The next generation of writers and artists who, like Watanabe Kazan, were acutely concerned with the position, the geopolitical position of Japan, in the world at the time, we can also see a deepening, of the concern for immediacy in what they write about. One thing that's different from Watanabe Kazan and his colleagues in the 1820s to the 1840s is that the men and women who are writing in the 1850s and in the 1860s, right up through the troubles into Meiji Restoration, are actually active politically, a lot of these men and fewer, but definitely there's a presence of women as well, who are basically activists working for, but especially against, the bakufu. Trying to reframe, or if possible, undo a lot of the policies that the Tokugawa bakufu declared in the 1850s, for example, the opening up the country to trade with the West. The treaties which were formed between for example, the United States and Japan and other countries during this period. A lot of political activists were extremely concerned that that would lead to invasion or the subjugation of Japan, in the same way that we see in China in the years and decades after the Opium Wars. So people are very, very intellectuals, writers, artist were very concerned during this period with not just their own expression, ways of expressing their own spirit and yearnings and interests in life around them, but also in writing as resistance towards the sort of political reality around them, or in a way writing as rhetoric or persuasion to persuade the people around them to join them in fighting against the so-called feudal forces of the Tokugawa bakufu. One of the important young authors, a Chinese-mode poet, Kanshi-jin, we say in Japanese, his name is Rai Mikisaburō, who is basically spending most of his time in Kyoto, but he came to Edo, and was arrested there in 1859. He was part of a very broad-scale crackdown on political activists by the Tokugawa bakufu. So basically what Rai Mikisaburō and a lot of his contemporaries were doing, he wasn't an extremist himself but a lot of young samurai intellectual activists were actually performing acts of terror: attempting assassinations, trying to burn down official offices and so forth. In ways to undercut and if possible to overthrow finally the Tokugawa regime. Rai Mikisaburō was arrested, jailed, interrogated, and executed in 1859. The last poem that he wrote in prison, a Chinese quatre, sort of describes the moments and evening he spent in his cell. I've put up a slide here of a wood block impression of his own writing, which survived and which was published right after the Meiji Restoration. Let's take a look at it a little closer up so that we can see it. On the other side here, I've transcribed it into modern Japanese writing, and sort of half-translated it into modern Japanese. So if you're a Japanese reader, you can take a look at this and the part over here is probably legible to you. But most of our students here are not modern Japanese readers or writers, so I've translated it into English. This is what he has to say. "Faint chirps followed by more chirping, as if one were talking to a man in deep seclusion. All through the night as the crickets cry, I sit beside my lantern in an autumn rain." This is a very lyrical, simple, very, very short poem. It doesn't have very much action, certainly. And it doesn't really convey directly, in a sort of expository way, what's going on in his mind. This is actually the evening before he's executed and he must have felt very, very tense certainly sad, perhaps desperate about his own situation and the situation of Japan in general, all of the things that he believed in. But he leaves, as his final word and testimony, his own last poem, a poem describing nature and the sound of crickets crying in the rain in the autumn. This is a very, very lyrical, but at the same time, realistic, convincing, seeing the prison that he was in, it's in the middle of Edo. But there were [COUGH] lots of open spaces around. And we know from other documents, that in the autumn you could hear all sorts of different insects chirping and so forth, and we have other documents from prison, people who are writing that shows the same sort of situation that he was writing in. So, we know that this is based in his own experiences, not something that he was, sort of, imagining. The terms that are used, it's hard to convey this in English, perhaps, but faint chirps, for example, as I've translated the original Chinese words, are used to describe the chirping of crickets, but also, very often used to describe the sort of the faint crying of souls who have passed away, but died in frustration, unfulfilled and so forth. It's a very, very sort of interesting term. It's the cries from beyond of spirits who died unfulfilled or died with their will and their purpose in life cut in half and so forth. And so very, very loaded classical Chinese but also in Japan is so often very, very used. So he's sort of using the natural scene around him as a sort of trope or a metaphor perhaps connecting him with the long history of Chinese resistance and writing resistance. Men who had been captured fought against the new dynasty or the new regime and were imprisoned, perhaps tortured, tormented, and often executed, as well. So he sort of places himself very, very subtly in this lineage of men who are dying or being tormented or prosecuted for a purpose, for a very, very strong purpose. Each of the words in the terms that he uses has resonances or echoes with the classical sort of litany of Chinese and Japanese resistance literature, in a sense. So this poem it's an interesting poem in itself, and if we were to cut it away from its context we would have no idea that it's a poem of resistance, it's the poem, the last words of someone who's about, and who realizes that he's about to be executed as well. By the way, the slide that I'm showing right now is from this album, which I have in my hands right now, it's large, as you can see. This was published by Woodblock Print in 1869, the year after the Meiji Restoration. In other words, the activists like Mikisaburō, he passed away before all of these things happened, they were victorious and the Edo bakufu was toppled. We have a new government from the beginning of the Meiji period. So after the Meiji period these activists especially people like Rai Mikisaburō who were basically martyred to their cause, because of their cause. All of their writings, especially their last writings, the writings that they wrote on the run, perhaps, or in prison, were collected and anthologized, and this is one of the very earliest collections of their writings. [COUGH] I just want to show you what it actually looks like themselves. Each of the contributions in this, they're blown up very, very big, but they're transcribed accurately. In other words, they're reproductions of the real, sort of autographs, the real [COUGH] writings, the handwritten texts that these men, and sometimes women, actually produced in the the last days or weeks, or sometimes moments of their lives before they were either executed, or often took their own lives, in the last years of the fighting, leading up to the Meiji Restoration. The illustration of Rai Mikisaburō's work is right here. You can see, it's the same thing. So, these works, certainly not made as works of art, became anthologized right after the Meiji Restoration and basically sort of formed a sort of literary history of the last years leading up to this new era, which was modernization itself. There are no illustrations in this book but we can see it and we can look also by the size of it and how it looks that it's fascinating to look through, and can be appreciated in a lot of different ways, not simply for the meaning of the words that they were writing but also the shapes, the speed, the tone of the writing; the characters themselves as they were written by men and women in very dire circumstances. This is one of the ways that we can take a look at or try to understand how the movement of history itself was felt within the era itself, and how important the image, the fact that these men and women left their own words in their own hand. And these were reproduced and anthologized and shared by a lot of people in the decades to come.
