Site Ed. note: The following excerpts are from a brief biographical essay by Richard H. Minear. For a more comprehensive introduction to Kurihara's life and work, see Minear’s "Translator's Introduction" to Kurihara Sadako, Black Eggs (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1994), 1-38.
Kurihara Sadako was born in Hiroshima; she was in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945; and she has lived in Hiroshima ever since. She is a Hiroshima poet, one of the most important poets of the atomic bomb. Yet her poetry is "atomic bomb literature" only in part. It is also poetry of the Pacific War, the nuclear age, and postwar Japan.
Kurihara Sadako is also an activist and a leader of the antinuclear movement in Japan. She composes poems, reads her poems, writes essays, and edits "atomic bomb literature." She also acts: as recently as June 1992 she took part in the campaign against sending Japanese troops abroad under the auspices of the United Nations, and she participated in a sit-in protesting the words of an American delegate to a United Nations conference in Hiroshima. Indeed, her political activities may keep critics from realizing that she is one of postwar Japan's greatest poets.
There are other reasons for the fact that Kurihara the poet is relatively unknown in Japan today: she is a woman; she writes from strong political convictions; she lives in Hiroshima, not Tokyo; and she publishes her poems and essays in journals that are hardly mainstream. Paradoxically, the same factors may contribute to the strength of her poetry.
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Kurihara Sadako was born Doi Sadako in Hiroshima city in 1913, second daughter of a farm family. Her formal schooling took place between 1919, when she entered primary school, and 1930, when she graduated from girls' higher school. In terms of the curriculum of today's American schools, her education was perhaps the equivalent of four years of college, but the school itself--run by the prefecture--was hardly an elite institution. Doi Sadako composed her first poems in 1926, when she was thirteen. Her first published poem appeared in Hiroshima's newspaper, Chúgoku shinbun, in 1930, when she was seventeen.
At eighteen, Doi Sadako met Kurihara Tadaichi, the man with whom she would spend the next fifty years. Then twenty-five, Tadaichi came from the same village as Sadako, but he had already moved into a larger world. A middle school dropout, he had thrown himself into leftist politics after the Great Earthquake of 1923. In Tokyo he took part in anarchist meetings. This activity made him a marked man, and when he returned to Hiroshima from Tokyo at the end of the 1920s, he was under police surveillance. Tadaichi and Sadako ran away from Hiroshima, going by boat to Matsuyama on Shikoku. However, they soon ran out of money, and on their return to Hiroshima, the police picked her up and returned her to her family. Though they treated their daughter with kindness, her family would not countenance Tadaichi. But Sadako and Tadaichi soon got back together, and they lived in Osaka, Tokushima, and Matsuyama before economic hardship drove them back to Hiroshima.
Their first child was born in poverty in 1932, when Sadako was 19. That child, their only son, died of malnutrition in 1934. Daughters followed: Mariko in 1935 and Junko in 1939. In 1931 Kurihara's parents had cut off relations with her in protest against her marriage to Tadaichi, but relations resumed on the birth of her second daughter in 1939. Between 1937 and 1944, the Kuriharas ran a kitchen goods store in Hiroshima, but they shared a life on the home front that was never good and soon got worse. In 1944 wartime shortages meant no goods to sell, and Tadaichi and Sadako eventually closed the store.
During the war Sadako was on call to neighborhood mobilizations for work gangs and air-raid drills. On August 5, 1945, the day before the bomb, she worked clearing firebreaks in Tenjin-chō, close to ground zero. On August 6,1945, she was at home, 2.5 miles from ground zero. "The Day of the Atomic Bomb" speaks with riveting intensity of her experience that day, and many other poems deal with her experience of the aftermath of the bomb.
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After the war Kurihara Sadako involved herself in literary and political activities. Tadaichi ran for political office and was elected to Hiroshima's prefectural assembly in 1955, serving three terms (twelve years), and Sadako played an important role in many of his political activities. She also became increasingly involved in issues of national and international political import. She wrote poems in support of the movement against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (1960), poems attacking U.S. policy in Vietnam, and poems attacking nuclear power in Japan and around the world (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl). She took on Japanese politicians of the conservative mainstream, from mayors of Hiroshima to prime ministers to the emperor, and she fought against the resurgence of nationalism and the de facto Japanese national flag, the Hinomaru.
The major early survivor-writers of Hiroshima's atomic experience died much too early: Hara Tamiki, by suicide, in 1951; Tōge Sankichi in 1953; Ota Yoko in 1963; and Shoda Shinoe in 1965. That left Kurihara Sadako and a few others such as the poet Ohara Miyao (1905-92) and the critic Nagaoka Hiroyoshi (d. 1989) to carry on. Thirty-two years old when the bomb fell, Sadako was eighty-two when, in 1995, the world commemorated August 6, 1945 for the fiftieth time.
Particularly after 1965, Kurihara stressed Japan's role as victimizer in the Pacific War. The poem for which she is most famous today outside of Japan, "When We Say 'Hiroshima"' (May 1972), speaks eloquently on the score of Japan as victimizer. It is perhaps symbolic of the Japanese scene until very recently that Kurihara is known in Japan most widely not for this poem but for the relatively apolitical "Let Us Be Midwives!"
