seem to despise those who cannot tolerate pain. Those wounded, who scream and wail seeking the mother’s fond love must be unhappy indeed. Japanese women respect those patients who quietly tolerate pains ‘like a man,’ while they struggle to manage their own mental strain. One such nurse, I have heard, wrote to her mother quoting an old saying ‘It is sweet and honourable to die for one’s country.’”

[6]

       Thousands of miles from the skies of hometown we have been sleeping, thinking it good to die or perish for our country. We were called together by our Emperor to the war front, just as dewdrops on leaf tips; sadly we were not as tough as stones. As is usual with war it is not rare to find bodies growing cold in an instant or disabled with wounds, but I have heard that in this war there were a greater number of more seriously wounded than before.

As I wrote before, I was dispatched to the Russo-Japanese War to engage in relief work. Comparing the wounds of the casualties of these two wars, in this war we found more evidence of atrocities. We felt a shudder come over us when we thought of the ferocity of the Germans, and this happened to us countless times.

The French Red Cross used dogs to search for the wounded soldiers at the front: those dogs were far cleverer than Japanese police dogs. Once the dogs were unleashed at the site of the battlefield, they found the wounded wherever they lay hidden, and came back to their masters to lead them back by the sleeves to the wounded. The intelligence of the dogs always amazed people who were watching them. All the wounded from Russia, Italy, Britain or France were sent to Paris thanks to the contribution of these dogs.

At the Paris station, there were army surgeons who sent the wounded soldiers, according to their conditions, to various relief corps delegated from various countries. The French army surgeons sent the most seriously wounded to the Japanese relief corps. I want to share with our readers our happiness that they had such confidence in our group. At first the president of the JRC ordered us to ask for the presence of French doctors when operating on any patient, but they came only for the first two or three times and never came afterwards. This is after they witnessed Dr. Shiota, our chief surgeon, performing an operation and the nurses tending the wounded. All of us, not only Dr. Shiota but our distinguished nurses from the Japanese medical world, felt very proud that the progress of medicine in our country was thus highly appreciated in the West, the greatest authority in the medical world.

Many wounded soldiers arriving at the Paris station want to be accommodated by the relief corps of their own country, which is quite understandable human nature, but they are obliged to be divided into that of every country. One of those patients confessed that he was greatly disappointed to find he would be sent to the Japanese relief corps. He said he complained about his unhappiness to be hospitalized into the Red Cross of a strange foreign country, even though the Red Cross advocates philanthropy. As he got used to our nursing, he felt very happy to find that our Relief Corps was kind. This is what every patient in our hospital says. When we addressed a patient as Monsieur, he said, “Japanese nurses are mothers. Call me ‘my son’.” So I said, “You are my son,” and he rejoiced, clapping his hand like a small child.

We accommodated patients from every country, and they each boasted about the place they had come from. When the topic shifted to the war, they got excited with their faces flushed with anger. Sometimes they tried to stand up with their maimed legs and attempted to throw anything at hand or began to fight about childish things, which amused us.

Another amusing thing is that patients from every country burst into tears when they feel pain at the time of operation or while their dressing was being changed. “You are a man and a soldier. What a weakling you are, weeping with such a small pain! Japanese soldiers bite their lips and never cry in a case like this”, I often chided them about this. At this they defied me saying, “We are soldiers. On the battlefields we never flinch no matter what happens. To tolerate pains on the battlefields is our duty. There is no loss of honour and we are no less courageous if we cry on the operating table.” It seems that they are making an excuse for their lack of toughness.

[7]

        What perplexed us most was the language. We learned the French language for the first time in a classroom in the JRC Hospital soon after we were summoned, and practiced it a bit on board the ship. Our teacher praised our remarkable progress and hoped we would go on improving.

        After we arrived in Paris, we could somewhat understand what the patients were saying, perhaps better than mothers who had to guess their babies’ talk, it seems. What was difficult was to make ourselves understood in French. Some of us could speak English, but there were not many.

        We wanted to continue practicing French, but we were too busy to find time to do so. In the meantime, we got used to speaking French, and patients began to guess what we wanted to say. Patients from big cities in France, Parisians especially, could guess our feelings and promptly understood us, which we greatly appreciated. On the other hand, newly hospitalized patients, particularly from the countryside, were hard to understand, because they had broad accents and dialects. Senior patients, accustomed to us, who shared a sickroom with the new patients took the trouble to translate for us what they wanted to say.

        Our French conversation was also very poor to the extent that our maid at the hospital was chided by her mother at home because her way of speaking French had become very strange. There can be no wonder why. When she thought about this, she realized that she had become used to articulating her thought word by word instead of speaking sentences.

        The inability to communicate is troublesome to medical people who should understand the subtleties of their patients’ minds. We can tolerate the inconvenience as long as we get what we need in time, but to patients it is a pity indeed that they cannot make themselves understood. To the slightly wounded, our strange language may have become a topic of conversation or even a charm, but to the seriously wounded, who have to put up with intense pain, it must be another burden to communicate to us what they want. We really felt sorry for them.

