ABSTRACT
Writing shortly after the end of World War II, Kuwabara criticizes haiku as a poetic form unsuited to giving expression to distinctly modern concerns about human nature and society. Kuwabara first demonstrates – by means of an informal survey involving a selection of haiku by both contemporary masters and unknowns – that objective standards of aesthetic value are lacking in modern haiku. He traces the reason for this artistic failing to a traditional reliance on maintaining the mystical authority of a leader over a tightly knit circle of devotees, resulting in an attitude of unprincipled aloofness. Unable to escape its feudal past and trapped between contradictory impulses toward elegance on the one hand and the mundane on the other, haiku seems fated to remain focused on producing superficial depictions of seasonal change, too frail and hidebound as an independent form to rival the great modern art of Europe. Kuwabara concludes that while haiku can therefore be enjoyed as an easily fabricated “second-class art” by those disconnected from the complexities of modern life, it has no place in Japan’s postwar educational curriculum because, unlike serious art, it fails to provide a useful basis for building the sort of “cultural nation” being promoted as an aspirational ideal in the wake of the war.
