Introduction. Court poetry and linked verse have a long history in Japan. Most of the celebrated poets of waka, thirty-one syllable poetry written in Japanese, have been men but not exclusively. Many court women produced excellent work in the 8th to 13th centuries and were represented in published anthologies. Women of leisure continued to write poems as talented amateurs, join local circles of fellow poets, or enjoy the occasional linked verse party in Japan’s medieval and early modern periods. They also enjoyed the new 17th century genre of haiku, or seventeen syllable poems. As in the case of fiction, women began to reach public acclaim again starting in the late Meiji period. Few poets, male or female, would achieve a wider following than Yosano Akiko ( 1878-1942), who made a sensational debut as a young woman with Tangled Hair, 1901, a collection of tanka poems. Between 1900 and 1945, other women tried their hand at publishing in free verse as well as in traditional Japanese formats. Popular novelist Hayashi Fumiko was almost as famous for her poetry as her prose.

People’s Poetry. The focus here for the Occupation and early postwar period is on notable women poets. However, just as it is important to explore Japanese women’s magazines and other sources for fiction by and about ordinary women, it is even more important to recall that poetry—both reading poetry and writing poetry—was a shared cultural practice among almost all modern Japanese. Poetry was valued by men, women, and children. It was written by the famous and the not so famous. In addition to Hayashi Fumiko, many of the women novelists featured on this site also wrote poetry; and many of the poets experimented with fiction. In defeat and occupation, countless poetry magazines, large and small, came and went, but many managed to flourish. Everywhere in Japan, ordinary people joined poetry groups, founded newsletters, and expressed a range of emotions in free verse or in the traditional forms of tanka or haiku. At the same time, Occupation censors and their Japanese assistants were very much on the alert for anything that smacked of ultranationalism or lingering militarism. The Gordon W. Prange Collection at the University of Maryland contains a huge amount of poetry which made it safely through the censorship channels but also a large number which did not. It is an unexamined treasure trove of Japanese emotions, attitudes, and sensibilities in the early postwar years. Since censorship was technically not a subject of public discussion, many Japanese must have wondered why their contributions went unpublished. To express sadness at the death of a son in battle or hope for a proper burial was, for a censor, sufficient cause for deletion as militaristic. To note foreign cigarettes, the black market, or Japanese women in the company of GIs, though obvious daily scenes in urban Japan, were poor choices for poems and likely to be caught and excised.

Notable Women Poets. It is difficult to identify an established or new woman poet who was well-known or active throughout the Occupation years. Yosano Akiko, highly acclaimed in her lifetime, had died in 1942. Other women poets had achieved respectable reputations before 1945, but not on her scale. Hiroshima poet Kurihara Sadako (one of the persons featured on this site) was at the time of the Occupation known only locally. For her, tanka and free verse were ways to voice anti-militarism and pacifism, in much the same way that A-bomb fiction was a forum for novelist Ota Y?ko and A-bomb murals for oil painter Akamatsu/Maruki Toshi. However, Kurihara ran into trouble in writing about the bomb in 1946 and was either censored by the Occupation or engaged in self-censorship in publishing her postwar anthology, Black Eggs. Another atomic bomb poet, Shoda Shinoe, a young woman who had survived Hiroshima, decided to publish her poems privately as an act of witness and to circulate them in secret. She would die soon from the effects of the blast.

As was the case with women novelists, women poets born in the late 1920s and early 1930s would begin to make reputations primarily in the years following the Occupation. Unfortunately, details in readily available biographies or critical essays are scarce with respect to their education and experience during the war and Occupation. Also, there is a tendency for translators to ignore the dates and contexts of the poetry they have selected or to select over and over the same poems. For students who are truly interested in early postwar Japanese women’s poetry, it will be necessary to embark on research in Japanese language materials. Nevertheless, we can begin to piece together the stories of several women poets born primarily in the period from 1926 to 1935, together with selected poems in translation. For the most part, the poets represented here wrote in free verse, some of it highly experimental.

Shiraishi Sachiko. The best known woman poet, both in Japan and overseas, is Shiraishi Sachiko, who is associated with highly sensual poetry of the sort that would or could not have been published before the war, even by Yosano Akiko. She was born in 1931 to a Japanese business family living in Vancouver, Canada, but taken back to Japan at a young age in 1938 just as Japanese militarism in China began turning into total war. We know just enough about her early life to argue that she is very much a child of the war and of Occupation reforms. In high school, 1947-1948, Shiraishi attracted the attention of avant garde poet Kitasono Katuo (his preferred romanization of his name), who was in the process of reviving his prewar magazine, Vous. With his backing, she privately published a small volume of poems in 1951. Soon after, she entered a prestigious private university, Waseda, one which would have been closed to her before the war. There, in her senior year, she met her future husband, Shinoda Masahiro, who later gained le fame as a New Wave filmmaker. Their careers clashed, and in the freer atmosphere of postwar Japan, they divorced after a decade or so. She became well-known in 1960s Tokyo haunts for reading experimental poetry to the sounds of American jazz and also for her beauty and stylish dress. A meeting with American poet Kenneth Rexroth in Tokyo, 1967, led to an early appearance in English translation and an invitation to the international writer’s program at Iowa University, 1972-73. Since then, she has been a favorite in many places of the world and won numerous prizes and awards, including a decoration from Emperor Akihito in 1997.