        The lack of language which pained us most is when we encountered mentally deranged patients or heavily wounded and exhausted patients. We thought it all the more necessary to practice the language especially when taking care of mentally deranged patients. To those who were noticeably deranged, the lack of language on our part was not a big problem, but when it came to those whose mental disorder was not so severe, we had to understand what they were saying and if they were speaking normally or deliriously. This was the most difficult problem we encountered in attending to patients.

        For this difficulty, French volunteer nurses gave a generous helping hand, which encouraged us all. Those ladies gave patients many comforting words which were far more effective than ours, and relieved the patients’ tedium by chatting and reading to them. They also wrote letters for the patients who had difficulty in writing. Dr. Shioda said that without the help of those volunteer ladies our hospital life would have been insipid. Our spoken French is largely single words instead of sentences, but it is enough for daily life.

The chief doctor and other people have said that our nursing skills are excellent and that we could work perfectly anywhere in the world as JRC nurses. They explained that even though we have poor physiques, our conduct is orderly and meticulous. It has also been said of our Japanese nursing group that we value cleanliness and are kind, which are all virtues necessary for nurses. In this manner we continued for seventeen months, working for fourteen hours a day, and we were able to complete our active military service. The praises given by our chief doctor and other people were a great satisfaction and joy to us all. 　　　

To be continued …

**********************

1 Hotel Astoria, on the corner of the Champs-Elysées and the rue de Presbourg, housed the Japanese hospital

2 The entrance to the Japanese hospital (Albums Valois, La Contemporaine, Paris)

3 The storage room of the Japanese hospital (Albums Valois, La Contemporaine, Paris)

4 Japanese nurses preparing bandages, 3 September 1915 (Albums Valois, La Contemporaine, Paris)

5 The operation theatre of the Japanese hospital, 3 September 1915 (Albums Valois, La Contemporaine, Paris)

6 A ward in the Japanese hospital (Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris)

7 A group of Japanese nurses and their French assistants on the balcony of Hotel Astoria (Musée Carnavalet, Paris)

8 Decorative plate with the flags of the Allied countries: the United Kingdom, Belgium, Russia, Italy, Japan, Serbia and France. (IFFM)

IFFF000106

Japanese officers visiting the Belgian front, 1916 (IFFM)

67_Sgt Marine JAPAN

Eugène Burnand : A Japanese sailor (from: Les Alliés dans la Guerre des Nations. Paris, 1922)

[1] Located at 133, Avenue des Champs Elysée the building later became the famous Publicis Drugstore. Gutted by fire in 1972, it was replaced by a modern structure.

[2] We were not able to trace this book. Obviously, it is not the eponymous novel by Pierre Loti, published in 1887 which is said to have inspired Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly.

[3] There is indeed an article on the Japanese hospital in this issue in Figaro, but it does not have the content quoted by nurse Takeda.

Writers in Kyoto Present the Seventh Annual Kyoto Writing Competition

November 23, 2021

◆ THEME: Kyoto (English language submissions only)
◆ DEADLINE: March 31st, 2022 (23:59 JST)
◆ GENRE: Short Shorts (unpublished material only)
◆ WORD LIMIT: 300 Words (to fit on a single page)
◆ FORM: Short poems, character studies, essays, travel tips, whimsy, haiku sequence, haibun, wordplays, dialogue, experimental verse, etc. In short, anything that helps show the spirit of place in a fresh light. A clear connection to Kyoto is essential.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

● Limited to one submission per person
● You do not need to be located in Kyoto to participate. We accept submissions
from anywhere in the world.
● Must be submitted by Microsoft Word attachment file. Submissions by PDF
attachment and submissions within the body of the email will not be accepted.
● At the top of the Microsoft Word attachment (not in the body of the email),
please include the following personal information: Full Name, E-mail Contact,
Nationality, Current Residence (Town, Country).
● Do not provide any special formatting to your piece. We request your personal
information at the top with the text directly below. Submissions in [Times New
Roman, 12pt] are preferred.
● Please send your Microsoft Word attachment file to: 
kyotowritingcompetition2022@gmail.com

TOP PRIZES

Kyoto City Mayoral Prize
¥50,000 cash prize, Structures of Kyoto (Writers in Kyoto Anthology 4), Kyoto Craft (generously provided by the Kyoto Convention and Visitors Bureau), One-year complimentary WiK membership (April 2022-March 2023), publication on the WiK website, and inclusion in a future WiK Anthology

Yamabuki* Prize (awarded to the national of a country in which English is an official language)
Kyoto Craft (generously provided by the Kyoto Convention and Visitors Bureau), Structures of Kyoto (Writers in Kyoto Anthology 4), publication on the WiK website, and inclusion in a future WiK Anthology

Unohana* Prize (awarded to the national of a country in which English is not an official language)
Kyoto Craft (generously provided by the Kyoto Convention and Visitors Bureau), Structures of Kyoto (Writers in Kyoto Anthology 4), publication on the WiK website, and inclusion in a future WiK Anthology

* Yamabuki (Japanese yellow rose) and Unohana (Deutzia) are flowers appearing in haiku.

