Songs of the Righteous Spirit: “Men of High Purpose” and Their ...

Songs of the Righteous Spirit:“Men of High Purpose” and TheirChinese Poetry in Modern JapanMAT THEW FR ALEIGHBrandeis UniversityThe term “men of high purpose” (shishi 志 士 ) is most commonlyassociated with a diverse group of men active in a widerange of pro-imperial and nationalist causes in mid-nineteenth- centuryJapan.1 In a broader sense, the category of shishi embraces not onlymen of scholarly inclination, such as Fujita Tōko 藤 田 東 湖 , SakumaShōzan 佐 久 間 象 山 , and Yoshida Shōin 吉 田 松 陰 , but also the lesseru dite samurai militants who were involved in political assas sinations,attacks on foreigners, and full-fledged warfare from the 1850s throughthe 1870s. Before the Meiji Restoration, the targets of shishi activismincluded rival domains and the Tokugawa shogunate; after 1868, somedisaffected shishi identified a new enemy in the early Meiji oligarchy (agroup that was itself composed of many former shishi). Although theyI have presented portions of my work on this topic at the Annual Meeting of the Associationfor Asian Studies, Boston, March 27, 2007, as well as at colloquia at the University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles, and Brandeis University. On each occasion, I have benefited fromthe comments and questions of audience members. I would also like to thank in particularthe two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, whose detailed comments have beenimmensely helpful.1I use Thomas Huber’s translation of the term shishi as “men of high purpose”; hisarticle provides an excellent introduction to several major shishi actions in the 1860s. SeeThomas Huber, “Men of High Purpose: and the Politics of Direct Action, 1862–1864,” inConflict in Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Tradition, ed. Tetsuo Najita and VictorKoschmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 107–27.Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute hJAs 69.1 (2009): 109–71 109

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 111and across the social spectrum to an unprecedented extent, especiallyamong those who wished to be seen as educated members of society.3Thus, although kanshi had long served as a vehicle for poetic discourseon overtly political topics of the sort that were rarely addressed in thecourtly waka tradition, the early nineteenth century brought both thekanshi form and this sort of political expression within the reach of amuch broader portion of the population. Specifically it saw the creationof a category of individuals for whom such engagement was of paramountimportance.For many of the shishi activists who emerged in the mid-nineteenthcentury, the production of poetry in Chinese was co-extensive withtheir identity as earnest and upright men who were committed to theservice of the state. When composing kanshi, they could integrate themselvesinto a larger epistemic order: they used the language and rhetoricof great statesmen of the past to declare their intentions and oftendrew explicit analogies between themselves and the heroes of Chineseantiquity.4 Kanshi composition also played an important role in forgingconnections among the shishi. On one level, a shared interest in composingand exchanging poems created lateral bonds between individualshishi, strengthening their sense of camaraderie and common purpose.On another level, links between Japanese shishi became the focus ofverse composition itself, and the contents of shishi poetry became moreself-referential. Although the intertextuality of Japanese kanshi compositionvis-à-vis Chinese precedents is readily apparent and frequentlythe subject of scholarly attention, the intertextuality among Japanesekanshi, especially those of the early modern period, also deserves note.In this paper, I argue that from the late Edo period onward the productionof Chinese verse furnished the shishi with essential textual supportfor articulating their identity and intention. As the corpus of Japaneseshishi poetry grew, it enabled them to situate themselves withinan increasingly contemporaneous and localized discursive sphere. Thenaturalization of shishi poetry in Chinese thus happened not because3Saitō Mareshi 齋 藤 希 史 , Kanbunmyaku to kindai Nihon: mō hitotsu no kotoba no sekai漢 文 脈 と 近 代 日 本 : もう 一 つのことばの 世 界 (Nihon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai, 2007), pp.19–24.4On the formation of shi self-consciousness within East Asia, see Saitō Mareshi,“Kanji ken toshite no Higashi Ajia” 漢 字 圏 としての 東 アジア, Daikōkai 大 航 海 66 (April2008), pp. 77–85.

112 MATTHEW FRALEIGHthe poems ceased to be Chinese in linguistic form or orientation, butbecause the shishi were increasingly able to interpolate themselves intoa referential landscape that was grounded domestically. By examiningthe poems of the Japanese shishi, I shall show how kanshi could simultaneouslymaintain its status as poetry in Chinese and serve aims thatwere entirely Japanese.The Origins of the shishiThe shishi emerged in Japan as a significant force only after CommodoreMatthew Perry’s arrival in 1853, although scholars have retrospectivelyincluded some earlier figures in the category. In particular, theyoften cited three men who were active in the late eighteenth centuryas forerunners of the mid-nineteenth-century shishi: Hayashi Shihei 林子 平 (1738–1793), Takayama Hikokurō 高 山 彦 九 郎 (1747–1793), andGamō Kunpei 蒲 生 君 平 (1768–1813). Collectively known as the “ThreeGreat Gentlemen of the Kansei Era [1789–1801]” (Kansei no sankishi寛 政 の 三 奇 士 ), these three championed such issues as coastal defenseand imperial predominance. They composed poetry that was oftendidac tic in tone, as the following kanshi by Hayashi Shihei illustrates:海 外 萬 國 布 如 星覬 覦 切 奪 他 政 刑廟 堂 會 無 防 邊 策爲 説 海 防 濟 生 靈The myriad countries across the seas spread outlike stars;Always seeking to wrest the reins of rule awayfrom others.In our halls of state, none has offered plans toprotect the borders;And thus I urge naval defense to safeguard ourpeople.5The poetry of the “Three Great Gentlemen” shares key features withlater shishi poetry, such as a perception of foreign threats to Japanesesovereignty and a strong sense of national, often imperial, pride.These forerunners’ nationalistic concerns and their committed politicalactivism (Hayashi, for example, was placed under house arrest forhis fervent advocacy of coastal defense) resonated with those of the5Cited in Takano Tatsuyuki 高 野 辰 之 , Shishi bungaku 志 士 文 學 (Tōkyōdō, 1942),pp. 6–7; and Sakata Shin 坂 田 新 , ed., Shishi: Fujita Tōko, Sakuma Shōzan, Yoshida Shōin,Hashimoto Sanai, Saigō Takamori 志 士 : 藤 田 東 湖 ・ 佐 久 間 象 山 ・ 吉 田 松 陰 ・ 橋 本 左 内 ・西 郷 隆 盛 , Edo Kanshisen 江 戸 漢 詩 選 , vol. 4 (Iwanami Shoten, 1995), p. 324.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 113mid- nineteenth-century shishi, many of whom revered them and madereference to them in their poetry.Yet the term shishi (Ch. zhishi) itself has ancient roots; the wordoriginates in a line from the Confucian Lunyu (Analects):子 曰 : 志 士 仁 人 無 求 生 以 害 仁 、 有 殺 身 以 成 仁 .The Master said: “Gentlemen of high purpose and men of benevolencenever cling to life at the risk of harming their benevolence; but they maylose their lives in the cause of achieving benevolence.”6In his Lunyu jizhu 論 語 集 註 (Collected notes on the Analects), Zhu Xiattempted to clarify the meaning of the term shishi as it was used in thispassage from the Analects:A shishi is a gentleman who has a purpose ( 志 士 、 有 志 之 士 ). A man ofbenevolence is a man whose virtue is complete. If principle demands thathe die and yet he clings to life, he will not be at peace in his heart, for to doso would harm the virtue of his heart. If he dies when it is time for him todie, then his heart is at peace and his virtue is complete.7Because Song Neo-Confucianism had received strong endorsementfrom the shogunate during the Kansei Reforms, Zhu Xi’s interpretationwas most influential on nineteenth-century Japanese samurai. What isparticularly important about Zhu Xi’s explication is, first, his postulationthat there are times when it is appropriate for a man to lay downhis life, and, second, his assertion that the two defining characteristicsof the “gentleman of high purpose” are an ability to discern when thistime has come and a resolve to act accordingly.The connection between single-minded determination and layingone’s life on the line was underscored by the fact that the terms meaning“intention” or “purpose” (shi 志 ) and “death” (shi 死 ) have identicalJapanese pronunciations. In light of this coincidence, a few nineteenthcenturyshishi and various subsequent commentators have dryly suggestedthat the first shi in shishi could just as well be written 死 instead of志 , to yield a “gentleman resigned to die” (shishi 死 士 ).8 Although the6The quotation comes from the Analects, XV.9.7Zhu Xi, Lunyu jizhu, quoted in Lunyu duben 論 語 讀 本 , ed. Jiang Boqian 蔣 伯 潛(Taipei: Qiming Shuju, n.d.), p. 236.8Kumoi Tatsuo, for example, used the phrase shishi 死 士 in a kanshi; see ShimaokaAkira [also known as Shimaoka Shin] 嶋 岡 晨 , Shishitachi no uta 志 士 たちの 詩 〈うた〉(Kōdansha, 1979), pp. 94–95; Sakata Shin, Shishi, p. 322.

114 MATTHEW FRALEIGHhomophony may appear accidental, the connection between the twoshi was implicit in the Analects passage and made unambiguous by ZhuXi. Moreover, through a further connection that was fortuitously forgedin the translation process, the shishi became intimately associated withyet another shi: 詩 , indicating Chinese poetry—for the shishi were notonly “gentleman resigned to die,” but also gentlemen who were obligedto compose poetry commemorating the occasion.9 Although in standardusage the term shishi typically refers exclusively to men, this sort ofpoetic expression was not entirely a masculine enterprise, as the worksof waka poet Matsuo Taseko 松 尾 多 勢 子 (1811–1894) and kanshi poetYanagawa Kōran 梁 川 紅 蘭 (1804–1879) demonstrate.10 Notwithstandingsuch examples, shishi poetry—whether in Japanese or Chinese—is overwhelmingly masculine in tone and often strikingly homosocial.The first anthologies of shishi poetry began to appear in Japanesebookstores several years before the Meiji Restoration.11 Seishin itchū精 神 一 注 (Singularly focused spirits) was published in Kyoto in 1862,and over the next few years, a handful of small collections appeared.Then, in the final months of Keiō 4 (1868), a series titled Junnan zenshū殉 難 全 集 (Complete works of martyrdom) was inaugurated and continuedto appear in installments during the first two years of the Meijiera (1868–1869). With Junnan zenshū, anthologies of shishi poetryreached a new level of breadth and comprehensiveness. The first volume,which contained compositions by seventy-seven poets martyredin the fight against the shogunate, made it explicit that a defining themeof the genre was self-sacrifice; several works soon followed in a similarvein.12 A large number of poems in such collections were said to betheir authors’ valedictory compositions, written as they steeled themselvesto meet a certain death. As Tanikawa Keiichi has pointed out,9Of course, the link between shi (intention) and shi (poetry) was as old as the Book ofDocuments, in which the famous dictum “poetry articulates what is on the mind intently”(shi yan zhi 詩 言 志 ) appears; see Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought(Cambridge: Council of East Asian Studies Harvard University, 1992), pp. 26–29.10On Matsuo Taseko, see Anne Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: MatsuoTaseko and the Meiji Restoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). A selectionof kanshi by poet Yanagawa Kōran appears in Iritani Sensuke 入 谷 仙 介 , ed., Rai San’yō,Yanagawa Seigan 頼 山 陽 ・ 梁 川 星 巌 , Edo shijin senshū 江 戸 詩 人 選 集 , vol. 8 (IwanamiShoten, 1990).11Koizumi Tōzō 小 泉 苳 三 , Ishin shishi kin’ō shiika hyōshaku 維 新 志 士 勤 王 詩 歌 評 釈(Kyoto: Ritsumeikan Shuppanbu, 1938), pp. 325–32.12The series includes Junnan zensō 殉 難 前 草 , Junnan kōsō 殉 難 後 草 , Junnan isō 殉 難遺 草 , and Junnan zokusō 殉 難 續 草 . Some volumes include a separate section of poemswritten by women, often the wives of the martyred men.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 115even when the poems did not explicitly appear under a heading suchas “Jisei” 辭 世 (On leaving the world), their presence in anthologieslike the Junnan zenshū series facilitated a particular mode of readerlyengagement with the texts. In using the word “martyrdom” in theirtitles, in organizing compositions by poet’s year of death, or in focusingon the poet’s sacrifice in their prefaces, these anthologies implied apara digm by which readers might encounter and evaluate the poems.As a result, readers might well have been encouraged to interpret eachcomposition as the poet’s parting words and to seek out signs of thepoet’s undiminished fervor within its lines.13Valedictory poems were not all that the shishi wrote, but even theirnon-valedictory poems often reflect a preoccupation with death. Frequently,the shishi’s poem served as a means of affirming his “do-or-die”resolve. It was in this spirit that Takasugi Shinsaku 高 杉 晋 作 (1839–1867) composed the following poem in 1865, when he accompanied themen of his Kiheitai militia to a newly completed memorial for theirfallen comrades at Sakurayama:八 月 六 日 招 魂 場 祭 事 與 奇 兵 隊諸 士 謁 之 此 日 軍 裝 行 軍 如 出 軍 式On the sixth day of the eighth month,there was a service carried out at thememorial for the war dead. With severalmembers of the Kiheitai militia, I went to observe it.Today, we marched in our uniforms as thoughparticipating in a troop send-off.猛 烈 奇 兵 何 所 志要 將 一 死 報 邦 家可 欣 名 遂 功 成 後共 作 招 魂 場 上 花Bold and fierce are the militia soldiers—andwhat is their intention?Each one offers himself, repaying the nationwith his death.Delightful! When their fame is achieved andtheir merits are complete,They will be flowers adorning the memorial tothese fallen souls.1413See Tanikawa Keiichi 谷 川 恵 一 , “Shi no arika: shishitachi no shiika” 詩 のありか: 志士 たちの 詩 歌 , Bungaku 文 学 9.4 (1998): 51–55.14Takasugi Shinsaku zenshū 高 杉 晋 作 全 集 , ed. Hori Tetsusaburō 堀 哲 三 郎 (Shin JinbutsuŌraisha, 1974), 2:498. Tominari Hiroshi 冨 成 博 has raised questions about the

