ABSTRACT
This chapter continues to document the poetry writing, publication and related activities of the Taiwan Tanka Association (Taiwan kadan 台灣歌壇), focusing on their responses to the Great Northeast Japan Disaster, hereafter referred to as 3.11. The group of well over 100 active members (with meetings in Taipei and Tainan) composed and collected poems in compassionate outreach to the victims of 3.11, and Japan in general, for their web page as well as for the July 2011 edition of the Association’s journal (entirely in Japanese): Taiwan kadan. In addition, many individual poets, who each contribute a sequence of 12 poems to the biannual journal, included more poems speaking to the 3.11 triple disaster. This chapter explores how the postcolonial “long-distance” (after Benedict Anderson) 1 residual sense of affinity for Japan and Japanese people within the Taiwanese poetry circle, which has close Japanese affiliations as well as members, exhibits what may be called long-distance postcolonial entanglement. The poems are shown both to assert a common field of experience and empathetic emotional response, building on shared associations within tanka diction as understood within the group and to provide hope and encouragement to victims of the natural disaster (earthquake and tsunami) and human-made disaster (the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns and ongoing contamination). While most poems to the victims in Japan avoid the rather embarrassing topic of the delicate ecological precipice to which the nuclear power village has led Japan, poems presented for the Association audience itself address the nuclear disaster in relation to how Taiwan is at risk with active nuclear power plants so close to Taipei and other populated regions.