OTHER PRIZES

Japan Local Prize
A selected ceramic piece from the Robert Yellin Yakimono Gallery

USA Prize
Phila-Nipponica: An Historic Guide to Philadelphia & Japan and a one-year complimentary membership to the Japan-America Society of Greater Philadelphia

Australia Prize
A one-year complimentary membership to the Australia-Japan Society of Victoria

PUBLISHING RIGHTS/COPYRIGHT

Writers in Kyoto reserve the right to publish entries on the group’s website. Top
winners will be eligible for publication in a future WiK Anthology. All authors retain the copyright of their own work.

SUPPORTERS

In addition to the aforementioned entities, the Writers in Kyoto Seventh Annual Writing Competition is supported by the Kyoto City Cultural Office, Kyoto City International Foundation (kokoka), and Kyoto Journal.

The WiK Competition logo was designed by Rebecca Otowa, author of At Home in Japan (Tuttle 2010), My Awesome Japan Adventure (2013), and The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper (2019).

STAY CONNECTED WITH WRITERS IN KYOTO

Please save our website link to your Favorites and follow us on Facebook, Twitter (@KyotoWriters), and Instagram (writersinkyoto). There is also a private Facebook group for paid-up members.

WiK ANTHOLOGIES

Writers in Kyoto anthologies available in Amazon marketplaces in paperback and Kindle editions:

Echoes: WiK Anthology 2 (2017)
ed. John Dougill, Amy Chavez, and Mark Richardson

Encounters with Kyoto: WiK Anthology 3 (2019)
ed. Jann Williams and Ian Josh Yates

Structures of Kyoto: WiK Anthology 4 (2021)
ed. Rebecca Otowa and Karen Lee Tawarayama







Writings about Kyoto, whether by Japanese or foreign observers

Foxes of Kyoto

November 22, 2021

by Stephen Benfey

“Last night,” he said, “was fun.”

“It was spooky,” she said. “How do you know such spooky places?”

“Serendipity. Just walking around and there it was.”

“What does ‘serendipity’ mean?”

He cocked his head. “Like how we met. Serendipity is when something good happens by chance.”

She frowned. “We call that en.”

“En is serendipity?”

“Fate, not chance.” Her eyes locked onto his, innocent yet knowing, daring him to disagree. “I don’t gamble.”

Was she angry, or playing with him? In Kyoto, you learned to listen to what wasn’t said. Circumlocution was an art to be refined daily, like sado, the tea ceremony. Any idiot could whisk up a bowl of frothy matcha in minutes, but only a yabanjin, a barbarian, would skip the painstaking detail that transmuted ritual into sacrament.

Reading between the lines, he decided she was testing him.

He looked to the east, to the horizon. “Fate means I don’t have free will.”

She touched the back of her fingers to his cheek, running them slowly across the stubble. “You’re funny. And you need a shave.”

He felt like a little boy. He wanted to lock eyes with her again, but he looked down and away.

Her scent floated on the cool night air. Earthy, spinning into ethereal, it reeled in the smells of Bangkok, Mumbai, Catalan.… all the aromas and spices rare in Japanese food.

His guard down, intoxicated by her redolence, he forgot his mantra: love is trouble. She pickpocketed it, secreted it. Would he notice?

She furrowed her brow, her face innocent. “Why do you like such spooky stuff?”

“Lafcadio Hearn. ‘Kwaidan,’ ‘Ghostly Japan’.”

“You mean Koizumi Yakumo?”

“That sounds right.”

“The place last night wasn’t a temple, you know. It was a jinja. Kamisama, not Hotokesama.”

“It was the gods, not the Buddha? A shrine to the rat gods?”

“Rats have a god. And rats can be gods, too. I like foxes better. I’ll show you a fox shrine.”

“Do all animals have shrines?”

“Mostly foxes. We’ll visit O-inari-san and see many kitsune.”

“I like your name,” he said, hoping she would remind him what it was.

“Reiko? Well, I like the sound of your name too,” she said. “Haru means spring and … you.” “How do you write Reiko?” Hal asked.

“There are many ways to write it, as many as there are girls named Reiko.”

“But how do you write your name?”

“My Reiko is rare. So I write it in hiragana. You know, syllabary.”

“You can at least show me.”

“When you are ready,” she said, “I will show you everything.”

‘Everything,’ the way she said it, straightened his spine. Like fresh wasabi, a twist of sudachi, a pinch of sansho or shichimi, it tantalized his tongue. The way she said it, ‘everything’ anticipated perfect pitch, shared. Upper harmonics mirroring the fundamental—the lowest resonance frequency—born of compliance and mass, coupled. A heavier or looser string sounds lower. A lighter or tauter string sounds higher. Compliance and mass. The beginning and the end. Yin and yang. Alpha and omega. 阿吽の呼吸. ॐ, ओम्, Aum.

