ABSTRACT
This chapter explores roles poetry played in creating a discourse of Japanese imperialism through both its inherited formal poetics of allusion and its highlighting of Nativist concerns as it aestheticized and naturalized Japanese colonial and imperial interests. Through the 1930s build-up to full-scale war with China to the end of the War, both traditional and modern Japanese poets routinely relied on images from classical poetry—extolling the emperor, aestheticizing self-sacrifice by young men falling in battle beautifully as the transitory cherry blossoms, and countless other images. This essay explores how this imperialist poetry and its depictions of China reflect an underlying ambivalence about a Japanese cultural identity. In analyzing the tortured thought that forms such ideologies of aggression, the example of Yamakawa Hiroshi (山川弘至 1916–1945) highlights a complicated genealogy of Nativism which was rooted in studies of poetry by Keichu (契沖 1640–1701), Kamo-no-Mabuchi (賀茂真淵 1697–1769), and Motoori Norinaga (本居宣長 1730–1801), themselves already developing in the Neo-Confucian context of Tokugawa Japan complicated relationships with Chinese thought and literature, moving toward desinicization, which forms an important underlying pattern in articulations of Japanese nationalism and recurs in the modern state as de-Westernization or “returning to Japan,” which is often, ironically, a return to Chinese Confucianism, as in the 1890s, to bolster the monarchical system.