116 MATTHEW FRALEIGHThe first couplet of this poem makes it clear that the Kiheitai men hadno “intention” other than “death” in the service of the country. A majormeans for articulating such aims and achieving the fame that Takasugialludes to in the second couplet was the composition of poetry. Oneindex of the tight connection between the shishi and poetry, especiallyChinese poetry, is the fact that some of the poems selected for inclusionin the anthologies are the only known works by the poet to whomthey are attributed. This suggests that even those shishi who were notparticularly fond of composing poetry were motivated to prepare atleast one verse that might serve as testament to their resolve. They thusparticipated in a longstanding tradition of valedictory poetry by soldiers,monks, and haiku poets.15 But such cases also raise the questionwhether the said shishi was in fact the composer of the poem attributedto him. Some commentators have speculated, for example, that the followingpoem, which has been conventionally attributed to SakamotoRyōma, who wrote no other kanshi, is a forgery:皇 路 傾 危 事 々 難奸 臣 黠 虜 覆 乾 坤憂 邦 烈 士 後 先 歿自 愧 余 生 在 柴 門The imperial way declines into crisis, and affairsgrow difficult;Venal vassals and crafty foreign curs haveturned the world upside down.The noble men who lament their countryperish one after another;And I stand ashamed, living out my daysbehind a rustic gate.16The absence of evidence that the putative author regularly wrote Chinesepoetry has, in other words, prompted some scholars to wonder ifthe dead may be the beneficiary of posthumous poetic ventriloquismcarried out by anonymous others who felt a need to provide every shishiwith a shi. Whether Sakamoto Ryōma was the author of this poemor not, in the prevailing climate of opinion, the shi form was intimatelylinked to the shishi.chronological order assigned by the Zenshū editors; see his Takasugi Shinsaku: shi to shōgai高 杉 晋 作 : 詩 と 生 涯 (San’ichi Shobō, 1992), p. 167.15See Yoel Hoffmann, Japanese Death Poems (Rutland: Tuttle, 1986).16Quoted in Shimaoka, Shishitachi no uta, p. 101. Doi Haruo 土 居 晴 夫 , a historianwho has published extensively on Sakamoto Ryōma, concludes that all kanshi attributedto Ryōma are forgeries; see Sakamoto Ryōma zenshū 坂 本 龍 馬 全 集 , ed. Miyaji Saichirō宮 地 佐 一 郎 (1978; revised and enlarged edition, Kōfūsha Shuppan, 1980), p. 406.

The shishi and TheirChinese-Language PoetryJAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 117My focus here is on the Chinese poetry composed by the shishi, but itwould be erroneous to characterize kanshi as their only mode of expression.Several wrote both kanshi and tanka, and a much smaller numberexperimented with hokku and chōka.17 The kanshi by Takasugi Shinsakuon visiting the memorial at Sakurayama is a good example of suchlinguistic multiplicity, for he paired it with a tanka in a piece of calligraphyhe wrote on the same occasion:弔 らわる 人 に 入 るべき 身 なりしにとむらう 人 となるぞはづかしtomurawaruhito ni iru bekimi narishi nitomurau hito tonaru zo hazukashiIt should be our fateto join the ranksof the mourned;how shameful then,to be among the mourners.18As the appearance of this Japanese-language poem alongside Taka sugi’sChinese-language poem on the same piece of paper suggests, the intertextualitybetween these two domains of poetic practice was important.Some poets used the strengths of each form toward different ends:they developed narrative more extensively in the longer kanshi andexplored the subtleties of psychological description in the waka. Eventhose poets who composed predominantly in one language were oftenaware of works written in the other, as two poems, one a kanshi andthe other a tanka, concerning the virtues of personal integrity illustrate.The first, a well-known kanshi by the shishi Saigō Takamori, is:幾 歴 辛 酸 志 始 堅感 懷FeelingsHaving endured bitter toils, my intention isnow firm;17A good example of a valedictory hokku is the following by the Mito shishi YamakuniKihachirō 山 國 喜 八 郎 (also known as Hyōbu 兵 部 ; 1793–1865): “So now it’s time /One last battle / with the ghosts of the underworld” いざさらば 冥 土 の 鬼 とひといくさ(quoted in Takano, Shishi bungaku, p. 218).18A photograph of this pair of poetic compositions appears in Tominari, TakasugiShinsaku: shi to shōgai, p. 188.

118 MATTHEW FRALEIGH丈 夫 玉 碎 恥 甎 全我 家 遺 法 人 知 否不 爲 兒 孫 買 美 田A true man would be the shattered jewel,ashamed to be the intact tile.We have a tradition in our house—I wonder ifyou’ve heard?Do not buy fine rice paddies for yourdescendants.19The phrase contrasting a fine but shattered jewel (gyokusai) with anintact but unspectacular roof tile can be traced to an episode recordedin one of the Chinese dynastic histories, the Bei Qi shu 北 齊 書 (Bookof Northern Qi), which was completed in 636.20 The term gyokusai isbest known to us today for the military government’s use of it duringthe Paci fic War as a slogan advocating the most extreme forms of selfsacrificeby the Japanese populace.21 Yet it was probably first throughthe poetry of mid-nineteenth-century shishi that this term becamewidely known. Not only did Saigō use it in this kanshi, but in the worldof waka, Hirano Kuniomi 平 野 國 臣 (also known as Jirō 二 郎 ; 1828–1864) is credited with an 1862 tanka alluding to the same adage:碎 けても 玉 となる 身 はいさぎよし 瓦 とともに 世 にあらんよりkudaketemotama to naru mi waisagiyoshikawara to tomo niyo ni aran yoriTo be the jewel,though it may shatteris gallant;far more than living onin the world as a roof tile.2219Sakata, Shishi, pp. 315–16; Sakamoto, p. 49; see also Takano, Shishi bungaku, p. 177.20The episode is recorded in the biography of Yuan Jing’an 元 景 安 in the Bei Qi shu,41.544. In 550, Gao Yang seized the throne from the Eastern Wei and established himselfas Emperor Wenxuan of the new Northern Qi dynasty. At the time, many of thosewith the Yuan surname (that of the deposed Eastern Wei imperial house) were executed.As a strategy for surviving this purge, Yuan Jing’an proposed assuming the Gao surname.Jing’an’s brother Jinghao opposed such expedience: “A great man would rather be a jewelthough it shatter than a tile that remains intact!” 大 丈 夫 寧 可 玉 碎 、 不 能 瓦 全 . Jing haowas later executed. Jing’an assumed the surname Gao. The “jewel” may refer specificallyto a fine piece of jade.21On the wartime use of the image as a term to “encourage mass suicide when facedwith a hopeless situation,” see Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, andNationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2002), pp. 114–15, 133, 150.22This poem of Hirano Kuniomi appears in Takano, Shishi bungaku, p. 177. A nearlyidentical tanka is attributed to Maki Izumi 眞 木 和 泉 (1813–1864): “To fall as the jewel /

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 119Because few of Saigō’s kanshi are dated, it is impossible to determinewhether Hirano was thinking of Saigō, Saigō was thinking of Hirano,or both had in mind the original Chinese source; nonetheless the twopoems show that the worlds of kanshi and waka were interpenetratingand mutually influential.Composing Chinese shi poetry was widely practiced by shishi and intimatelyconnected to their construction of identity and self- expression.That the enterprise was considered de rigueur is ample evidence of hownaturalized shi composition had become by the mid-nineteenth century,even for lower-ranking Japanese samurai. Yet in stating that kanshihad become a naturalized form to the shishi, I do not mean to suggestthat this domesticating process had completely de-sinified the texts orrendered them into anything other than literary Chinese. The shishiwrote kanshi as literary Chinese, often introducing into them episodesand allusions drawn from other literary Chinese texts, and incorporatingtechnical features that show an impressive sensitivity, or at least anattentiveness, to linguistic features in the original Chinese. Even if thetexts were recited in the form of Sino-Japanese known as kundoku 訓 読 ,they were nevertheless written and circulated in literary Chinese andmust be understood as such.23It is important to distinguish this sort of domestication in the compositionsof the shishi from another domesticating process that hasbeen pursued by some later twentieth-century commentators on thisbody of Chinese-language texts. Two wide-ranging monographic surveysof shishi poetry have appeared in Japan in recent decades, bothwritten by scholars for a general audience. The titles of these two worksindicate that the distance separating the modern Japanese reading publicfrom the kanshi tradition has necessitated some editorial, or at leasttypographical, bridge-building. In his popular 1979 introduction tothough it shatters / is gallant; far more than living on / in the world as a roof tile” 碎 けても 玉 とちる 身 はいさぎよし 瓦 とともに 世 にあらんより (see Takano, Shishi bungaku, p.230).23In emphasizing the Chineseness of their kanshi, I do not mean to imply that literaryChinese was for the shishi a local or national language specific to a particular regionor ethnic group. Precisely because of its linguistic status as literary Chinese, the shishi sawtheir kanshibun works as universal. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, literaryChinese was becoming increasingly provincialized; on this transformation, see SaitōMareshi, Kanbunmyaku no kindai: Shinmatsu Meiji no bungakuken 漢 文 脈 の 近 代 – 清 末= 明 治 の 文 学 圏 (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2005), esp. Chapters 1 and 9.

120 MATTHEW FRALEIGHshishi literature, the poet and French literary scholar Shimaoka Akira(b. 1932) focused predominantly on their kanshi, yet he titled the bookShishitachi no uta, using the Chinese character shi but glossing it uta,the word typically used for Japanese-language poetry. As for the questionof why kanshi composition was so prevalent, Shimaoka observed:“It might be said that it was rather the kanshi expressive form that wasmore suited to the shishi’s emphasis on and exaggeration of his ferventemotions.”24 Although Shimaoka’s comments reveal his appreciation ofthe distinctive tonal features of the kanshi form, his decision to readthe character shi as uta calls into question the poems’ status as Chineseverse. A decade later, the eminent historian of the Meiji period NaramotoTatsuya 奈 良 本 辰 也 (1913–2001) gathered together a series ofbrief essays focused on the Chinese poetry of the shishi under the titleIshin no uta 維 新 の 詩 〈うた〉, similarly using the character shi but glossingit as uta.25 Like Shimaoka, Naramoto attributed the prevalence ofkanshi to what he claimed was the form’s greater capacity for accommodatingintense feelings and inflamed passions:In such times [of crisis and radical change] the shishi of the late Tokugawaperiod used kanshi, not uta, to express more fully the fiery blood of theirhearts. . . . More than uta, more than haiku, it was kanshi that was mostappro priate—for it was high-toned and had a dignified style (kakuchō gatakai). Ever since the uta of the Man’yōshū the Japanese people have beenexpressing their hearts with uta, doing so with true freedom and sophistication.But for the shishi of the late Tokugawa period, kanshi rather than utawas more fitting.26Beyond following Shimaoka’s lead in putting a Japanese gloss on thecharacter for Chinese poetry, Naramoto took a further step towardnaturalizing kanshi in his book by dispensing entirely with the originalliterary Chinese text and offering only a Sino-Japanese reading ofthe poems. We can understand both the unconventional orthographythat reads the character shi as uta and the decision to provide only aSino-Japanese gloss for the poems as attempts to domesticate kanshi:to ground them in Japanese poetic practice, to de-exoticize them byeliding traces of foreignness, and to render them familiar.24Shimaoka Akira, Shishitachi no uta, p. 32.25Naramoto Tatsuya, Ishin no uta (Kawai Shuppan, 1990).26Naramoto, Ishin no uta, pp. 4–5.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 121An even more egregious example of attempts by modern criticsto domesticate the kanshi of the shishi is the poet and literary scholarKageyama Masaharu 影 山 正 治 (1910–1979), who notes in his discussionof Saigō Takamori’s Chinese poetry:The Great Saigō was, in his essence, a nativist (kokugakuha) to the core, butin his conceptual process, he was rather sinological. We can see this if wesimply look at the fact that when he spoke of the “gods” (kami) he alwaysused the word “Heaven” (ten). Therefore, when he wished to express hispoetic soul, he did so with kanshi. But unless we are keenly aware of the factthat the Great Saigō’s kanshi are fundamentally composed with the heartof uta, we will be unable to accurately understand the Great Saigō and thebasis of his poetic practice.27The idea is reminiscent of well-known critic Karaki Junzō’s rather problematicnotion that, when classical Japanese poets composed kanshi,“they wrote using diacritic marks, adding Japanese inflections in theirhearts. Although its form may have been Chinese poetry, it was actuallyJapanese poetry.”28 Yet, any view of kanshibun composition that dismissesout of hand the primacy of the original literary Chinese text isprofoundly ahistorical. As Suzuki Naoji has painstakingly demonstratedin his survey of the history of Japanese kundoku practice, the method oftransforming literary Chinese texts into Sino-Japanese developed as itdid in order to enable the reader to recall and reconstruct the originalChinese text from the kundoku gloss. Especially in the early modernperiod, the immediate intelligibility of the kundoku gloss as Japanesewas often sacrificed so as to make it a more transparent means to apprehendthe placement and function of particles in the Chinese and thevarious meanings that a given character had in Chinese.2927Kageyama’s argument is quoted with approval in Yamaguchi Tadashi 山 口 正 , SaigōTakamori no shikon: yamato nishiki o kokoro ni zo 西 郷 隆 盛 の 詩 魂 : 大 和 にしきを 心 にぞ(Gin no Suzu sha, 1988), p. 24.28Thomas LaMarre, Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 39. The original quotation is from KarakiJunzō’s Nihonjin no kokoro no rekishi 日 本 人 の 心 の 歴 史 (Chikuma Shobō, 1976), 1:63.29Suzuki Naoji 鈴 木 直 治 , Chūgokugo to kanbun: kundoku no gensoku to kango no tokuchō中 国 語 と 漢 文 : 訓 読 の 原 則 と 漢 語 の 特 徴 (Kōseikan, 1975). My comment about theprimacy of the original Chinese text is true for orthodox shi composition; one exceptionto this would be “crazy Chinese poems” (kyōshi), a humorous genre that flourished in themid-Edo period, where wordplay in the Sino-Japanese reading (kundoku) often played animportant role.