“I’m so happy we met, he said. But why were you out?”

“That’s my neighborhood, where I live with my mother. You’re the one who was out of bounds, not me!”

“Did you tell your mother about last night?”

 “Too spooky.” She shivered. “She’d only worry. Then press me to marry some guy I’ve never met.”

 “Arranged marriage?”

 “Her head is stuck in the Showa era.”

“I bet my mother’s worse.”

She smiled.

“What is it with you and foxes,” he said.

“Kitsune wa bakeru.”

“Foxes are shapeshifters. I know that. And your Reiko is rare because it’s written with the kanji for spirit fox.”

She raised an eyebrow. “If it’s going to be you or me,” she said, locking eyes with him again, “You’re the one who is shapeshifting. You are a foreigner who understands Japanese. But no gaijin can speak fluent Kyoto dialect. You are the fox.”

“Nice try!” he said. “And who was wearing a white yukata at the shrine of the rat last night?”

“Funny boy!” she said. “I always wear white at night for safety. Taxi drivers are crazy here.”

“Sure,” he said. “You are a fox, a kitsune. Foxes wear white when they seduce humans.”

“Cute!” she said. “See you tomorrow at the train station. We’ll go to Fushimi Inari Shrine and you’ll find out what’s what and who’s who.”

No clever retort came to mind. He shrugged and mumbled, “OK.”

 They got off the train and walked to the shrine. Red torii gates framed red torii gates like nested Russian dolls.

“We’ll each get our fortune told and learn the truth,” she said.

In front of the main shrine he reached into his pocket for change. “I don’t have any coins,” he said.

“Hold on,” she said, “stay right here.”

He followed her with his eyes.

She wandered, aimlessly, among the worshippers, then, in front of a sharply dressed man, she bent over as if she had dropped something, exposing her chest to the man’s eyes. The man very slowly sank into a hunched stance to help her, at which point she lost her balance and plunged her head into his midriff. She grabbed his body to regain her balance, giving the man a look of apology and thanks, certain to make him think more of himself and forget what happened.

When she returned, she gave Hal a fistful of bills and coins. “Take these,” she said, “and keep a few steps away from me.”

They tossed coins into the slatted box, bowed, clapped twice, and prayed to the fox gods to fulfill their dreams.

He looked at her, then out at the crowd. “I saw that,” he said.

“So you know.”

“As if it were ever a secret.”

She looked at him. “We are both foxes; now I know. So let’s go back to my den.”

“But you said …”

“Oh, that?” she said, “about my mother? It’s something I say to guard against hen na gaijin. Weirdos. Don’t worry. I don’t live with my mother. It’s OK.”

“Oh, you know you said we would …”

“Have our fortunes read?”

He gave her a quizzical smile.”

“But we know already. We’re foxes. And I don’t gamble.”

As they walked away from the shrine, one of the stone foxes at the gate said to the other, “Pretty clever for a human.”

The other stone fox said, “She fooled you, too?”

******************

* Spirit fox,  霊狐, is read “Reiko.” It could also mean ghost fox.
* Hen na gaijin, 変な外人, weird foreigner , is a cliche, today considered socially incorrect. Many people are also careful to say gaikokujin, foreign country person,” for “foreigner” instead of gaijin, which means the same but is considered rude.

******************

Stephen Benfey’s homepage with examples of his short stories can be found here.

Writings about Kyoto, whether by Japanese or foreign observers

Afternoon Tea in Teramachi

November 18, 2021

by Nicholas Teele

The last two or three years, I’ve been experiencing what I call visual flashes. They come on without warning, first with an intensity that nearly blocks everything else out, then stay a few minutes, or a day, or a week, but eventually fade away. These are not hallucinations in the sense that they appear to be something with a hard sense of reality outside of my mind. They are more like an attack of tinnitus, where the sound can be deafening but is clearly within one’s own brain, or like a live double exposure, where one image is overlaid on the other and both must be looked at at the same time.

This one came when I was cleaning up after lunch: an image appeared of an elderly woman sitting at the back of a small, cramped used bookstore. It was overlaid on what I saw before me so that I had to see through it to continue washing the dishes.

I stopped what I was doing and watched, knowing that there was no reason to be afraid. My wife asked if I was ok, and I said “Yes, just need to sit down for a bit.” Relaxing in the easy chair, I closed my eyes and let the scene unfold, as both observer and participant, in two places at the same time.

The image was clear and sharp – the kimono the woman was wearing was a country weave, perhaps yūki tsumugi, with subdued shades of grey, brown, and violet. She had salt and pepper hair done up in a neat bun and sat by a hibachi that had an old pot steaming on it. The store was small, with room for no more than two or three people at the same time. On the left were shelves of mostly pre-Meiji Japanese style books (wasōbon); the right side was for prints, scrolls, and larger art books, with one shelf wider, a space for spreading scrolls out to view them. As I watched, I remembered, or thought I remembered.

