Yosano Akiko

Myōjō's editor, Tekkan Yosano, whom she later married, taught her tanka poetry, having met her on visits to Osaka and Sakai to deliver lectures and teach in workshops.Her first book, by far her best-known, brought a passionate individualism to traditional tanka poetry, unlike any other work of the late Meiji period.Midaregami not only expressed concepts and/or issues that pertain to women and were not normally voiced in such a public manner, but also created a new, revolutionary image of womanhood, as lively, free, sexual, and assertive, nothing at all like the conventional picture of the modest, demure young lady expected in Japan.[8] The American scholar Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase noted, "The visual representations of flesh, lips and breasts symbolize women’s sexuality".[11] Yosano helped to found what was originally a girls' school, the Bunka Gakuin (Institute of Culture), together with Nishimura Isaku, Kawasaki Natsu and others, and became its first dean and chief lecturer.[13] Yosano's poem Kimi Shinitamou koto nakare[14] (君死にたもうこと勿れ, Thou Shalt Not Die), addressed to her younger brother,[14] was published in Myōjō during the height of the Russo-Japanese War and was extremely controversial.[15] Made into a song, it was used as a mild form of anti-war protest,[14] as the number of Japanese casualties from the bloody Siege of Port Arthur became public.In September 1904, Yosano had learned that Japanese soldiers at Port Arthur were being used as "human bullets", being strapped with explosives and sent to blast holes through the Russian barbed wire entanglements in suicide missions.In Bushido, it was the highest honor for a man to die for the Emperor, and knowing of her brother's impulsive nature, Yosano was seized with the fear that he might volunteer to be a "human bullet", inspiring her to write a poem pleading with him to think of his widowed mother.[19] For calling the war with Russia senseless and stupid, Yosano made herself into Japan's most controversial poet, and the government attempted to ban her poem.[18] The Kimi was so unpopular that Yosano's house was stoned by angry people while she became involved in a rancorous debate with the journalist Ōmachi Keigetsu [ja] over the question of whether poets had the duty to support the war or not.[11] During the Taishō period, Yosano turned her attention to social commentary, with Hito oyobi Onna to shite (As a Human and as a Woman), Gekido no Naka o Iku (Going through Turbulent Times) and her autobiography Akarumi e (To the Light).[31] Yosano ended her poem by praising Bushido, declaring that the "purest" act a Japanese man could perform was to die for the Emperor in battle and urged the Kwantung Army forward onward in the conquest of Manchuria "through suffering a hundredfold" to "smash the sissified dreams of compromise".In 1942, in one of her last poems, Yosano praised her son who was serving as a lieutenant in the Imperial Navy, urging him to "fight bravely" for the Emperor in "this sacred war".