122 MATTHEW FRALEIGHMany readers of these surveys by Shimaoka and Naramoto wereborn in the postwar era, when proficiency in literary Chinese played anever-dwindling role in the primary and secondary school curriculum.To a substantial portion of them, the all-kanji exterior of the kanshimay have seemed forbidding, and the texts themselves impenetrablewithout the additional mediation of a kundoku gloss. But, beyond suchvalid concerns about improving the texts’ accessibility, Shimaoka’s andNaramoto’s treatments reveal an ambivalence regarding the questionof whether texts written in Chinese by Japanese authors fully qualifyas Japanese literature. Such doubts are manifest even in works on theshishi by scholars active in the prewar period, whose readership wouldhave been more readily equipped to understand literary Chinese, albeitwith the aid of kundoku. In the introduction to his 1942 history of shishiliterature, for example, Takano Tatsuyuki felt obliged to defend hisview that Chinese compositions by shishi poets constituted a topicworthy of consideration, observing that, in spite of the popularity andemotional appeal of shishi poetry,literary historians have thus far regarded it as outside of their scope; at best,treatment has been limited to a passing reference to those shishi who werealso active as Japanese language poets. I regard the Chinese poetry andprose composed by our countrymen as national literature, and believe thatit must be considered; from this standpoint, I cannot turn a blind eye to it.30As Takano’s apologia suggests, the doubts about the legitimacy of Japanesekanshibun and its place in the canon are largely the product of adiscourse of “national literature,” which was consolidated in the latenineteenth century and produced a new awareness of kanshibun asforeign.Although Naramoto Tatsuya does not specifically explain his decisionto render the poems only in kundoku, his comments on SaigōTakamori’s poetry shed some light on what is at stake here. In his discussionof the kanshi on the shattering jewel, Naramoto incidentally notesthat “Ōkubo Toshimichi never left any such poems. And that is whatdistinguishes Saigō from Ōkubo.”31 As Charles Yates has discussed, thedefinitive characterological contrast that is said to exist between boy-30Takano, Shishi bungaku, p. 4.31Naramoto, Ishin no uta, p. 82.

124 MATTHEW FRALEIGHthe more familiar 瓦 ( J. ga; Ch. wa). Though the latter is the characterused in the Bei Qi shu passage to which Saigō alludes, he departs fromprecedent because a character having a level (ping 平 ) tone rather thanan oblique (ze 仄 ) tone is required. Saigō’s acquaintance with Chinesetonal regulations was impressive in its thoroughness, as is illustrated bythe following quatrain, where level tones are indicated by a transparentcircle ◦ and oblique tones by a solid circle ◦:◦◦◦◦◦◦◦蟋 蟀 聲 喧 草 露 繁◦◦◦◦◦◦◦殘 星 影 淡 照 頽 門◦◦◦◦◦◦◦小 窻 起 座 呼 兒 輩◦◦◦◦◦◦◦温 習 督 來 繙 魯 論秋 曉Autumn DawnThe crickets chirp noisily, the grasses growthick with dew;Pale light from the lingering stars shines on myrun-down gate.Rising from my seat beside the little window, Icall the boys in;Watching over as they review their lessons, Ibrowse the Confucian Analects.The final character, 論 , usually meaning “discussion” or “argument,”would seem at first to be an oblique tone (equivalent to lùn in modernMandarin); given the level tones in the rhyme characters endingthe first two lines, it is thus incorrectly placed. However, in exceptionalcases, most notably when this character refers to the Analects as it doeshere, the character has a level tone (equivalent to lún in modern Mandarin),and thus matches the rhyme of the poem, which fully conformsto the “oblique start” tone pattern for poems with level rhymes.33The foundation of education for these men was the Confuciancanon and selections from the dynastic histories, and the pleasantdomes tic scene depicted in this last poem by Saigō indicates the ordinariness that characterized induction into and participation in theworld of literary Chinese. Spurred by the industriousness of thecrickets outside, one generation supervises the inculcation of the next;in the process the boys are integrated not only into the human world of33These examples are gathered from the annotations compiled by Sakata Shin in Shishi,and are just two of the many instances where Saigō’s knowledge of tonal requirements(or at the very least his belief in the importance of maintaining them) is evident.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 125learning, but also into the natural order, as their voices raised in sodokurecitation come to mirror the chirping of the crickets. In light of thefact that learning the rudiments of Chinese versification was often astaple of these young men’s schooling, it is obvious that, for the shishi,such expres sion had already become domesticated, requiring no furtheredi torial intervention.34 Any apparent “foreignness” of the kanshipoetic form is mainly an artifact of a view of Japan’s literary history thatis based on “national literature”—a view that diminishes the importanceof literary expression in Chinese or resists accepting its status asliterary Chinese.Mark Ravina has cogently observed in his recent biographicalstudy of Saigō, “For Saigō, ancient Chinese history was not foreign: itwas the shared cultural heritage of all civilized men.”35 This sense ofa shared cultural heritage unquestionably informed the shishi compositionof Chinese verse, but that shared sense of culture was twofold:the shishi asserted a shared cultural continuity with “ancient Chinesehistory,” but they also incorporated domestic cultural heroes of bothantiquity and recent times into their constantly evolving poetic tradition,sometimes even by overwriting the Chinese past. This happenednot because kanshi were waka in disguise but because, as a literary form,kanshi provided the shishi with rhetorical modes, allusive techniques,and other poetic possibilities that shishi were able to exploit in a varietyof innovative ways. Moreover, as the body of Japanese shishi literaturein Chinese grew and as poems were copied, recited, and circulated,the referential world of their Chinese verse became as densely populatedby Japanese loci classici as by Chinese. Kanshi composition hadbecome a fully domesticated poetic enterprise for the late Tokugawashishi, but not in the way that these popular treatments of the genre byNaramoto, Shimaoka, and Kageyama would suggest.34For detail about the curriculum at one academy—the Zōshun’en 蔵 春 園 of TsunetōSeisō 恒 遠 醒 窓 , where Gesshō and other shishi studied—see Umihara Tōru 海 原 徹 ,Gesshō: jinkan itaru tokoro seizan ari 月 性 – 人 間 到 る 処 青 山 あり (Mineruva Shobō,2005), pp. 22–24.35Mark Ravina, The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigō Takamori (Hoboken:John Wiley and Sons, 2004), p. 35. Ravina further notes that Saigō’s “understanding of theworld was deeply rooted in the shared East Asian canon of the Chinese classics,” but thatthis did not necessarily translate to respect for contemporary Chinese; p. 105.

126 MATTHEW FRALEIGHThe Referential Fields of shishiChinese PoetryShishi thus domesticated the shi form without losing sight of its Chineseprovenance or sacrificing its linguistic status as literary Chinese.As such, kanshi served as a familiar and pliable form not just for elitescholars but even for a shishi poet such as Takasugi Shinsaku, whoseears were not so keenly attuned to the nuances of classical Chineseand whose scholarly aptitude was unextraordinary.36 Once the teenageTakasugi enrolled in the Meirinkan, the school for the sons ofHagi-domain samurai, it took him four years to earn a place in its dormitory.Even the sympathetic biographer Tominari Hiroshi, author ofthree monographs on Takasugi, recognizes this leisurely pace as evidencethat Takasugi was “by no stretch of the imagination an outstandingstudent.”37 Nevertheless, Takasugi Shinsaku’s complete worksinclude over three hundred Chinese poems written during the twentyeightyears of his brief life.38 Although Tominari points out occasionalgrammatical or rhythmic defects of Takasugi’s poems, he also notesthat their technical inadequacy reveals that they could not have beencomposed to fulfill academic expectations or assert social class distinctions.39Rather, the very roughness of Takasugi’s poems indicates that,for him, writing kanshi had other expressive purposes.For Takasugi, as for so many of the shishi poets, one of the resourcesthat kanshi composition provided was ready access to a gallery offamous figures from Chinese literature and history whom they coulddraw into their poetic worlds. Frequently Takasugi’s poetry refers tofamous paragons of moral probity and selfless fidelity. Late in 1860, for36Takasugi himself acknowledged that his technical skill for writing Chinese poemswas limited. When his uncle Ōnishi Kohayata sent him a long “old style poem” ( J. koshi;Ch. gushi) in 1861, for example, Takasugi recorded in his diary: “My poetic talents aremeager and I was unable to respond by matching his rhymes, so I sent him a seven characterquatrain instead” (quoted in Tominari, Takasugi Shinsaku: shi to shōgai, p. 50).37Tominari, Takasugi Shinsaku: shi to shōgai, pp. 10–11. Tominari’s other monographson Shinsaku include Takasugi Shinsaku (Shimonoseki: Chōshū Shinbunsha, 1979) andTakasugi Shinsaku no shōgai 高 杉 晋 作 の 生 涯 (Shin Jinbutsu Ōraisha, 1996; rev. ed., Yudachisha,2005).38The Zenshū actually contains 370 separately listed kanshi, but several of these aremerely alternate versions of the same poem, differing by only one or two characters.39Occasionally, Tominari also suggests the “rough-hewn” quality of Takasugi’s poemsas an index of his sincerity; see his Takasugi Shinsaku shi to shōgai, pp. 13–14, 16.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 127example, after he had tried and promptly abandoned the idea of studyingnavigation, Takasugi Shinsaku found himself back in Hagi, workingat the domain school and casting about for a future course in life. Heimagined himself to be a man whose talents and sheer earnestness wentunderappreciated. In the following quatrain, he alludes to two contrastingresponses to such a predicament:繁 文 爲 累 古 猶 今今 古 誰 能 識 道 深采 菊 采 薇 眞 的 意人 間 萬 事 只 斯 心偶 成Extemporaneous compositionIn dense thickets of text piled up from ancienttimes to the present,Who now, or then, has penetrated the depths ofthe Way?Plucking chrysanthemums or fiddleheadferns—herein lies the true meaning;Many are the things in this world, but all thatmatters is this.40The references in the third line are to famed eremites of Chinese antiquity.The phrase “plucking chrysanthemums” alludes to the reclusivepoet Tao Yuanming (365–427), who resigned his post as the magistrateof Pengze in 405, during the final years of the Eastern Jin, and declinedfurther official service.41 The second reference in this line is to thebrothers Bo Yi and Shu Qi, quasi-mythic figures of the remote past,who chose to starve themselves rather than serve a regime they believedcorrupt. When paired alongside Tao Yuanming’s positive embrace ofreclusion, the brothers’ radical self-abnegation appears para digmaticof an alternative solution to the problem of remaining true to one’sprinciples: that of extreme self-sacrifice.42 Takasugi’s poem thus shows40Takasugi Shinsaku zenshū, ed. Hori Tetsusaburō 堀 哲 三 郎 , p. 388.41The reference is to a famous couplet in the fifth of Tao Yuanming’s series “Yin jiuershi shou” 飲 酒 二 十 首 : “Picking chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge / I catch sightof the distant southern hills” 采 菊 東 籬 下 悠 然 見 南 山 ; see James Robert Hightower,trans., The Poetry of T‘ao Ch‘ien (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 130.42Alan Berkowitz calls Bo Yi and Shu Qi “extreme exemplars” of a type he terms the“paragon of extraordinary conduct”: those who shun service because of their fundamentalnature. Such figures, argues Berkowitz, thus stand in contrast to Confucian heroes,who tend to make ad hoc evaluations of the propriety of service at a given juncture; see hisPatterns of Disengagement: The Practice and Portrayal of Reclusion in Early Medieval China(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 39–44.