It is the early 1970’s. I have come down from my cabin in the hills northeast of Tokyo for a few days in Kyoto, and have spent several hours walking leisurely along Teramachi-dōri. (The name which dates from the late sixteenth century refers to the street that runs down the part of Kyoto where temples were “relocated” by Toyotomi Hideyoshi at that time. It became known not only for its temples, such as Gangyōji, but also for its interesting variety of shops, many of which specialized in areas such as fine arts, crafts, religion . . . and bookstores. In the 1970’s there were at least half a dozen second-hand bookstores on that street, some before the prefecture offices, several in the arcade section up from Shijō and a few on past that street, nestled in among electrical appliance and computer parts stores.)

I have been walking on down Teramachi from Shijō, and am tired and ready to stop when I see another small second-hand bookstore. I go inside. After a few minutes, the woman starts talking to me. Perhaps there have only been a few customers and she is bored, or maybe she just sees I’m tired and want to sit down.

“Please have a cup of tea.” She motions for me to sit on the stool across from her and pours me a cup of roasted green tea (hōji cha). “You’re interested in Classical literature?” she asks.

 “Yes,” I say. “I love to look at old books printed in Japanese style, and to hold them and to read them, or rather, try to read them. But I don’t have much money.”

“That’s fine,” she says, “the books like to be touched, too.”

We smile, and drink tea.

I notice several black and white photographs on the wall behind her. One is of a young man in a fighter pilot’s uniform. Another shows a beautiful Western style home nestled among well-manicured trees and a garden. A third picture is of an older man, also in military uniform. I assume they date from the 1940’s.

“The books are beautiful,” I say. They are indeed in excellent condition, with prices way beyond my tiny budget.

“My father and mother had a wonderful collection; they formed the base for what my mother and I have been selling for the last twenty years.”

After a moment, I ask, “Is that your father in the picture?”

She turns and points, this one?” I nod. Then, pointing to the other, “and this is my younger brother. Both died in the war.” She smiles, as though my asking had been a release.

Looking at the picture of the house, my mind flashes images of the opulent estates of Ashiya that I had sometimes visited as a child. There is something familiar about the atmosphere in the picture. “You’re from Ashiya?” She nods. We are silent for a while again; she pours me some more tea. 

“Before the end, things got very bad. Ashiya was bombed several times, but the areas damaged were along the coast, so we were safe. It was terribly frightening. After that, the servants left and my mother and I were all alone. By the last year of the war the transportation system was so disrupted that it was often impossible to get fresh food. I was trained in naginata to fight the enemy with if they invaded.” She laughs. “The training was useless for growing food.” She closes her eyes, as though remembering. “As the war continued, transportation became even more difficult and food scarcer yet. We would go into the hills to hunt for something to eat – grass, roots, wild fruit, grain, even field mice and sparrows. Anything.”

“At the end we had almost nothing.” She closes her eyes again. “Oh, we had my father and mother’s collection of books and scrolls, a few tea bowls, other antiques, but who had money to spare for luxuries? When the Occupation came, the US military sequestered our home. My mother and I moved the collection to the storehouse and went to Nishinomiya to stay with her sister. We took only what we could carry. People shared what they had, but there wasn’t enough,” she laughs, quietly. It is a laugh of exhaustion and sadness. “Of course, as bad as the situation was for us, it was worse for others, especially those who lived in areas that were carpet bombed. Thousands of innocent women and children died. An atrocity.”

I listen silently, and nod; then tell her I grew up on the campus of Kwansei Gakuin University, in Nishinomiya, and had heard stories of the suffering from people living around there and in Kobe where I went to school. I remember but don’t mention finding discarded military paraphernalia on my walks in the woods. She nods. I go on.

“The bus we rode on to the elementary school in Kobe followed a river up a valley. We passed caves that had been cut out of the cliffs along the river and turned into one-room homes, with cardboard or plywood for a front door. And there were clusters of makeshift shanties on the mountain side of Nishinomiya.”

“When was that,” she asks.

“Early 1950s,” I answer.

“Things were a lot better by then,” she sighs, then speaks slowly, as though remembering many things and speaking only of one, “My brother was in the Shinpū Tokubetsu Kōgekitai ((神風特別攻撃隊). He trained to be one of those young pilots who sacrifices his life for his nation.” There is neither bitterness nor pride in her voice, only loss. I recognize the name of the so-called “kamikaze” pilots. (Kamikaze and shimpū are different readings of the same two characters.)

I tell her that as a child exploring the university campus I had found an unmarked entrance to what was some kind of underground military complex under one of the sports grounds, and had entered it several times, always a bit afraid I might get lost in the maze of tunnels and rooms that I felt must be there. “Of course by then the place was completely empty,” I say, adding that much later I had learned it was one of the training sites for pilots who took off never to return.

“Who told you?”

