Unveiling Open Secrets of Hometown, War, and Mass Culture in Twentieth-Century Japanese Poetry

My dissertation, Unveiling Open Secrets of Hometown, War, and Mass Culture in Twentieth Century Japanese Lyric Poetry, explores the potential of lyric poetry, when used in conjunction with strategies of translation and rewriting, to unveil politically charged open secrets. Translation theorist André Lefèvre has said that translation can function as a kind of “alibi” that allows the translator to evade or redirect the pressures of censorship, to publish subversive material that might excite a more repressive reaction were it under the author’s name as original work. The poets treated in my dissertation all use various modes of translation, rewriting, or adaptation to create an alibi for themselves, a quietly resistant lyric voice forged from the fragments of other languages, other writers, and other media. Although modern lyric has often been portrayed as an elite art form removed from popular art forms, all the poets and artists discussed in my project adapt visual imagery and motifs from mass culture into lyric poetry in order to show the pervasiveness of these open secrets in a way that permeates the cultural environments of the elite and ordinary people alike.The first chapter explores Kitahara Hakushû’s (1885-1942) defamiliarizing portrayal of the nostalgic ideal of the hometown in his 1912 poetry collection Memories and other works. Hakushû uses visual devices drawn from Meiji cinema to reveal the projected, artificial quality of the notion of hometown. The second chapter investigates Ueda Bin’s (1874-1916) translations of Charles Baudelaire, which portray indirect ripples of the distant Russo-Japanese War in the latent violence of urban life in Tokyo. Chapter three discusses several 1930s lyric poets’ use of formal motifs drawn from mass media in their works of propagandistic nationalism during the Pacific War, and argues that these writers endued their works of nationalistic poetry with oblique criticism of wartime militarism. The last chapter of the dissertation investigates the legacy of these prewar and wartime strategies of the open secret in 1960s poetry and film of the Minamata environmentalist activist movement