128 MATTHEW FRALEIGHhim struggling to define his own moral position, using the contrastingexamples of these Chinese paragons as fixed points in relation to whichhe can orient himself.Another classical figure to whom Takasugi frequently alluded wasQu Yuan (ca. 343–277 B.C.E.), a victim of slander who fell from favor yetremained loyal to the king who had banished him. Qu Yuan is known asthe author of poetry that trenchantly insisted upon his own purity, theinjustice of his exile, and his undiminished loyalty to the King of Chu.One of the best-known sequences in the Chu ci (Songs of the south) isthe encounter between Qu Yuan’s persona of “the sober old man” and afisherman who, representing the recluse, asks Qu Yuan why he remainsso adamantly invested in political affairs even after his unjust banishment.43Just as he had in the previous poem implicitly likened his ownlack of political agency to the two contrastive reclusive strategies of TaoYuanming on the one hand and Bo Yi and Shu Qi on the other, Takasugiin the following quatrain suggested a link between his own disaffection and that of Qu Yuan:篠 川 氏 來 談 分 韻 得 思 字Mr. Shinokawa came over to chat;we divided rhymes, and I got the character si壯 士 由 來 有 所 思所 思 遂 不 與 時 宜誰 知 夜 夜 孤 燈 下空 唱 醒 翁 漁 夫 辭Stalwart men have always had things on theirminds;And what is on their minds may not accordwith their times.Who knows that night upon night I sit alonebeneath my lamp,Vainly intoning the “Fisherman’s Discourse” ofthe “Sober Old Man.”44In invoking Qu Yuan, Takasugi was indeed partaking of a long tradition.As Laurence Schneider observes in his study of the Qu Yuanmyth, the convention of writing about Qu Yuan when one is in a “timeof per sonal misfortune” had been established two millennia earlier in43The term that I render “sober old man” (Ch. xingweng; J. seiō 醒 翁 ) alludes to QuYuan’s statement to the fisherman: “All the world is muddy and I alone am clear . . . allmen are drunk and I alone am sober”; see “The Fisherman,” trans. David Hawkes, TheSongs of the South: An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems by Qu Yuan and Others (Harmondsworth:Penguin Classics, 1985), pp. 206–7.44Takasugi Shinsaku zenshū, ed. Hori Tetsusaburō 堀 哲 三 郎 , pp. 393–94.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 129the poetry of Jia Yi (201–169 B.C.E.).45 As in these examples, the shishimight make reference to a particular historical episode or to reading aspecific literary work, letting the allusion indirectly point to a parallelwith the poet’s persona or circumstance.Sometimes the shishi might draw the analogy more directly, as inthe following poem from 1864, written when Takasugi was imprisonedfor absconding without permission from his domain:囚 中 作Composed while imprisoned君 不 見 死 爲 忠 鬼 Behold! Minister Sugawara, who菅 相 公became a righteous ghost when he died;靈 魂 尚 在 天 拜 峰 Still today, his spirit haunts Mount Tenpai.又 不 見 懷 石 投 流 Or behold! Qu Ping of Chu, stones in his楚 屈 平bosom, he jumped in the water;至 今 人 悲 汨 羅 江 Even now, people mourn him at the MiluoRiver.5 自 古 讒 閒 害 忠 節 From ancient times, slander has harmed loyalmen of integrity;忠 臣 思 君 不 懷 躬 A loyal vassal thinks of his lord without a carefor himself.我 亦 貶 謫 幽 囚 士 I too have been slandered and exiled: a man inprison now,憶 起 二 公 涙 沾 胸 I recall these two men, and tears wet my breast.10 休 恨 空 爲 讒 閒 死 Do not begrudge vainly dying from slander;自 有 後 世 議 論 公 For the verdict of posterity shall be just.46Takasugi had left his domain abruptly, hoping to reconnoiter withother shishi who were familiar with recent conditions in the capital andwho, he hoped, would be able to advise the domain on its future courseof action. Convinced that the time to act had arrived, he left behindonly a vague statement of his plans before racing to the capital. Thedomain authorities, however, were unimpressed with the bold initiative,regard ing it instead as a rash dereliction of duty.47 Being detained45Laurence Schneider, A Madman of Ch’u: The Chinese Myth of Loyalty and Dissent(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 23.46Takasugi Shinsaku zenshū, ed. Hori Tetsusaburō 堀 哲 三 郎 , p. 449.47Ichisaka Tarō 一 坂 太 郎 , Takasugi Shinsaku 高 杉 晋 作 (Bungei Shunjū, 2002), pp.147–50.

130 MATTHEW FRALEIGHfor his unauthorized departure from the domain proved conducive toTaka sugi’s self-conception as the victim of myopic officials who failedto appre ciate his pure valor. In his opening couplet, Takasugi intro ducesthe figure of Sugawara no Michizane (845–903), the Japanese paragonof the upright official who is unjustly exiled, specifically linking Sugawarato Mount Tenpai in Dazaifu, the region in Kyushu to which hewas banished in 901 and which is conventionally invoked in Japanesedramatic and pictorial representations of Michizane as the site of hisdeification. The couplet that follows rhetorically parallels this one withits reference to the Chinese exemplar Qu Ping (that is, Qu Yuan) invery similar terms: focusing on the geographic site at which his mortallife ended and toward which his present-day propitiation is directed. Inhis kanshi, Takasugi adopted this technique of invocation to embraceallusions not only to Chinese paragons but also to Japanese ones, positioningthem side by side on a single referential plane.Moreover, Takasugi drew these Japanese models both from antiquityand from among his own contemporaries. In 1860, he embarkedupon a tour of the Kantō area to broaden his knowledge and develophis abilities in scholarly and martial arts alike. In addition to engagingin duels with practitioners of various schools of swordplay, one ofthe specific purposes he mentioned in his diary was the exchange ofpoetry with scholars such as Katō Yūrin 加 藤 有 隣 , Yokoi Shōnan 横 井小 楠 , and Sakuma Shōzan, the teacher of his mentor Yoshida Shōin.48In Kasama (modern-day Ibaraki), he presented the following poem toYūrin:書 劍 飄 然 遊 天 涯半 肩 行 李 一 草 鞋壯 士 不 期 墳 墓 地訪 笠 間 加 藤 先 生 、 席 上 匆 卒 □□ [perhaps 賦 志 ]I visited Mr. Katō in Kasama and atour gathering hurriedly . . .[wrote this poem to express my intention]Drifting along with books and sword, I travelto horizon’s end;Luggage hoisted low on my shoulders andgrass sandals on my feet.A great man need make no plans for hisgravesite;48Tominari, Takasugi Shinsaku: shi to shōgai, p. 30.

132 MATTHEW FRALEIGHof others’ personal kanshi collections both were important in creatingand perpetuating a sense of shared identity among the shishi. Just ashe composed poems as an act of remembrance to his teacher YoshidaShōin on the first anniversary of his death, so too did he use the kanshiform to solicit the instruction of other men.50 Kanshi compositionwas intimately linked to the formation, clarification, and expression ofpersonal intention. At the same time, it served as a shared practice thatmediated the relations among contemporaneous shishi. Moreover, thispoem demonstrates how kanshi could forge strong bonds beyond thestrictures of direct contact, for even the poetry of other shishi, whomreaders encountered as disembodied texts, played a role in determiningthe frame through which shishi would express their intentions. Inthe second couplet of this poem, Takasugi makes reference to perhapsone of the best-known shishi poems, a quatrain written in 1843 by theChōshū nativist monk Gesshō 月 性 (1817–1858):51男 兒 立 志 出 郷 関學 若 無 成 不 復 還埋 骨 何 期 墳 墓 地人 間 到 處 有 青 山將 東 遊 題 壁As I am about to leave for the east,I inscribed this poem on the wallOne born a man stakes out his ambitions andleaves his hometown behind;Unless his studies are complete, he shall notreturn.Why should he hope to have his bones buriedin a graveyard?In this world, wherever he goes, there will beblue mountains.5250Takasugi Shinsaku zenshū, ed. Hori Tetsusaburō, p. 387. The poem is titled “Senshishōshōbi no saku” 先 師 小 祥 日 作 , dated 10.27.1860, and is signed as the “tearful lament ofhis disciple, Nanju Takasugi.”51There were actually two famous Buddhist monks named Gesshō in late TokugawaJapan; both were active in nativist causes and both died in 1858. The Gesshō who wrotethis line was from Chōshū. The other Gesshō ( 月 照 ), from Kyoto, committed suicidewith Saigō Takamori, though the latter was rescued.52Misaka Keiji 三 坂 圭 治 and Gesshō Kenshōkai 月 性 顕 彰 会 , eds., Ishin no senkaku:Gesshō no kenkyū 維 新 の 先 覚 月 性 の 研 究 (Tokuyama: Matsuno Shoten, 1979), p. 396. Inthis volume, Yoshitomi Haruichi gives other versions of the second line, such as “Unlesshis studies are complete, he shall not return even if he dies” 學 若 不 成 死 不 還 ; as heargues, however, the tonal requirements make the version quoted above more likely.Some have also asserted that the poem is not Gesshō’s own, but one that he corrected forMuramatsu Bunshō 村 松 文 祥 .

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 133Gesshō’s famous poem, especially its fourth line, became widely knownand in later years even kanshi poets who did not identify with the shishicame to allude to it.53 For Takasugi, poetry composition itself wasa means to draw close to heroic figures such as Gesshō, who was oneof the most highly skilled shishi poets, and his citation of Gesshō’s lineshows how the examples and poetry of Japanese figures, even contemporaries,had begun to be the objects of homage in Chinese verse.Alongside the process by which shishi mutually framed their ambitionsin correlation with heroes of Chinese antiquity, the Chinese poetic discourseof the shishi had begun to develop its own self-referential status.The shishi and Wen Tianxiang’s“Song of the Righteous Spirit”This increasingly domesticated intertextuality is especially evident ina series of interrelated shishi poems inspired by the Song loyalist WenTianxiang 文 天 祥 (1236–1283). On the one hand, these poems, writtenby various Japanese individuals over the course of many decades,show the enduring importance of a noted Chinese historical precedentin Japan. On the other hand, they show how a single Chinese text wasrepeatedly reconfigured and redeployed and how its referential pantheonwas repopulated with Japanese figures. The diverse ways in whichthe shishi domesticated Wen Tianxiang show how even shishi poemsthat advertised the Chinese provenance of their frame, structure, andrhyme could nevertheless be fully localized and self- referential withinthe context of shishi literature.Wen Tianxiang remains a celebrated cultural hero in China evento this day for his refusal to submit to the Mongols when the SouthernSong Dynasty collapsed. When Hangzhou fell in 1276, he was one of thefew to resist, and it became his responsibility as prime minister to negotiatewith the Mongols. After multiple failures to ally with other Songloyalists, he was taken prisoner in 1278. In spite of pressure from hiscaptors to write appeals urging his fellow Song loyalists to surrender, he53Narushima Ryūhoku 成 島 柳 北 (1837–1884) nearly quotes the line verbatim in thefirst of a series of quatrains he composed during the tumultuous summer of 1868 titled“Boshin gogatsu uru tokoro no zasshi” 戊 辰 五 月 所 得 雜 詩 ; see Ryūhoku shishō 柳 北 詩 鈔(Hakubunkan, 1894), 2:23.

134 MATTHEW FRALEIGHstubbornly refused. Even after being transported to Northern China inthe following year, he would not submit. To document his ordeal, WenTianxiang had been keeping two extensive poetic journals. The secondof these contains what is perhaps his most famous work, a sixty-linepoem he wrote in 1281 called “Zhengqige” 正 氣 歌 (Song of the righteousspirit). In the preface he reveals how he was able to overcome hisbleak situation by faith in the “righteous spirit.”Wen Tianxiang’s patriotic actions and his poetry of resistance hadbeen popularized in Japan by the scholar Asami Keisai 淺 見 綗 齋 (1652–1711), whose Seiken igen (Testaments of selfless sacrifices) included adetailed biography of Wen Tianxiang, as well as a thorough annotationand commentary on his “Song of the Righteous Spirit.” Writtenas an ethical guidebook, Keisai’s text comprised eight chapters, eachof which extolled the valorous deeds and resolute loyalty of an individualChinese figure from pre-Qin times down through the Ming,and was widely used as a textbook.54 Wen Tianxiang was an importantinfluence on many Japanese shishi, who referred in their own compositionsto his inspiring example. Frequently such literary homage tookthe form of an implicit comparison between the Japanese poet’s confinementand Wen Tianxiang’s own tribulations, as in the followingexample from Taka sugi Shinsaku, another poem that he wrote whileincarcerated:囚 中 作Composed in prison囚 室 無 苦 爲 In this prison cell, I do not want for things to do;披 書 養 良 知 I can open a book and cultivate my “goodknowledge.”虛 心 而 平 氣 I empty my mind and relax my spirits;書 中 自 有 師 The book itself becomes my teacher.5 讀 至 南 宋 滅 When I read to where the Southern Song collapsed,獨 悲 天 祥 節 In my solitude I was struck by Tianxiang’s integrity.臨 死 衣 帶 銘 When he faced his death, his sash held a document54Asami Keisai later wrote a series of lectures on the text that are known as Seikenigen kōgi 靖 獻 遺 言 講 義 , which covered, in addition to Wen Tianxiang, Qu Yuan, ZhugeLiang, Tao Qian, Yan Zhenqing, Xie Fangde, Liu Yin, and Fang Xiaoru. The work waspopular among and important to the shishi, inspiring, for example, Yoshida Shōin’s 1854series of “Eight Historical Poems”; see Yamaguchi-ken Kyōiku Iinkai 山 口 縣 教 育 會 , ed.,Yoshida Shōin zenshū 吉 田 松 陰 全 集 (Iwanami Shoten, 1934–36), 7:43–52.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 135使 人 爲 泣 血 That made people shed tears of blood.爾 來 天 下 士 Recently, all the men of the realm10 貪 利 不 成 仁 Are greedy for profit and do not achievebenevolence.嗟 我 雖 愚 鈍 Alas! Though I be foolish and dull,要 學 天 祥 心 I seek to learn from Tianxiang’s mind.55It is quite likely that the book in which Takasugi read of Wen Tianxiangwas Asami Keisai’s Seiken igen, for the title of its section on WenTian xiang also calls attention to the “Document in the Sash”: the martyr’sfinal writings that he hid in his sash and that were discoveredpost humously. Although Takasugi speaks in line 4 of the book itselfintroducing figures who would serve as models for him during hisincarceration, in another poem, written about the same time, he noteshow he had been instructed in the example of Wen Tianxiang by histeacher Yoshida Shōin. When Takasugi found himself imprisoned, hewas brought to remember the words of his mentor:偸 生 決 死 任 時 宜不 患 世 人 論 是 非嘗 在 先 師 寄 我 語回 頭 追 思 涙 空 垂囚 中 作Composed in prisonWhether I cheat death or prepare to die, I leaveup to time;I do not concern myself with society’s debatesover right and wrong.These are words my former teacher oncebestowed upon me;And as I reflect back on them, tears pour downin vain.56Takasugi explained the content of Shōin’s lesson in a note, dated 04.11of Genji 1 (1864), that he appended to the poem: “I recall that when myteacher was in prison in Edo, he sent me a letter stating: ‘You shouldplace the matter of death and life outside your immediate focus. Eventhough you may possess a high level of integrity like [Wen] Tianxiang,if you can cheat death [lit. “steal life”], then cheat death.’” In their referencesto Wen Tianxiang, shishi focused in particular on his equanimityin captivity, his willingness to die if that should be his fate, his55Takasugi Shinsaku zenshū, ed. Hori Tetsusaburō 堀 哲 三 郎 , p. 461.56Takasugi Shinsaku zenshū, p. 435.