“Someone who had trained there. The war ended before he was sent to the field.” I spoke quietly, remembering a talk with an elderly man in a snack bar in Hitachi, where I had gone with students after our English Conversation class finished. Some of the younger factory workers had started singing war songs and he had stopped them by saying that only people who have never experienced war sing such songs, and then began telling me about his own past.

“He was lucky.” She pauses. “Nishinomiya was where my brother did his training.”

Her eyes have the gleam of tears. We are quiet again.

“Friends told us we should take my parent’s collection, move to Kyoto, and open a store” she begins, “because a lot of foreigners came there and they might buy old scrolls, and also because there are lots of universities in Kyoto with students and scholars that might buy old books.” She laughs. “Once my father’s estate was settled, we sold the house and with my mother’s share bought this little place. It was good advice.”

“It’s a nice shop,” I say, feeling perhaps I should change the subject.

“Really? Thank you. The location is terrible; not many people come down this far unless they know about the store. Most people are just looking for some kind of electrical appliance. Still, my mother built up the collection and we have lasted this long.” She laughs again, brews fresh tea for us and offers me a couple of rice crackers (senbei.), some some Gliko caramels, and a mikan.

“Everyone I knew suffered in the war,” she says.

“Yes,” I agree, and tell her that when I was growing up nearly all my teachers, and my classmates’ parents, shared their wartime experiences at one time or another, no matter what country they were from. I tell her my father and three of his brothers had served in the war, and sometimes talked about it, too.

There is another pause; perhaps we are both remembering. Images and experiences fill my mind, images of both my own experiences and those of people I knew, or had read about, or seen in newsreels or documentaries. In the silence I feel her pain and loss; it is as though they have not been diminished by the years.

“Please, look at the books some more, they will enjoy it” she says, finally, getting up slowly and going through the narrow door behind her. I realize our afternoon tea is almost over.

There is a cardboard box of much less expensive books by the entrance to the shop. I find a little one with illustrations that I thought I might paint copies of.

“Ah, you found one you like,” she says when she comes back. 

I hand her the little book – Chikuden Gafu (竹田画譜) – a collection of illustrations of the painter Tanomura Chikuden (田野村竹田, 1777-1835) published in 1880.  She smiles. “You paint?”

“Sometimes,” I confess, “but I don’t have any talent”.

She laughs warmly, “The illustrations are nice just to look at, too.”

Agreeing, I pay, and thank her for the tea and conversation. She nods and smiles. As I leave, she sits down and goes back to staring into the glowing charcoal of the hibachi.

The image of this woman and its story remained with me for several weeks, hovering upon the screen of my mind. Sometimes it was a pale image, sometimes much stronger. Sometimes I only saw her sitting there. Sometimes I saw all parts of the memory at once, placed in a circle around her like in a mandala such as the Taema mandara (当麻曼荼羅). When the image was strong, often I would sit and watch it, as though meditating. Sometimes one of the smaller scenes around her would take over the center, act out what it represented, and then recede, to be replaced by another of the smaller scenes. Over time, I remembered other stories, experiences, things I had heard, read, seen, such as tying to help a friend who came back from Vietnam so traumatized that he was unable to return to a normal life and eventually killed himself. He had come to me asking for help because he knew I was a veteran, too, and might understand. I understood but I could do nothing because he was too trapped by his own experiences.

The image of a woman seated at the rear of a small secondhand bookstore thus became a kind of portal by which my mind revisited the ravages, the suffering, and the lasting pain of war.

***********************

For an interview with Nicholas Teele about his unusual past, see here. You can also view his writing about Emperor Sutoku in Kyoto, or the 13 Temple Kyoto Pilgrimage, or a ‘reborn’ Kyoto Pilgrimage. For a list of his publications, see here.

.

Writers in focus

The Poetry of Pain

November 16, 2021

The Poetry of Pain and Its Meaning in the Age of COVID-19 

by Michael Freiling and Shelley Baker-Gard 

(This article first appeared in Frogpond, official journal of the Haiku Society of America, issue 44-3, Autumn 2021.)

In late 2017, Shelley Baker-Gard was presented with a manuscript of poems, all in Japanese. They were brought to her by Duane Watari, a sansei (third-generation) Japanese American. Mr. Watari had discovered them among his mother’s keepsakes and believed the poems were written by his grandfather, Masaki Kinoshita, who wrote under the pen name of Jonan. Shelley brought the manuscript to Michael Freiling and together we examined its contents. 

As we opened the manuscript and began to study it, we were surprised to discover that these poems had been written in an unexpected context: the Wartime Civilian Control Administration’s (WCCA) North Portland Assembly Center, where Japanese Americans were incarcerated in the months after Pearl Harbor while they waited for their transport to camps farther inland, such as Heart Mountain in Wyoming and Minidoka in Idaho. The manuscript was, in fact, a journal of senryu poems composed by multiple senryu poets at the Assembly Center in August 1942. 

