In the next lesson, I'd like to take a look at the next generation, the generation of men and women after those who overthrew the Tokugawa government and formed the national polity at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration. These are the men and women who created what we've come to recognize as modern Japanese culture, modern Japanese literature, art, and so forth. One representative of this era, of this generation, is Shimazaki Tōson, who is a poet. One of the earliest Western-style poets in the Japanese language, and he's also a great novelist, who spent a lot of his time and a lot of his work looking back on his childhood. And, for example, at his father, his father's generation, and how people in his region raised themselves, educated themselves, and actually were able to sort of fulfill the promise of the restoration which he was born into. Anyway, one of his novels, which I've translated a very, very short passage of right here is called When the Cherries Ripen on the Branch. It's a novel in which he's looking back on the 1890s, from the late 1880s to the 1890s, a situation that the protagonist of the novel, whose name is Sutekichi, is walking around and thinking about, on the way to school and back, he's thinking about, again, when he was a child in the very early years of the Meiji regime, thinking about his uncle. This young man was raised by his uncle and his aunt, and he's remembering a certain time at the beginning of the Meiji period when his uncle changed. We assume he was of the samurai class and he was struggling very, very hard in the first decade of the Meiji era to study law and to become an early lawyer. He wasn't able to do this, however. He was unsuccessful and at one point decided since he needed to nurture and raise his family, that he would give up his dream of becoming a new Western-style lawyer and went into mercantile business, opened up a shop and became very successful for that. So he's trying to remember the point where his uncle changed as he's talking to himself as he strolls in the neighborhood. "It was just at this point that my uncle shaved off his handsome beard. It was then too that he stopped scribbling his reflections on the back of old photographs; He no longer kept his detailed diary, going on to become my familiar uncle with an apron tied to his waist." Having an apron tied to your waist means that you're a merchant, you're selling things. You're working very, very busily to support your family and so forth. He's remembering the so called sort of before and after moments of his uncle. He used to have a beard which is very common among young bureaucrats or sort of Western-styled intellectuals in the early Meiji period. He stopped that. He cut off his beard, but he also stopped scribbling on the backs of photographs. Shimazaki Tōson, when he wrote this novel, obviously had this image as a sort of sign or sort of icon of early Meiji intellectual, ambitious young men. What they would do, they would write their diaries in great detail, writing down all of their hopes and the way that they struggled and the things that they were trying to overcome in order to realize their dreams. But they also wrote on the backs of their photographs and so forth. So we can see that at least for the readers of this novel in the 19th century, the notion, the image of a man writing on the back of his photograph. And what would be written, what that meant, how that was part of the whole discourse of self-reflection, and perhaps, promoting oneself, and pushing oneself forward in society. We can see that there´s this connection there within the literary text. [COUGH] Again, this second generation or so of modern intellectuals, among them are the great novelist, intellectual, the great novelist, poet and painter Natsume Soseki. Natsume Soseki's very close friend, who was a poet, he did a great deal to modernize the traditional waka, a 31-syllable verse, into tanka, which we still call that poetic form today, and he also modernized traditional haikai, or hokku, into what we call haiku these days as well. Masaoka Shiki, a young man from the west of Japan, Matsuyama, came to study at the University of Tokyo as a young man. He traveled to the continent, he was a journalist, so to speak embedded with the imperial forces during the Sino-Japanese War in the 1890s. Unfortunately, contracted tuberculosis, returned to Japan, came back to Tokyo and for the last six years of his life, he passes away in 1902, becomes bed-ridden. He's basically taken care of by his mother and his sister and by all of his slightly younger or same-age disciples, a group, a very, very powerful group of young poets in Tokyo. Anyway, Masaoka Shiki, as I've said, is very, very famous for his treatises and his ability to promote young talent. [COUGH] He was also able to create a whole new area for traditional verse, being sort of re-contextualized into the modern era. Masaoka Shiki would have poetry groups. People would get together and read aloud or compose poems on the spot. Very often, this is a very old tradition in Japan. And especially once a year in December, December was the month when Yosa Buson passed away. And commemorate him and create new poems in the spirit of Yosa Buson, who is one of the traditional Edo period Haikai poets whom he really, really cherished. They would get together and after creating all of their poems, they would sort of line up in the garden or in other places, and have a photographer who was in the neighborhood, actually, come and take a commemorative photograph of the whole group. We have a couple of these photographs. In December 1900, however, Masaoka Shiki, his condition getting worse and worse with the months, was not able to participate in the photograph itself. So, the next day, he had the photographer who had his studio in the neighborhood. He had him come to his house and take a photograph of him alone so that he could be sort of placed or embedded into the photograph of everyone else afterwards. The photograph that I'm showing you right now is the original photograph, one of several which remain, I believe four original photographs themselves. Copies of the photographs of itself of Masoaka Shiki, as he was photographed on that day, the day after the poetry gathering that I'm talking about. We can see the photograph is on the sort of standard sort of paper, cardboard which was used by the photography studio right here in Negishi, in Tokyo where he lived. It's rather faded out. This photograph itself is valuable because it shows the entire shape, the whole original photograph itself. He was in such bad condition that he couldn't sit straight in the chair so he sat sideways and had his mother and his sister sort of hold him up underneath so that he could maintain a sitting pose in order to take a profile photograph like this. He had several photographs taken in fact, but this is the one that he chose and which remains for us. What I'm showing you right now are some galley proofs of the first edition of Masaoka Shiki's writings which were published shortly after he died in 1902. Galley proofs of the frontus piece which used this photograph of themselves. This is a much clearer edition of it. Let me just show you also the photograph itself of the book. This is the first, as I said, the first book of essays which were published right after it. This image of Masoaka Shiki is very, very important. The sort of seminal, modern poet of the late 19th century. He became very, very popular. He has lots of followers all over the country. And we can see it used in a lot of different ways. This is the cover of the work that I was just referring to. For example, here we have it again. This is in the early 20th century, a book, an anthology of Masoaka Shiki's writing together with the last verse, which he wrote out in his own hand shortly before he died. The Japanese throughout history, samurai warriors, but in peaceful times, merchants and farmers and all sorts of other people in the Meiji era, young students and literary figures like Masoaka Shiki, would attempt to leave their final testimony or their final words in poem. as close to possible from before their actual demise. So you'll see a lot of young Japanese men, sometimes women as well, who leave short poems in their own hand shortly before they pass away. And of course, in the case of warriors, of course, that's right before they go into battle, and often, they die in battle and the poem that they leave at home is what sort of stands in for them. Again, as a document to be left and handed down to their descendants. This image of Masoaka Shiki, one simple photograph which was taken in December 1900, again, it becomes disseminating, becomes the sort of central image of this. Now we can see here, that in fact there's an interesting sort of aspect the chair. The arm of the chair, the back of the chair, has been erased in this photograph to make it look like he's sitting in a Japanese style looking out, perhaps at the garden, meditating or something like that. In fact, he was in great pain. But anyway, they've sort of treated the photograph or edited it in that way. In the early 1950s, Masoaka Shiki was given his own stamp in Japan. This is a postal commemorative stamp of him. Again, it uses this photograph, turns it into a lithograph. Erases the chair and the other sort of elements of the actual occasion itself into a sort of rarefied, but also very, very sort of shadowed and sort of pensive-looking portrait of the great author.