136 MATTHEW FRALEIGHmaintenance of personal integrity in the face of fierce pressure to submit,and the resilient spirit that enabled him to write stirring works inspite of humiliating deprivation.57The example of Wen Tianxiang thus suggested itself naturally tothose shishi who were imprisoned for their political loyalties in nineteenth-centuryJapan. In the following quatrain, Kojima Kyōsuke ( 児島 強 介 , 1837–1862), another incarcerated shishi, directly addressed thequestion of how Wen Tianxiang’s ordeal spoke to him, attributing especialimportance to the Song loyalist’s “Song of the Righteous Spirit”:愛 讀 文 山 正 氣 歌平 生 所 養 顧 如 何從 容 唯 待 就 刑 日含 笑 九 原 知 己 多獄 中 作Composition in PrisonI have loved to read Wen Tianxiang’s “Song ofthe Righteous Spirit”;Reflecting back now, I wonder what it hastaught me.To be composed and just wait for the day ofexecution;Smiling to myself that in the underworld manycomrades await.58Similarly, in one of the poems he composed while in prison, the wellknownshishi martyr Hashimoto Sanai 橋 本 左 内 (1834–1859) invokedWen Tianxiang’s “Song” not just as a source of solace but as a statementof defiance:獄 中 作 三 首 其 二Composed while in prison (the second of three)二 十 六 年 如 夢 過顧 思 平 昔 感 濨 多These twenty-six years have passed like adream;Reflecting on the past, my feelings grow all themore numerous.57William Hung attests to the lasting fame of Wen Tianxiang’s example in Japan.When he was being imprisoned by the Japanese army in Peking in 1941–1942 and one ofhis fellow inmates was severely beaten by the guards for cursing the Japanese Emperor,Hung asked why the guards did not kill the inmate; they replied, “Oh, no . . . . That wouldbe killing another Wen Tianxiang”; see his foreword in William Brown, Wen T’ien-hsiang:a Biographical Study of a Sung Patriot (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center Publications,1986), p. xi.58Quoted in Koizumi Tōzō, Ishin shishi kin’ō shiika hyōshaku, p. 106.

天 祥 大 節 嘗 心 折土 室 猶 吟 正 氣 歌JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 137Tianxiang’s great integrity has always stirred myheart;In this earthen cell, I sing out “Song of theRighteous Spirit.”59Hashimoto had been incarcerated in 1859 as part of the Ansei Purge,a crackdown on shishi activities that had been launched the previousyear by Great Councilor Ii Naosuke 井 伊 直 弼 (1815–1860), the Hikonedaimyo who had concluded a treaty with Townsend Harris withoutimperial sanction. Yet unlike many of the activists targeted by Ii’s crackdown,Hashimoto strongly supported open relations with the West.However, because he advocated a position contrary to Ii’s on the questionof shogunal succession, he was arrested, accused of impropermeddling, and promptly executed.60 Familiarity with Keisai’s Seikenigen may have been the inspiration that led Hashimoto to invoke WenTianxiang and “The Song of the Righteous Spirit” in his own poetry,but it is also possible that, like Takasugi, Hashimoto was particularlyinspired to write about Wen Tianxiang through contact with othershishi.61Beyond the simple invocations of, and references to, jailhouse recitationsof Wen Tianxiang’s “Song” in the poems by Kojima and Hashimoto,some Japanese shishi pursued an entirely different sort of homageby composing their own versions. In 1859, one of Hashi moto Sanai’sfellow inmates in Edo’s Denmachō prison, Yoshida Shōin, employedprecisely this literary tactic, producing a version that would earn59Sakata, Shishi, pp. 252–56.60Born to a father who served as physician for the domain of Fukui, Hashimoto raninto trouble with the shogunal authorities over the question of who should succeed thethirteenth shogun, Tokugawa Iesada, who was infirm. Whereas Hashimoto lobbied theKyoto nobility in support of Tokugawa Yoshinobu, Ii Naosuke and others in Edo backedthe alternative candidate, who went on to become the fourteenth shogun, Iemochi. SeeGeorge Wilson, “The Bakumatsu Intellectual in Action: Hashimoto Sanai in the PoliticalCrisis of 1858,” in Albert Craig and Donald Shively, eds., Personality in Japanese History(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 234–63.61In his famous valedictory essay “Yūkonroku,” Yoshida Shōin laments that HashimotoSanai was executed before Shōin had the chance to show him the poems of Gesshōand also of Kuchiba Norisuke 口 羽 徳 祐 . Nevertheless, kanshi did serve as a medium ofexchange between the two while they were incarcerated at the Denmachō prison, forHashimoto addressed Shōin in a quatrain, alluding to the latter’s repeated failed attemptsto become a stowaway on Russian and American ships so that he might investigate conditionsabroad; see Shimaoka, Shishitachi no uta, p. 49.

138 MATTHEW FRALEIGHconsiderable reknown.62 Shōin and other Japanese shishi thoroughlyengaged Wen Tianxiang’s “Song of the Righteous Spirit,” echoing itsdiction and rhetorical features in various ways while at the same timemaking the poem their own. To understand their achievement, it isessential that one take a close look at the original poem, whose prefaceexplains the context in which Wen composed the work:I am held captive by the North, and sit now in an earthen room. The roomis eight feet wide and twelve yards deep, its single door is low and small, itswindows short and tight. It is dirty and dark. On a summer day like today,various vapors [or energies] (qi 氣 ) gather here. When the rains come in onall four sides, causing my bed and table to begin to float, this is the energyof water. When the muddy dirt dries halfway and steam bubbles ripplethrough it, this is the energy of earth. When the skies are clear and oppressivelyhot and the wind is blocked on all four sides, this is the energy of thesun. When cooking fires are lit under the shade of the eaves, making thelong heat even more brutal, this is the energy of fire. When the grain in storagebegins to decay, releasing an oppressive mustiness, this is the energy ofrice. And when one is shoulder to shoulder with all sorts, rank, dirty, andoily, this is the energy of man. When the stench of privies, rotten corpses,and decaying rats emerge, this is the energy of fetor. These various malignenergies overlap one on top of the other, and few are the men exposed tothem who can remain unharmed. Moreover, my constitution is weak, yet Ihave lived amid them going on two years now, and thankfully have emergedunscathed. This is probably because I have something I have cultivatedwithin me that makes it so. But how do I know what I am cultivating inmyself? Mencius said, “I am good at cultivating my flood-like qi.” There areseven energies, and I have just one. One has held off seven. So why shouldI worry?! Especially since what I mean by “flood-like” is the “RighteousSpirit” of Heaven and Earth. I hereby compose “The Song of the RighteousSpirit.”6362Yoshida Shōin wrote additional poems that made use of the rhymes in other poemsby Wen Tianxiang. See Yoshida Shōin zenshū, 7:282–83.63Wen Tianxiang quanji 文 天 祥 全 集 (Beijing: Zhongguo shudian, 1985), 14.375–76.For discussion of the many allusions in the poem, see Yoshikawa Kōjirō, Five HundredYears of Chinese Poetry, 1150–1650, trans. John Timothy Wixted (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1989), pp. 52–55. I have also learned a great deal from Yang Ye’s translationand discussion of the poem in “The Culture of Canonization: Wen Tianxiang’s ‘Song ofthe Noble Spirit,’” unpublished paper presented at The Power of Words, a conference heldin honor of Stephen Owen at Harvard University, October 28, 2006.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 139正 氣 歌The Song of the Righteous Spirit天 地 有 正 氣 Pervading Heaven and Earth is a righteous spirit—雜 然 賦 流 形 Mixed and manifold, it assumes various forms.下 則 爲 河 嶽 Below, it makes rivers and mountains;上 則 爲 日 星 Above, it makes the sun and stars.5 於 人 曰 浩 然 In the world of man, it is what Mencius called“flood-like,”沛 乎 塞 蒼 冥 Surging forth to fill all that lies beneath the blue sky.皇 路 當 清 夷 When the Great Way is tranquil and peaceful,含 和 吐 明 庭 It inspires the bright court with harmony.時 窮 節 乃 見 When events reach an impasse, integrity is tested;10 一 一 垂 丹 青 Each instance is recorded down in the annals ofhistory.在 齊 太 史 簡 In Qi, it was the Grand Historian’s bamboo slips[that told of Cui Zhu’s assassination of DukeZhuang];在 晉 董 狐 筆 In Jin, it was the brush of Dong Hu [that attributedblame to Zhao Dun for Duke Ling’s murder].在 秦 張 良 椎 In Qin, it was the hammer of Zhang Liang [withwhich he attacked Qin Shihuang’s carriage];在 漢 蘇 武 節 In Han, it was the staff of Su Wu [that he carried asenvoy].15 爲 嚴 將 軍 頭 It was General Yan’s head [that refused to bow insubmission],爲 嵇 侍 中 血 It was Palace Attendant Ji Shao’s blood [that hespilled defending the Emperor].爲 張 睢 陽 齒 It was the teeth of Zhang Xun at Suiyang [that heground down while defending the city];爲 顏 常 山 舌 It was the tongue of Yan Gaoqing at Changshan或 爲 遼 東 帽[that was cut out when he insulted An Lushan].Or, it appeared as the cap in Liaodong [that GuanNing wore in his reclusion],20 清 操 厲 冰 雪 Whose purity was more intense than ice and snow.或 爲 出 師 表 Or, it appeared as the “Memorial to Dispatch theTroops” [by Zhuge Liang],鬼 神 泣 壯 烈Which made even ghosts and spirits cry solemnly.