Senryu poems are different from haiku. Although both Japanese poetic forms follow the traditional 5-7-5 structure, their focuses of attention are different. Haiku tend to be meditative observations springing from the contemplation of nature. Senryu, by contrast, tend to be earthier, occasionally acerbic commentaries on human life, relationships, and behavior (including misbehavior). Life in the WCCA Assembly Center, with its attendant uncertainties and anxieties, was naturally the focus of attention for the senryu recorded in this journal.  

The poems were composed at a series of senryu-kai held regularly at the Assembly Center. Senryu-kai and haiku-kai are social gatherings where the members each contribute their own poems. The poems are sometimes composed independently and sometimes in a sequence. Quite often, contests are held where winning haiku or senryu are selected by a designated master or judge, or sometimes by a vote of the present attendees. 

Gatherings at the WCCA Assembly Center were organized by the internees themselves. Their purpose appears to have been twofold: (1) to maintain morale by holding social events that would provide both enjoyment and shared experience, and (2) to give the internees an outlet for expressing their feelings. 

Jonan, who was already an experienced poet in 1942, served as one of the key organizers, as well as the secretary who recorded the poems in the journal. This must have entailed a certain amount of risk because the possession of documents written in Japanese was generally forbidden. One internee was not even allowed to bring with her a copy of the Man’yoshu, a classic anthology of poems from the earliest period in Japanese literature. 

Many of the poems in this clandestine manuscript were written by Jonan himself. We have also been able to identify several other prominent poets who had published independently or organized local Japanese-language poetry groups in the decades prior to WWII and after. Poets we identified include: Shinjiru Honda, Kaoru Kurokawa, Kyokuo Iko (Yakima, WA), Toyoko Tamura (Powell Valley, OR), Katsuhiko Shimizu (Yakima, WA), and Hisako Saito (Portland, OR). 

The poignancy of uncertainty and anxiety was quite palpable, even in the very first poem we looked at, which turned out to be one of Kurokawa’s: 

汽車が出る迄を淋しく笑ひ合ひ 
kisha ga deru made wo sabishiku warai ai 

melancholy laughter helps us pass the time until the train departs 

We were touched by these poems from our very first encounter. The writers of these poems are ordinary people trying to make the best of the unbearable. Instead of the delicate themes typically associated with Japanese haiku, feelings are often expressed directly in senryu, with a raw and sometimes caustic intensity. But this very intensity is what makes them so relevant today and presents the opportunity for us to share deeply in the emotions experienced by those Japanese Americans nearly 80 years ago. 

Our experience working with these poems evolved against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the emotions expressed in these poems take on a new urgency during this unprecedented time in history. The most apparent parallel with 1942 and today has been the unfortunate tendency to blame ordinary Asian Americans for the catastrophes caused by COVID-19. 

Beyond this sad parallel, however, the poems also highlight some of the shared, universal human experiences, though it is important to note that last spring’s pandemic lockdown in no way compares with the injustices and discomforts experienced by the incarcerated Japanese Americans during WWII. We offer the following brief excerpts from the journal in hopes of better understanding the life that Japanese Americans led during their incarceration, as well offering us guidance on how to navigate our own set of challenging circumstances as we battle the pandemic—be it in the form of isolation, confinement, or even outright prejudice. 

Looking Back 

In this collection of senryu poems, there is a sense of loss and nostalgia for what the poets were forced to leave behind during their incarceration. Occasionally, this nostalgia relates to specific places, as when two internees from the same hometown in Japan encounter each other: 

your neighborhood?
from the same hometown – memories 
–Hisataro 

Even sight of the world beyond the Assembly Center is enough to produce nostalgia for their former freedom: 

beyond the barbed wire a glow of neon lights – tears in my eyes 
–Jonan 

More often, however, the nostalgia relates to friends and family whom the internees fear they will never see again, often with good reason: 

no longer heard
their so happy sounds – dad’s drunken songs 
–Jonan 

Nearly all Japanese Americans treasured photographs of loved ones as a way of keeping their memories alive. Some would express their heartbreak through reference to these photos: 

my husband left
and now I talk to him in his picture 
–Jonan, quoting another resident 

Perhaps most poignant is the loss of contact with children and grandchildren: 

only this photo can hold the child we talk about – until peacetime comes 
– Goichi 

Life in the Center 

Life in the Wartime Civilian Control Administration’s North Portland Assembly Center was unpleasant. The Center itself was a re-purposed livestock exhibition facility, and internees were herded into small stalls originally designed for horses and livestock—not for human beings. 

Preparation of the facility by the military was a haphazard affair at best, which compounded the discomfort. In one infamous episode, the residents were forced to endure an infestation of flies attracted to the manure-laced dirt under the Center’s hastily-assembled plywood floor. 

