ABSTRACT
An author widely read and commented upon in the 1970s, Ishihara Yoshirō (1915–1977) found a readership that extended beyond that of contemporary poetry enthusiasts. 1 Even today, most anthologies of postwar poetry include one or two of his poems. The usual practice is to present short texts (like Position that we translate below) that are strongly marked by his experience in Siberian labour camps, where, as a young soldier in the imperial army mobilised at Harbin, the author spent eight years after having been made prisoner by the Soviet authorities at the time of the Japanese defeat. The presence of these texts seems to an extent to have been determined by the choice of editors who wished that the collective Japanese consciousness should pay homage, at least when people were interested in postwar poetry, to the unhappy witnesses of this aspect of its history, which otherwise was rarely alluded to. If the anthology gave him a few lines more, it would choose one of his last poems (like Ashikaga, see below), where the author extracts himself from the unhappy experiences of the camps into a fictitious and stylised universe that he placed in the distant Japanese past. But apart from these references, there is now little interest in his poetry, just as authors known as ‘postwar poets’ are not so much read today. 2