140 MATTHEW FRALEIGH或 爲 渡 江 楫 Or, it appeared as the oar that crossed the river[which Zu Ti beat, vowing to reclaim the north];慷 慨 吞 胡 羯 With righteous determination to vanquish thebarbarians.25 或 爲 擊 賊 笏 Or, it appeared as the tablet that struck the bandit[Zhu Ci];逆 豎 頭 破 裂 Whose traitorous head was split open.是 氣 所 旁 薄 Each and every place that this spirit springs forth,凜 烈 萬 古 存 Has stolid dignity that shall last for eternity.當 其 貫 日 月 When it suffuses the sun and moon,30 生 死 安 足 論 How can life and death merit discussion?地 維 賴 以 立 The Terrestrial Perimeters depend upon it to stand;天 柱 賴 以 尊 The Pillar of Heaven relies upon it to rise tall.三 綱 實 係 命 The fate of the Three Bonds is tied to it;道 義 爲 之 根 For Righteousness and the Way are its roots.35 嗟 予 遘 陽 九 Alas! I have met with an ill-fated year;隸 也 實 不 力 And am now one held captive, truly powerless.楚 囚 纓 其 冠 Like the Chu prisoner who fastened his cap strings,傳 車 送 窮 北 I was brought by carriage to the remote north.鼎 鑊 甘 如 飴 To be boiled in a cauldron would be sweeter thancandy;40 求 之 不 可 得 I begged for this, but could not obtain it.陰 房 閴 鬼 火 My gloomy cell fills with ghostly will-o’-the-wisp;春 院 閟 天 黑 The spring courtyard is plunged into darkness.牛 驥 同 一 皂 The ox and steed share the same trough;雞 棲 鳳 凰 食 A phoenix is made to eat among chickens.45 一 朝 濛 霧 露 One day I shall be overcome by the damp, I thought,分 作 溝 中 瘠 My fate to be an emaciated corpse in some gully.如 此 再 寒 暑 Two winters and springs have passed like this,百 沴 自 辟 易 And a hundred malignancies have kept theirdistance.嗟 哉 沮 洳 場 Oh this damp and soggy place,50 爲 我 安 樂 國 Has now become my paradise!豈 有 他 繆 巧 Surely it is not because of some clever trick陰 陽 不 能 賊 That I am immune to the harm of the elements.顧 此 耿 耿 在 I know it is the radiance that lies within,

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 141仰 視 浮 雲 白 Pure as the white floating clouds that I gaze atoverhead.55 悠 悠 我 心 悲 Vast is the sorrow in my heart;蒼 天 曷 有 極 Blue Heaven! When will it end?哲 人 日 已 遠 The great wise men grow more distant each day;典 刑 在 夙 昔 Yet their example lives on in the past.風 簷 展 書 讀 Under the breezy eaves, I open a book and read;古 道 照 顏 色 The ancient path illuminating my face.The original poem is not explicitly separated into stanzas, but it may bedivided into four sections based upon shifts in rhyme: indicated hereand in the Japanese versions that follow with the insertion of a blankline. Wen’s poem begins with a general statement about the “RighteousSpirit” (lines 1–10), continues with a parade of vignettes from Chinesehistory that demonstrate the Spirit in action (lines 11–26), proceedsto another meditation on this Spirit (lines 27–34), and ends with asequence on the poet’s own situation and his reliance on the RighteousSpirit for inspiration and transcendence (lines 35–60).64 The echoes ofWen Tianxiang’s “Song” in the above poems by Japanese shishi are clear.The final section of Wen’s “Song” in particular, with its grim descriptionof the humiliation of unjust imprisonment, had particular resonancefor the incarcerated Japanese shishi, and the equanimity toward life anddeath expressed by Wen in line 30 is specifically invoked in the poemsby Takasugi Shinsaku and Kojima Kyōsuke. The shorter Japanese shishipoems that reference Wen Tianxiang repeat a key structure fromthe original, but they also effect an important contraction and displacement.In the same way that Wen Tianxiang speaks of how reading historicalaccounts of his valorous predecessors gives him the spiritualsustenance necessary to endure his ordeal, so do these short Japanesepoems emphasize the encouragement readings and recollections ofthe past provide, yet they focus on a single historical exemplar: that ofWen Tianxiang himself. Similarly, line 9 of Wen Tianxiang’s “Song” celebratesthe “integrity” or “mettle” (Ch. jie; J. setsu 節 ) of a panoply ofheroic individuals in Chinese history, while in these Japanese poems64Yang Ye has suggested first a two-part division (lines 1–34 and lines 35–60), the firstpart of which can then be further subdivided into a “beginning, a middle, and an end initself ”; see his “The Culture of Canonization,” p. 10.

142 MATTHEW FRALEIGHinspired by Wen’s example, the term serves as the definitive term associatedwith Wen himself, appearing in line 6 of the first poem entitled“Composed in prison” by Takasugi, the comment from Yoshida Shōinthat Takasugi appended to his second poem of the same title, and thepoem by Hashimoto Sanai. These shorter poems by the Japanese shishithus recapitulate the frame in Wen Tianxiang’s “Song” that invokeshistorical analogues as sources of inspiration, but at the same time displacethe referential scope to Wen Tianxiang himself. The versions ofWen Tianxiang’s “Song” by Yoshida Shōin and others represent a differentform of displacement, one that relocated the frame to Japan.Yoshida Shōin’s “Song of the Righteous Spirit,” also a “pentasyl labicold-style poem” (Ch. wuyan gushi; J. gogon koshi 五 言 古 詩 ), makes useof the rhyme characters in Wen Tianxiang’s original. Moreover, as inWen’s “Song,” the shifts in Shōin’s rhymes correspond to the contoursof his poem’s semantic content and rhetorical strategy, serving to distinguishone structural unit from another.和 文 天 祥 正 氣 歌 韻Matching the rhymes of Wen Tianxiang’s“Song of the Righteous Spirit”正 氣 塞 天 地 The righteous spirit pervades Heaven and Earth;聖 人 唯 踐 形 Only a sage can completely fulfill it.65其 次 不 朽 者 And after the sages come the ever-enduring,亦 爭 光 日 星 Who rival the sun and stars in their light.5 嗟 吾 小 丈 夫 But, alas! I am a mere man,一 粟 點 蒼 溟 A grain of millet floating on the dark blue depths.才 疎 身 側 陋 My talents are meager, and my station low;雲 路 遙 天 廷 The cloud-path to Court stretches so far away.然 當 其 送 東 Yet when I was sent up to the East,10 眼 與 山 水 青 My eyes shone as pure blue as the mountains andrivers.周 海 泊 舟 處敬 慕 文 臣 筆When our ship anchored on the shores of Suō,I paid my respects to the literary vassal’s brush.6665The allusion is to Mencius VIIA.38: 孟 子 曰 形 色 天 性 也 . 惟 聖 人 然 後 可 以 踐 形 .“Mencius said ‘Our body and complexion are given to us by heaven. Only a sage can givehis body complete fulfillment.’” See Mencius, trans. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth: PenguinBooks, 1970), p. 191.66I believe that the “literary vassal” here refers to eminent poet and scholar Sugawara

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 143嚴 島 鏖 賊 地 At Itsukushima, where the bandits were obliterated,仰 想 武 臣 節 I reverently pondered the military vassal’s resolve.6715 赤 水 傳 佳 談 Along the red rivers of Akō is told a glorious tale;櫻 留 義 士 血 The cherry blossoms preserve the blood ofrighteous men.68和 氣 存 郡 名 The “Japanese spirit” lives on in the name of “Wake”county;孰 捫 清 丸 舌 Who could suppress Kiyomaro’s tongue?69壯 士 一 谷 笛 A stalwart soldier played his flute at Ichinotani;20 義 妾 芳 野 雪 And Yoshitsune’s righteous consort danced onYoshino snows.70墓 悲 楠 子 志 At his grave, I grieved over Kusunoki’s resolve;城 仰 豐 公 烈 At the castle, I gazed up at Hideyoshi’s greatness.倭 武 經 蝦 夷田 村 威 靺 羯Yamato Takeru subdued the Emishi barbarians;And Tamuramaro’s awesome might reached all theway to Mohe.71no Michizane, who stopped in at Suō while en route to his place of exile in Dazaifu in901. One of the first shrines dedicated to Michizane as the god Tenjin was founded inSuō. Alter natively, Maki Fujio 槇 不 二 夫 interprets this couplet as “While sailing aroundon the seas, when our ship would dock, I would pay my respects to the vassal Wen Tianxiang’sbrush”; see his Bun Tenshō, Fujita Tōko, Yoshida Shōin Seiki no uta shōkai 文 天 祥 ・藤 田 東 湖 ・ 吉 田 松 陰 正 気 歌 詳 解 (Bunrokudō, 1902).67The reference is to the defeat of Sue Harukata (1521–1555) and his clan by MōriMoto nari at the Battle of Itsukushima in 1555; the term “military vassal” emphasizes Motonari’srelationship with his former lord Ōuchi Yoshitaka (1507–1551), whom Harukata hadturned against and defeated in a 1551 coup.68The reference is to the “Forty-Seven Loyal Rōnin” of Akō whose avenging of theirlord in 1703 became the celebrated subject of many literary and dramatic works, includingKanadehon Chūshingura.69When Dōkyō attempted to succeed to the imperial throne, Wake no Kiyomaro wasordered to inquire about the succession of the Emperor at Usa Shrine; when he reportedthe prophesy did not support Dōkyō’s bid, Dōkyō banished him. Subsequently, onceDōkyō fell from favor, Wake was reinstated and given command of Bizen and Mimasaka,where Wake county is located today.70The references are to Taira no Atsumori and Shizuka-gozen, both of whom figureprominently in the Genpei Wars of 1180–1185 and in the literature derived from it, suchas Tale of the Heike and the Nō plays Atsumori and Yoshino Shizuka. Atsumori’s “flute” wasa gift from his father Tsunemori and the fact that Atsumori had it with him when confrontedby Kumagai Naozane suggests his filial piety. The purity of Shizuka-gozen’s loyaltyto Yoshitsune is similarly reflected in the “snow.”71Mohe was the name of a northern state populated by a Tungusic tribe that hadcontact with China beginning in the period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties.Sakanoue no Tamuramaro 坂 上 田 村 麻 呂 (758–811) was, like the more shadowy figure ofYamato Takeru, sent to subjugate the Emishi, and presumably “Mohe” refers here to thenon- Yamato peoples who lived in the northern reaches of the Japanese archipelago.

144 MATTHEW FRALEIGH25 嗟 此 數 君 子 Ah! These several gentlemen, each大 道 補 分 裂 Used the Great Way to forestall division.尾 張 連 伊 勢 In Owari and in Ise too,神 器 萬 古 存 The sacred treasures have been kept since timeimmemorial.琵 琶 映 芙 蓉 With Lake Biwa, where lovely Fuji is reflected;30 嵩 華 何 足 論 What need is there to discuss Mount Song or Hua?最 是 平 安 城 But supreme above all is this, the capital of Heian;仰 見 天 子 尊 Where I gaze up at the imperial majesty.神 州 臨 萬 國 The Divine Land reigns over the myriad nations,乃 是 大 道 根 For it is the root of the Great Way.35 從 墨 夷 事 起 Ever since the matter of the American barbariansarose,諸 公 實 不 力 The various lords have truly been powerless.已 破 妖 教 禁 Already the ban on the wicked religion has beenbroken;議 港 洲 南 北 And debates are held about the northern andsouthern ports of our land.名 義 早 已 誤 The “names” and “principles” having long beenmistaken,40 寧 遑 問 失 得 How can we have leisure to ask about their pros andcons?天 子 荐 軫 念 The Emperor grew profoundly distressed,四 海 妖 氛 黒 While malign airs spread black across the four seas.奉 勅 三 名 侯 The three lords who received the imperial order鷄 棲 鳳 凰 食 Were as phoenixes made to eat among chickens.7245 其 他 憂 國 者 And other men concerned for the nation,亦 皆 溝 中 瘠 Were all left to rot: skeletons in the ditch.欻 忽 五 六 歳 In a flash, five or six years have passed;72The identity of the “three lords” in the first line of this couplet is unclear. Maki suggeststhe reference is to the “Mito samurai, pro-expulsion activists in the capital, and thecourt nobles”; Bun Tenshō, Fujita Tōko, Yoshida Shōin Seiki no uta shōkai, p. 113. The editorsof Yoshida Shōin zenshū speculate that the phrase “might” refer to “the daimyo of Mito,Owari, and Echizen”; 7:309 n. 6. H. Van Straelen holds that the three are the “daimyōsof Satsuma, Tosa, and Chōshū”; see his Yoshida Shōin: Forerunner of the Meiji Restoration(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1952), p. 109 n. 4. The second line of the couplet, with its image ofthe auspicious phoenix being forced to feed among the much more pedestrian chickens,comes directly from the Wen Tianxiang poem, where it refers to the latter’s being takencaptive by the Mongols.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 145世 事 幾 變 易 And affairs in the world have shifted so many times.幸 有 聖 皇 在 Yet we are blessed by fortune with a sagely emperor,50 以 足 興 神 國 Who can reinvigorate the Divine Nation.如 何 將 軍 忠 And what of the loyalty of the generals,曾 不 拂 洋 賊 Who have never once attempted to expel theWestern bandits?大 義 自 炳 明 The great principle shines bright in self-evidence,孰 惑 辨 黒 白 Who can be so lost as to debate its propriety?55 人 世 轉 瞬 耳 A human life lasts but for the blinking of the eye,天 地 何 有 極 Yet can Heaven and Earth ever come to an end?聖 賢 雖 難 企 Though the designs of sages and worthies may behard to effect,吾 志 在 平 昔 My resolve remains as it has always been.願 留 正 氣 得 I wish to draw the righteous spirit up within me,60 聊 添 山 水 色 And somehow add to the beauty of this land.73Like Wen Tianxiang’s original, Shōin’s poem consists of four discretesections: the first ten lines constitute a prologue that introduces thetheme of the “Righteous Spirit”; lines 11–26 offer a series of illustrativeinstances from Japanese history; lines 27–34 reflect on the Spiritas manifest in the Imperial house and capital, and lines 35–60, shiftingthe focus to recent times, lament Japan’s inability to repulse the foreignthreat and express the poet’s unflagging confidence in the nation andhis resolve to contribute to its glory.Even while drawing upon the rhymes and structure of Wen Tianxiang’s“Song,” Shōin made the poem his own: he transplanted its referentialscope almost entirely to Japan, and he subtly shifted the courseof its narrative to highlight how his own experiences had endowed himwith a grand vision that transcended his own subjectivity. Wen Tianxiang’spiece is striking for its extensive preface, which vividly portraysthe grim details of the author’s imprisonment and explains how thesqualid surroundings inspired him to compose the poem. Yet, after thisrevelatory preface, Wen Tianxiang’s poetic persona disappears duringthe first half of the poem, which discusses Heaven and Earth and surveysseveral Chinese historical precedents; only in line 35 does the poetreemerge with a direct reference to his individual situation. Shōin, by73Yamaguchi-ken Kyōiku Iinkai, ed., Yoshida Shōin zenshū, 7:306–10. The version ofthe poem in Maki curiously omits lines 39 and 40.