Of course, life for Japanese Americans did not stop simply because it was uncontrollable. Babies continued to be born. Mangers, which were still present in several of the stalls, were used by some families as cribs in a painful parallel with the events of two thousand years ago that was not lost on the internees themselves: 

grandmother too
awaits the baby’s first cry all on edge
– Jonan 

As normal, there were the usual conflicts between parents and their teenagers. These tensions were two-sided, as the younger members of the Assembly Center were forced to adjust to the expectations of their more traditional parents in such close quarters: 

my mother says
things are not so simple – duty beckons 
– Jonan, quoting another resident 

There is even time for a game or two. Tennis matches and baseball games were popular: 

hot summer day
the pitcher wipes sweat off his face 
– Jonan 

Fears and Anxieties 

Uncertainties are often harder to bear than clearly defined hardships. And the Japanese Americans interned at the Assembly Center were faced with countless uncertainties. The greatest uncertainty, of course, was that they did not know when the war would be over or when they would be able to return to their homes. 

More immediately, they did not even know where they would be shipped off to for the remainder of the war. And for some who were considering repatriation to Japan, decisions like this were just too difficult to make: 

stay forever or return home
the day of decision never comes – just too much to bear 
– Roshyou 

Heightening all the internees’ already-pervasive anxiety, one of the military police on guard shot and killed one of their own cooks, mistaking him for a thief. This incident may very well have been the impetus for the below poem: 

my daughter –
I watch more closely now since it happened 
– Jonan, quoting another resident 

Friendships made in the Assembly Center might not even survive the next few weeks: 

accepting that
we may not meet again –
I squeeze your hand so tight 
– Choubou 

The accumulated anxieties caused some Japanese Americans to express their readiness even for worst-case scenarios: 

ten thousand miles I’ve come – to be with you, ready
to die with you 
– Shousui 


And some of the older residents began to despair that they would never see the light of freedom again: 

it doesn’t matter –
father has already written his final wishes 
– Mokugyo 

Reactions to Their Situation 

Internees found many different ways to cope with the conditions in which they found themselves. Some found distraction in everyday activities: 

now I know why
she snuggles with baby – troubles vanish 
–Jonan 

Some attempted to express their feelings with humorous irony: 

even autumn
comes on command here at the assembly
– Jonan 

While others resorted to more cutting and sarcastic commentary: 

their free movie such generosity escapes me 
– Jonan 

Some envied childhood when methods for coping with stress were more intuitive: 

for the toddler
security from a thumb — a peace I need 
– Jonan 

Some sought consolation in looking beyond the internment to a time when even the internment itself would yield memories: 

someday after –
Center name cards just might become nostalgic 
– Jonan 

It is quite common in senryu-kai for different personalities to take completely different approaches when considering a question. Two poets here offer different opinions on the question of why they were ordered to leave their homes in the first place. The first appears to more or less take the U.S. military’s stated reasons for incarceration, looking forward to exoneration: 

cleared of suspicion
for the sake of this country a new life for me 
– Jonan 

The second, not without good reason, takes a more cynical view of the entire affair. Unstated, but implicit in the poem, is the distinct possibility that ulterior motives were at work in the decision to round them up in internment camps: 

they never asked suspicious or not – just put us away 
– Sen Taro 

Resolution and Peace 

Several of the most uplifting poems in this manuscript illustrate the ways in which the Japanese Americans came to terms with their circumstances and achieved a certain peace and optimism: 

have come to this point – accepting what will be but still holding on to hope 
– Hikari 

In some cases, we even see signs of what might be termed an interior transformation in the face of great obstacles: 

peace overtakes my heart – allowing events to follow the course that was ordained 
– Goichi 

In Summary 

Many of these poems display cultural values that are often attributed to the Japanese people: perseverance, patient endurance, and doing what duty requires. But what also clearly stands out in the variety of individual expressions is a kaleidoscope of basic humanity. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all of us around the world. Our reactions to these new circumstances have become similar in many ways—we have good days and bad days, positive and not so positive feelings, and yet somehow, life continues. In that light, these poems represent a tribute to the human spirit in its near infinite adaptability and its willingness to find a way to nurture and sustain life, even during the worst of circumstances. 

*******************

Michael Freiling was born in San Francisco and earned his PhD in artificial intelligence at MIT. He studied poetry under David Ferry at Wellesley and was co-founder and contributor to the first issue of Rune, which eventually became MIT’s official literary magazine. In 1977, Michael was named a Luce Scholar with an appointment to Kyoto University, where he studied Japanese and produced a translation of the Hyaku Nin Isshu, a well-known anthology of Heian Period tanka. Michael returned to Japan in 2014 for the first time in 25 years. 

The translations in this essay are excerpted from a forthcoming book, which will be They Never Asked: WWII Senryu Poetry by Japanese Americans at the Portland Assembly Center, an anthology of WWII Japanese American senryu poetry written at the North Portland WCCA Assembly Center. It will include a wider selection of poems from the Assembly Center, as well as many notes on the historical background and translation details required for understanding some of the poems. (The authors wish to thank Ms. Satsuki Takikawa, who assisted in producing the initial translations of these poems. Mike would especially like to thank the late William Morlock, his high school teacher, who first brought this tragedy of the treatment of Japanese Americans to his attention.)

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