K?ra Rumiko. Other distinguished postwar women poets include K?ra Rumiko, who was born in Tokyo in 1932, and Tomioka Taeko, born in Osaka in 1935. K?ra graduated from high school and entered Keio University during the Occupation years. Her mother, K?ra Tomi, who earned a Ph.D. as an overseas student at Columbia University in the 1920s, was a professor at Japan Women’s College and successfully ran for a seat in the new Upper House of the Japanese Diet in 1947. Based on existing scholarship, we can only speculate as to the nature and extent of the mother’s influence on the daughter. In her future output as a poet and essayist, beginning with her first publications in 1958 and 1962, K?ra Rumiko would give voice to pacifism and maternalism. She would be especially eloquent on the pros and cons of making women’s literature into a separate category, as illustrated in her oral history on this site.

Tomioka Taeko is especially intriguing. She first won recognition in the 1950s and 1960s as a poet, but permanently abandoned verse for fiction by 1967. She is another of the women writers born in the early to mid 1930s who achieved considerable fame in the years following the end of the Occupation. It is important to remember that the 1950s, following the Occupation, was a volatile time in Japanese politics and economic development and in shaping literary and popular culture. Although born in Osaka to a lower class working family in 1935, Tomioka was introduced by her father and uncle to the popular arts associated with traditional puppet theater when still a young girl. As a student at Osaka Women’s College, she privately published a collection of poems called Reciprocal Courtesy and won an important prize. Soon, she was off to Tokyo. As was the case with many young women of her era, she next decided to spend some time overseas in the United States, 1964-1966, including an interlude in New York City with a male artist friend. For her, this was a lonely and not entirely enjoyable stay. Her poetry, as illustrated on this site, is highly sensual and gender bending in exploring sexual identity. Her fiction, beginning in 1971 with Facing the Hills They Stand, places her in the same cohort as the second literary quartet treated in the fiction theme on this site. A versatile writer, she has worked in many different genres, ranging from poetry and fiction to film and radio scripts, plays, and critical essays.

A Continuing Feast. Other women poets born in the prewar years have earned praise. Two feminist who joined forces in 1983 to create La Mer, a magazine and poetry circle for women, are Shinkawa Kazue (1929-2003) and Yoshihara Sachiko (1932-2002). Shinkawa, born near Tokyo in Ibaragi Prefecture and a graduate of a local high school, began publishing poetry in 1953. She was the first women to head the Modern Japan Poets Society, 1983-84. An English language translation in 1993 of Shinkawa’s collection, Not a Metaphor, fortunately includes excerpts from a diary she kept during the Occupation period and is one of the best sources we have for a young poet in the making. Yoshihara, born in Tokyo, first appeared in English translation in the early 1970s with the poem, “Air Raid.” Attracted to dance and theater, she turned to publishing poetry in 1964. She had been sent by her family to the outskirts of Tokyo in 1944 for protection against future raids but returned in 1945 after her father’s death just as the devastating B-29 fire bomb raids were beginning to ravage Tokyo and other major cities. A graduate of the University of Tokyo, where she became enthralled by theater and dance in the 1950s, she also learned to act. She added poetry to her accomplishments and began publishing her work in 1964. Well traveled in Asia and Europe, she was invited to participate in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1979.

Ishigaki Rin. Born in 1920, older than the above poets and recently deceased (2004), Ishigaki Rin came to acclaim in 1959 and after. She was born in Tokyo’s Asakusa or downtown section and worked in a bank from the age of fourteen, following elementary school, began working in a bank to help support her father and step-mother. She remained there until retirement in 1975. She was also active during that period in the bank labor union and published poems in the union’s newsletter. She was seventeen at the time of the Marco Polo Incident in 1937, the prelude to total war with China; and twenty-one when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. If her poetry, as critics have said, reflects war and occupation, then much more would be welcome in English translations. Among the poems of Ibaragi Noriko (b. 1926 in Osaka), graduate of a women’s pharmacy college in 1946, is one of great poignancy, “When My Beauty Was at its Best” (also translated as “When I Was Prettiest in My Life”). It is a lament for lost opportunities in love and marriage. She was seventeen when Japan embarked upon the Pacific War in 1941. Another poet of great renown in Japan is the late Tada Chimako (1930-2003), born in Fukuoka and a long-time resident of Kobe. A prolific poet, essayist, and translator of French theorists into Japanese, she is often given credit for her intellectual and philosophical themes. Though she has attracted increasing attention from English language translators, the circumstances of her life and the dates of publication of her poetry have so far been much neglected. A dateable example include "Fireworks" in 1956 and the “Universe of the Rose,” 1963. A recent short colection in English of her poetry is virtually clueless as to her life and the development of her work. A search for Okinawan women poets turned up the much admired Ichihara Chikako, born on Ikema Island, Okinawa, in 1951. Since Okinawa was occupied by the United States until 1972, Ichihara’s work is integral to this site, though she is much younger than our other poets. She grew up in Okinawa’s capital, Naha; moved to Tokyo at age nineteen in 1970; and began publishing poems in 1975. Thus far, although no resident Korean writers, including women, have been identified for the 1960s and after, but there are no full translations of their work.