146 MATTHEW FRALEIGHcontrast, provided no prose preface to his poem; instead he used thefirst half of the poem to chart how his poetic persona had come intocontact with traces of historical events.74The five couplets of Shōin’s prologue steadily progress from thegrand scale of “Heaven and Earth” (line 1) to the minuteness of “a grainof millet” (line 6), and from the realm of “sages” and other luminaries(lines 2–4) to the humble domain of the poet’s own meager station(line 7). Wen Tianxiang’s poem also progressively narrows its focus inits first few lines. Both poets turn their attention from cosmic to humanaffairs in line 5; but whereas Wen Tianxiang speaks in general termsabout the world of men, Shōin speaks specifically about himself. In WenTianxiang’s “Song,” historical precedents are listed with detachment. InShōin’s poem, even the spectacular procession of illustrative historicalpersonages (lines 11–26) is filtered through the poet’s individual perceptions.In both poems, lines 9–10 serve as a transitional couplet thatoffsets the parade of famous figures to follow. Yet Shōin provides a personalcontext for this litany, describing the sequence in terms of thesites he remembered having visited during his cross- country travel in1859—when he was being remanded from domiciliary confinement inHagi to a shogunal prison in Edo. Shōin thus links the portraits in thegallery with a spatial vector that describes a more or less steady coursefrom east to west. Grounded in Japan, the vector coincides with Shōin’sown progression toward confrontation with the authorities and thenceto his own death.In Wen Tianxiang’s “Song,” twelve historical figures appear in sixteenlines (11–26), with only the first group of four following a strictchronological order. Scholar of Chinese literature Yang Ye has characterizedthe variety in both the syntactic structure of the lines and thetime periods from which the allusions are drawn as lending Wen Tianxiang’sgallery “color and musicality.”75 Shōin’s poem also uses structuraland syntactic variation, with the concentration of allusions percouplet varying considerably; the first four couplets (lines 11–18) eachidentify a single episode; the three couplets (lines 19–24) that followeach identify two episodes, and the concluding couplet offers a summaryjudgment about the whole group of ten figures (lines 25–26). Fur-74Perhaps the work that he was writing concurrently, Shōkonroku, can be read as a prosecounterpart.75Yang Ye, “The Culture of Canonization,” p. 11.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 147thermore, similarities among the couplets in their syntactic structureand semantic value create links within Shōin’s gallery; the “literary vassal”of line 12 offsets the “military vassal” of line 14, for example, andthe polysemy of a place name such as Akō (line 15) echoes the multipleasso ciations called up by the characters for Wake (line 17).Just as the ultimate couplet of the first section of Shōin’s poem(lines 9–10) provides a transition to the following section, so too doesthe second section of Shōin’s poem end with a transitional couplet(lines 25–26), a feature absent from the Wen Tianxiang original. Thiscouplet implicitly invites readers to see the ten historical figures just recalledas linked not only by their shared status as sites of remembrancealong the poet’s journey from Hagi to Edo, but by their putative sharedrole in Japanese history. Just as these recollected figures span the entirearchipelago, unifying its territory, so too have they promoted unity andprevented division over the course of history. If this particular readingof Shōin’s works better for some of the enumerated incidents than forothers, the third section declaims more directly that the focus and basisof this unity lies in the imperial house, its capital, and the national territoryitself. In this section, after enumerating the domestic sites connectedto the imperial house in the opening lines, the poet offers afleeting glimpse of the world beyond Japan (line 30). Just as the sacredsites of Henan’s Songshan and Shaanxi’s Huashan, two of China’s celebrated“five mountains,” threaten to impinge upon the poem’s fieldof vision, the poet peremptorily refocuses his gaze with insular confidenceon Japan’s status as a “divine land” that occupies a special placeamid a myriad of other nations (line 33).The tentative, disinterested glance beyond Japan’s borders that isintroduced in this sequence anticipates the transition to the fourthsection, in which an unexpected foreign incursion disrupts the idyllicequilibrium. Having asserted that the defining feature of the historicalheroes in the gallery is their ability to restore unity in troubled times,Shōin’s detailing of the threat to Japan’s unity and stability—initiallyintroduced by the incursion of, and the concessions made to, foreignpowers (lines 35–46)—suggests that the time is ripe for the emergenceof another such heroic figure. Now, in 1859, five or six years afterPerry, Shōin remains inspired by his faith in the emperor (line 49–50)and maintains his own personal resolve and determination (line 57–60). As in Wen Tianxiang’s “Song,” the fourth section of Shōin’s poem

148 MATTHEW FRALEIGHthus narrates a trying circumstance and explains how the poet remainshopeful through it. Yet, unlike Wen Tianxiang’s focus on his individualcrisis of imprisonment, Shōin’s concern in these lines is the fate ofJapan as a whole. The poem’s focus, in other words, has moved fromits initial attention to Shōin’s own incarceration and his acts of remembranceto the larger issue of Japan’s present crisis—precisely the oppositedirection of movement from the Wen Tianxiang poem.To appreciate these contrasting trajectories, it is worthwhile tocompare a pivotal couplet in the original with Shōin’s version. In writingabout Wen Tianxiang’s poem, Yoshikawa Kōjirō has identified amomentary wavering in lines 55–56, near the poem’s climax:悠 悠 我 心 悲蒼 天 曷 有 極Vast is the sorrow in my heart;Blue Heaven! When will it end?76As Yoshikawa notes, Wen Tianxiang recovers from this brief crisis offaith when he recalls the historical precedents he has earlier rehearsed;these provide him with encouragement and solace and he literallybasks in their glow as he peruses them again. In Shōin’s version, by contrast,the couplet that occurs in this position instead intimates an indifferencetoward the poet’s individual death:人 世 轉 瞬 耳天 地 何 有 極A human life lasts but for the blinking of the eye,Yet, can Heaven and Earth ever come to an end?In its contrast between the endurance of Heaven and Earth and thetransience of human life, Shōin’s couplet thus emphasizes his progressionout of personal experience to a larger truth that embraces anddefines all of Japan.Yoshida Shōin’s “Song of the Righteous Spirit” influenced later shishi,many of whom may well have been more familiar with Shōin’s versionthan the original.77 Wen Tianxiang’s piece had been domesticated76Yoshikawa Kōjirō 吉 川 幸 次 郎 , Gen Min shi gaisetsu 元 明 詩 概 説 (Iwanami Shoten,1963), pp. 61–70, esp. 69–70; and in Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry, trans. Wixted,pp. 52–56.77Shōin’s version of the piece remained popular into the twentieth century. H. VanStraelen notes how its “poetic and stirring lines” were recited by Japanese youth marchinginto battle during the Pacific War; see his Yoshida Shōin, p. 107. Although he does notspecify a particular text by Shōin, tokkōtai (kamikaze) pilot Hayashi Tadao wrote abouthis own turmoil in metaphoric terms as a struggle between the eponymous protagonist

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 149through Shōin’s matched composition. Yet, a rigorously matched compositionwas not the only way in which Japanese shishi domesti catedthe “Song of the Righteous Spirit,” and Shōin was not the first shishi toproduce a Japanese version of the work. Fourteen years earlier, whileunder house arrest, the Mito scholar Fujita Tōko had written “MatchingWen Tianxiang’s ‘Song of the Righteous Spirit.’”78 In a significantdeparture from the typical custom in such “matching” ( J. wa; Ch. he和 ) poems, he made no attempt whatsoever to echo Wen Tianxiang’soriginal rhymes, but clearly the work was never far from his mind.79 Inthe elaborate preface that accompanies his version, Tōko details howWen Tianxiang’s poem had long been an inspiration to him:When I, Takeki, was eight or nine years old, I learned of Wen Tianxiang’s“Song of the Righteous Spirit” from my late father.80 Whenever my latef ather recited the song, he would beat out time with cup in hand, ferventand impassioned. He would explain how Heaven and Earth were filled witha righteous spirit, and would insist that one must follow it all the way to itsbasis in the great virtues of loyalty and filial piety. That was over thirty yearsago now. For every ten works of poetry and prose that I could recite whenI was young, I have probably forgotten seven or eight of them. But when itcomes to Tianxiang’s song, I recall each line perfectly and haven’t forgottena single word. Moreover, my late father’s voice and visage appear withof Thomas Mann’s “Tonio Kröger,” representing sensitive artistic withdrawal; and YoshidaShōin, representing impassioned social engagement; see Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, KamikazeDiaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2006), p. 89.78In 1844, the shogunate ordered Tōko’s lord, Tokugawa Nariaki, to report to Edo,whereupon he was stripped of his status as daimyo of the Mito domain. Tōko accompaniedhis lord and was placed under house arrest in the Mito domain residence in Edo. Inaddition to the “Song of the Righteous Spirit,” Tōko wrote a poetic life history entitledKaiten shishi 回 天 詩 史 while he was in captivity.79The poem is titled “Bun Tenshō no ‘Seiki no uta’ ni wasu; narabini jo” 和 文 天 祥正 氣 歌 并 序 , and I have used the version in Sakata, Shishi, pp. 38–62. It has also been reprintedin Maki, Bun Tenshō, Fujita Tōko, Yoshida Shōin Seiki no uta shōkai, pp. 43–83, andin Takano, Shishi bungaku, pp. 46–75. The explications in these two versions by Maki andTakano are strikingly similar, suggesting that Takano either relied on Maki or else bothof them relied on a third source, perhaps Seiki no uta zokkai 正 気 歌 俗 解 , the 1867 commentaryprepared by Oyama Shunzan 小 山 春 山 (also known as Tomohiro 朝 弘 ; 1827–1891), a former student of Ōhashi Totsuan who participated in the Sakashitamon incident.Shunzan apparently prepared the commentary for the use of his academy students.80Here Tōko uses his given name, Takeki 彪 ; Tōko’s father, the Confucian scholar FujitaYūkoku 藤 田 幽 谷 (1774–1826), was a founding figure of the Mito school.

150 MATTHEW FRALEIGHlife-like vividness in my mind’s eye. By nature, I am prone to sickness. Lastyear, when it was time for me to follow my lord [Nariaki]’s carriage andcome [to Edo], I happened to be suffering from a cold, but I toughed it outand departed. When my lord ran afoul of the authorities, I too was orderedinto confinement. Drafty windows and a leaky room leave me assailed bydank and malevolent airs. Thin robes and sparse food make my hunger andcold extreme. The bitter toils and harsh difficulties I face are not those thatthe average man could endure. And yet, I have suddenly recovered from mylong-standing illness, and my physical stamina is superb. That I am able tohold my head up and cast my gaze around the world, recklessly arraying myselfalongside the ancients, I think is in large part due to Wen Tianxiang’ssong.Fujita Tōko’s decision to write a substantial preface itself emphasizeshis indebtedness to Wen Tianxiang, and the textually mediated salvationhe finds toward the end of this first section echoes the statement inWen Tianxiang’s preface about how the poet overcomes the fetid vaporsof his confinement through reliance on cultivating the Righteous Spiritthat he identifies with the Mencian “flood-like qi.” Like Wen Tianxiang,Tōko writes that he has been able to achieve some degree of psychologicalrelease from his trying circumstances through his faith in a “righteousspirit.” In writing the poem, Tōko had another agenda, however:to insist upon the particularity, and indeed the superiority, of the Japanese“righteous spirit.” His preface continues:When Tianxiang met with the toppling of the Song state, he was taken prisonerby the Mongols. Truly this was a great crisis in the life of a vassal. Myconfinement, on the other hand, is no more than a temporary and aberrantmisfortune. And so both our circumstances and accomplishments aregreatly dissimilar. But as someone of old once said, “Life and death are greataffairs.”81 Now, my travails have come to this point. But it seems that peopleare still unsatisfied with this and say “Why is he not given leave to commitsuicide?” or “Why does he not hurry up and take his own life?” This is whyI can say that I spend my days now on the border between life and death.Moreover, in my stubborn refusal to change, in my self-confidence thatgrows ever stronger, there is no dissimilarity between me and Tian xiang.81In Zhuangzi V, these words are attributed to Confucius; see Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings,trans. Burton Watson (Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 64.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 151Ah! The question of my own life and death is of course a matter beneathmention. When it comes to the advance or retreat of my lord, then this is amatter connected to the expansion or compression of the righteous spiritand the flourishing and decline of the Divine Land. How can this be said tobe just a temporary and aberrant misfortune? Tianxiang said that “floodlike”is the righteous spirit that pervades Heaven and Earth. I will expandupon his statement, and say that the “righteous spirit” is what is accumulatedthrough moral action, and is the basis upon which loyalty and filial piety arecarried out. However, what he calls the “righteous spirit” has changed andremained inconstant from Qin to Han, from Tang to Song. And what I callthe “righteous spirit” has endured unchanged across thousands of generations,remaining constant even to the ends of Heaven and Earth. Thus, Irecite Tianxiang’s song, and to it match my own song. It goes like this:Alongside his no-doubt-profound respect for Wen Tianxiang and hissincerely felt gratitude for the poem, a distinct sense of one- upsmanshipmotivated Tōko to write his own version.82 Not surprisingly, Tōko’s“Song of the Righteous Spirit” exceeds the length of the original bysome fourteen lines. The idea of Japanese imperial constancy and politicalunity that Tōko introduces in the preface’s final section receivesamplification in the poem’s opening couplets. Here Tōko assigns Japana special place as the purest site of the Righteous Spirit’s manifestation,a unique status underscored by the orthography 不 二 ( J. fuji; lit. “peerless”or “singular”) for Mount Fuji.天 地 正 大 氣 The Righteous Spirit of Heaven and Earth粹 然 鍾 神 州 Is gathered purely in the Divine Land.秀 爲 不 二 嶽 In its splendid heights, it forms the peak of Fuji,巍 巍 聳 千 秋 That has soared skyward for thousands of autumns.5 注 爲 大 瀛 水 Pouring down, it forms the great ocean waters,洋 洋 環 八 洲 Encircling the Country of Eight Islands in itsvastness.發 爲 萬 朶 櫻 Opening, it forms the cherry blossoms of countlessbranches,衆 芳 難 與 儔 With which no other flowers can compare.82On the ambivalence that China engendered in many prominent Edo-era scholars,see Kate Wildman Nakai, “The Naturalization of Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan: TheProblem of Sinocentrism,” HJAS 40.1 (1980): 157–99.