Kurihara's political engagement included reaching out to the international peace community in prose and poetry, defending atomic bomb literature and its writers against hostile critics, and drawing parallels between atomic bomb literature and the literature of the European holocaust. Political engagement also meant choices that left Kurihara at odds with former allies. For example, in 1961 the Soviet Union resumed nuclear testing. Japanese antinuclear groups, overwhelmingly leftist in orientation, had to decide whether to indict the Soviet Union in the same terms that they had used for the United States. Kurihara was a member of a group of women artists who decided to attack all nuclear testing. As Kurihara wrote in an essay of 1980: "Contamination of the environment and damage to the human body are the same no matter whether the country exploding the bomb is capitalist or socialist."' That decision left her an outcast. Yet she has continued to be an activist to this day, despite a serious traffic accident in 1994 that left her unable to walk.
In 1990 Kurihara was awarded the third Tanimoto Kiyoshi Prize. (Tanimoto was the Methodist minister who figures so prominently in John Hersey's Hiroshima.) Her acceptance speech on November 24th of that year was typical: little about herself, much about issues. In the second half of her speech she criticized those in Japan who would portray Japan as a victim but not victimizer:
The dropping of the atomic bomb, a crime against international law, is intolerable. But flatout denying historical fact-saying that there was no rape of Nanking, that the Chinese dreamed it up-and then on top of that bringing in America's dropping of the atomic bomb in order to absolve Japan of guilt as victimizer: that is to use Japan's hibakusha [atomic bomb victims] to advance one's argument through sheer force. The hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are mortified....
Until now, hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have gone abroad to argue the cruelty of atomic bombs and to plead for the abolition of nuclear weapons, but recently victims of the war have begun to come to Japan from Asia and the Pacific to testify to the large-scale atrocities that the Japanese army committed....
Hiroshima was once Fortress Hiroshima, and today it maintains throughout the city imposing cenotaphs and ruins in memory of emperors and their army; these monuments sing of holy war. Hiroshima itself was a victim, of course, but the true Hiroshima demands an acknowledgment of Japan's war guilt and a sensitivity to the aggression and murder Japan committed. Failure on these fronts raises questions about Japan's war guilt and about its militarization as a great power since. The true Hiroshima demands that there be a "dual awareness, of Japan as victim and Japan as victimizer."
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As Kurihara stated in 1985: "Literature is not dependent upon politics; it goes ahead of politics. In every age free literature stands in opposition to the status quo." Kurihara plays important editorial and political roles in preserving and defending the heritage of Hiroshima literature and poetry, but she is not primarily a literary critic. She is a poet, composer of some four hundred poems, and author of over one hundred essays. For Kurihara, to live is to write poetry. Kurihara's poems and essays have won her an audience, but in the most basic sense she writes for herself. Kurihara defended Hara Tamiki's right to be left in peace and Ōta Yōko's right to stop addressing the issues of the atomic bomb, but Kurihara's indomitable spirit would not let her forsake Hiroshima and the bomb. Nor could she be persuaded by Ōe Kenzaburō's Hiroshima Notes that suicide is a legitimate way out. Thus does Kurihara reveal her own toughness and devotion to life.
Kurihara's life is an act of faith in words, but words themselves are not the goal. As she writes in the Introduction to Kuroi tamago ("Black Eggs," 1946), poetry is not "the depiction of simple sensual beauty, self-complacent emotional pain, and dark melancholy-things not real mirrored in morbid sensibilities.” Poems are words, but the key element is the "unity of ideas" that must undergird the poems. That is, the beauty and force of poetry must be harnessed to ideas, and the ideas must suit the times. For Kurihara, the ideas are those of "a new humanism," and she listens intently for its footsteps. To be sure, this is Kurihara at her most didactic; usually she lets her poems themselves be the focus.
As Kurihara herself has written, there are striking parallels between Hiroshima literature and the literature of the European Holocaust. Both are literatures in extremis; both are literatures of witness. Here is a comment from 1985: "Atomic bomb poetry and prose began to be written by novelists, poets, and anonymous individuals who experienced firsthand being speechless, able only to stand dumb in the midst of mass death-written because as human beings they could not not speak of it."
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For the past dozen years I have studied the literature of Hiroshima. I began my study of Kurihara's poetry by translating the poems that dealt with the atomic bomb. But as I worked my way into the world of Kurihara's poetry, I was struck with its breadth and depth and beauty. I realized also how different it is from what the prevailing stereotypes lead us to expect. Further, I saw how far Kurihara's world is from the world of those on whom Japanese and American critics alike have focused their attention.
Kurihara lives in the nuclear age: "The human alienation of nukes and pollution is the very essence of the nuclear age; it is the end phase of a modern science and culture that are contemptuous of people and treat them- as objects." She strives to universalize the hibakusha experience and make of it a fundamental element of modern thought, to use it in the cause of human liberation from things nuclear. Thus, Hiroshima and Nagasaki become an indispensable part of today's ideas, part not of the past but of the future:
Hiroshima is by no means something that happened in the past. As the cruelest end point of Fortress Hiroshima, Hiroshima is a futurescape in which we see where militarism leads, where the arms race leads, their destination; it is humankind's greatest blind spot that serves notice to the world!
In conditions ranging from censorship to relative toleration, over not twenty-five years but more than fifty, with a persistence and application only the mural painters Maruki Iri (1901-96) and Maruki Toshi (1912-) can equal, Kurihara Sadako has kept the faith. In the process, she has produced a body of poetry that will surely stand as one of the major artistic testimonies to life in the nuclear age.