152 MATTHEW FRALEIGH凝 爲 百 錬 鐵 Hardening, it forms the iron sword, tempered ahundred times,10 鋭 利 可 割 鍪 Which is sharp enough to cleave a helmet.藎 臣 皆 熊 羆 Each loyal retainer is fierce as a bear;武 夫 盡 好 仇 Every military man a trusted vassal.神 州 孰 君 臨 In this Divine Land, what sovereign reigns?萬 古 仰 天 皇 Since time immemorial, we have revered theEmperor.15 皇 風 洽 六 合 The Imperial way suffuses all space;明 德 侔 大 陽 His “shining virtue” equal to the Sun.不 世 無 汚 隆 True, no age is without its rise and fall;正 氣 時 放 光 But the Righteous Spirit shines forth each time.乃 參 大 連 議 It was manifest in the argument of the Ōmuraji,20 侃 侃 排 瞿 曇 Who resolutely called for the expulsion of Gautama.乃 助 明 主 斷 It aided the bright sovereign in his determination焰 焰 焚 伽 藍 To torch the Buddhist temple in a roaringconflagration.83中 郞 嘗 用 之 Nakatomi once drew upon this Spirit宗 社 磐 石 安 To place the state on a rock-solid foundation.8425 淸 丸 嘗 用 之 Wake no Kiyomaro once drew upon this Spirit妖 僧 肝 膽 寒 To subdue the fiendish monk, turning his innardscold.85忽 揮 龍 口 劍Suddenly, it appeared in the hefted sword atTakinokuchi,83The Nihon shoki records how Paekche’s presentation of a Buddhist statue and sutrasto the court in 553 prompted debates about whether the new doctrine should be accepted.The first couplet refers to Mononobe no Okoshi’s argument that to propitiate Buddhismwould incur the disfavor of Japan’s own gods, a position he staked out in opposition tothat of Soga no Iname. Emperor Kinmei decided to award the Buddhist statue to Iname,who installed it at the temple he founded at his home in Mukuhara, but a subsequent pestilencecaused Kinmei to reconsider, and he ordered the statue discarded and the Mukuharatemple burned.84The reference is to the 645 coup in which Nakatomi no Kamako (Fujiwara noKama tari) and Prince Ōe ousted Soga no Iruka and promulgated the Taika Reforms thefollowing year.85In 769, when the monk Dōkyō attempted to succeed to the imperial throne, Wakeno Kiyomaro insisted on ascertaining the will of the gods at Usa Shrine; when Kiyomaroreported that the oracle was opposed to Dōkyō, he was banished, but ultimately Dōkyōfell out of favor and Kiyomaro’s brave fidelity was celebrated.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 153虜 使 頭 足 分 Separating the Hun emissary’s head and limbs fromhis body.忽 起 西 海 颶 Suddenly, it rose up in the storm on the WesternSeas,30 怒 濤 殱 妖 氛 Forming angry waves that devastated themalevolent airs.86志 賀 月 明 夜陽 爲 鳳 輦 巡芳 野 戰 酣 日又 代 帝 子 屯Then, on a bright moonlit night in Shiga,It was the imperial carriage sent as a decoy.87Then, in the heat of battle on Mount Yoshino,It became a stand-in for the Crown Prince.8835 或 投 鎌 倉 窟 Or, for one thrown into an earthen prison inKamakura,憂 憤 正 愪 愪 It became an indignation so truly lamentable.89或 伴 櫻 井 驛 Or, for him who was led to the post-station atSakurai,遺 訓 何 慇 懃 It became a parting lesson so tender.90或 殉 天 目 山 Or, with the defeat at Tenmokuzan,40 幽 囚 不 忘 君 The sequestered prisoner did not forget his lord.9186These two couplets refer to the thirteenth-century Mongol invasions: in 1275 anemi ssary of Qubilai was executed at Takinokuchi, near Kamakura, and in 1281 the secondMongol invasion was repulsed supposedly through a “divine wind.”87As recounted in the military chronicle the Taiheiki, Fujiwara Morokata is sent tomake a pilgrimage to Mount Hiei in the guise of the Emperor Go-Daigo as a strategyto rally the monks in opposition to Hōjō Takatoki; see The Taiheiki: A Chronicle ofMedi eval Japan, trans. Helen Craig McCullough (New York: Columbia University Press,1959), p. 57.88In 1333 Murakami Yoshiteru exchanged garments with Prince Morinaga, permittingthe latter to escape, whereupon Yoshiteru killed himself in the Prince’s guise; see The Taiheiki,pp. 178–79.89Referring to Prince Morinaga, who was slandered by Ashikaga Takauji and thusordered incarcerated in a cave prison, where he died in 1335; see The Taiheiki, pp. 384–87.90The reference is to the parting of Kusunoki Masatsura (1326–1348) from his fatherMasashige at Sakurai (near modern Osaka) in 1336, just as Masashige was preparingto fight in the battle of Minatogawa. A famous scene in the Taiheiki (Chapter 16), themoment was well known through pictorial depictions, such as the painting called “TheParting of the Kusunoki Father and Son at Sakurai Station” by Kikuchi Yōsai (1788–1878).Saigō Takamori brought the poetic and graphic representations of the scene together whenhe wrote a kanshi in praise of Yōsai’s painting that used Tōko’s diction, entitled “Sakuraieki no zu no san” 桜 井 駅 図 賛 ; see Sakata, Shishi, p. 265.91Upon learning of Takeda Katsuyori’s defeat at Tenmokuzan in 1582, his vassal KomiyamaNaizen, who had once enjoyed his lord’s favor but had been estranged from him inrecent years, raced to the scene to die alongside Katsuyori.

154 MATTHEW FRALEIGH或 守 伏 見 城一 身 當 萬 軍Or, in protecting Fushimi Castle,One man took on an army ten thousand strong.92承 平 二 百 歳 Peace has endured for two hundred years,斯 氣 常 獲 伸 And this Spirit has continued to spread.45 然 當 其 鬱 屈 Just when it seemed that the Spirit might beobscured,生 四 十 七 人 It took the form of forty-seven men.乃 知 人 雖 亡 And thus it is known, that even though a man may die,英 靈 未 嘗 泯 His spirit shall never succumb.長 在 天 地 間 Rather it shall abide between Heaven and Earth,50 隱 然 敍 彜 倫 Subtly giving order to the Way.孰 能 扶 持 之 Who, then, can nurture and sustain this Spirit?卓 立 東 海 濱 He who towers above the rest, on the banks of theEastern Sea.忠 誠 尊 皇 室 With loyalty and sincerity, he reveres theImperial family;孝 敬 事 天 神 With filial piety and respect, he serves theheavenly gods.55 修 文 兼 奮 武 He cultivates learning while also rallying the troops;誓 欲 淸 胡 塵 Vowing to purify the realm of the foreign filth.一 朝 天 歩 艱 Yet one day, the workings of Heaven broughtadversity,邦 君 身 先 淪 And the domain lord himself was the first casualty.頑 鈍 不 知 機 Stubborn and foolish, I could not discern the signs,60 罪 戻 及 孤 臣 And charges were brought even against this lonevassal.孤 臣 困 葛 藟 Now I, a vassal separated from his lord, am confinedand bound,君 冤 向 誰 陳 Whom can I tell of this calumny against my lord?孤 子 遠 墳 墓 A fatherless child, far from the family graves,何 以 謝 先 親 How can I offer apology to my late ancestors?65 荏 苒 二 周 星 Now, two years have passed slowly by;唯 有 斯 氣 隨 And all that I have is this Spirit that follows me.92The reference is to Torii Mototada’s heroic defense of Fushimi Castle in 1600 whilehis lord Tokugawa Ieyasu headed east to do battle with Uesugi Kagekatsu. Recognizingthat the fall of the castle was inevitable, Mototada urged Ieyasu to take extra troops withhim rather than to leave behind a large force to guard the castle.

嗟 予 雖 萬 死豈 忍 與 汝 離屈 伸 付 天 地JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 155Ah! Even were I to die ten thousand deaths,How could I bear to be parted from you?Whether I am crushed or freed, I leave to Heavenand earth,70 生 死 復 何 疑 Whether I live or die, how could I hesitate?生 當 雪 君 冤 So long as I live, I will clear my lord of thisaccusation,復 見 張 綱 維死 爲 忠 義 鬼極 天 護 皇 基So that we may again see the three bonds and fourvirtues at work.Should I die, I shall become a righteous ghostAnd protect the Imperial state forever.Although Fujita Tōko ignored the rhymes of the original and the fourpartstructure that they underscored, he drew upon several features ofWen Tianxiang’s original to compose his version of the “Song of theRighteous Spirit.” In addition to the gallery of famous examples, variousrhetorical devices used in the original find a place in Tōko’s rendition.Most of the shifts in rhyme in Tōko’s poem do coincide with thematicshifts. The prologue (lines 1–12) elaborates the theme of the“Righteous Spirit” that Tōko introduced in the preface, articulatingits purported unique connection to the land of Japan and its people.Like Wen Tianxiang in the original, Tōko moves from the grand scaleof Heaven to the small scale of man, and from the impersonal naturalworld to the personal. In this opening section Tōko makes use ofanaphora, especially in the repetition of the 爲 character, and of a syntacticstructure that is sustained across several lines. (Lines 3, 5, 7, and 9can be represented as V 爲 XXY, where V is a verb, XX is a geographicterm or adjective, and Y is an element of the natural scene.) Tōko’simplementation differs from Wen’s when it comes to particular details,but such repetition of semantic and structural elements is a device thatWen Tianxiang makes use of in the original poem. The ultimate coupletof this section (lines 11–12) introduces the theme of loyalty and fidelityas the defining characteristics of men in the imperial realm: a segue tothe second section (lines 13–18), which introduces the object of theirloyalty: the imperial personage. The final couplet of this second section(lines 17–18) acts as a transition, anticipating the parade of paragonsthat follows in the third section (lines 19–42) as exemplars of instanceswhen the “Righteous Spirit shines forth.”

156 MATTHEW FRALEIGHIn contrast to Wen Tianxiang, Tōko introduces the twelve figures ofhis pantheon in strict chronological order, maintaining the verbal densityconstant throughout: one couplet alludes to each famous event.Yet, just as Wen Tianxiang added rhythmic interest by using a varietyof repeated lexical elements and grammatical structures in his paradeof heroes, so too does Tōko use a range of syntactic structures, each ofwhich is sustained over the course of a single rhyme group, to recall heroesfrom Japan’s history. Accordingly, the two couplets of lines 19–22repeat the particle 乃 ; those in lines 23–26 repeat “once drew upon it”嘗 用 之 ; those in lines 27–30 repeat the word “suddenly” 忽 ; those inlines 31–34 both use a place name at the head of the first couplet; andthose in lines 35–42 repeat the word “or” 或 . In addition, the adjacentcouplets in each rhyme group show either complete intercouplet parallelismor “alternating” parallelism between the first lines of each. Suchuse of common verbal structures serves to bind together the coupletscomprising each rhyme group and mirrors the use of anaphora in WenTianxiang’s original poem.Having surveyed over a millennium of Japanese history prior tothe founding of the Tokugawa shogunate, Tōko then turns his attentionto his own era (lines 43–64). Tōko finds that, after two centuries ofpeace and stability punctuated only by the exceptional valor of the Akōincident, his own lord Tokugawa Nariaki is a shining manifestation ofthe “Righteous Spirit” in practice. The adversity visited upon the Mitodaimyo, and Tōko’s feelings of responsibility for having failed to avertthis crisis (lines 59–64), lead into the poem’s final section (lines 65–74), where the focus shifts entirely to Tōko’s present predicament. In itsprogression from eternal verities to a series of historical exemplars, andthen from a trying circumstance to the poet’s undiminished resolve toovercome it, the poem closely mirrors the trajectory of Wen Tianxiang’s“Song.” Both poems celebrate the triumph of the unbent spirit, but Tōkoparts company from his Chinese predecessor by articulating nationalparticularism instead of universality and in vowing to rectify the presentdisorder.In their versions of Wen Tianxiang’s “Song of the Righteous Spirit,”both Fujita Tōko and Yoshida Shōin assign a preeminent place to Japan’snational territory, thus domesticating the work further. Whereas theopening lines of Wen Tianxiang’s “Song” identify the righteous qi as

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 157the source of the “rivers and mountains,” both Japanese versions invokenot generalized topographical features, but elements of the landscape(whether named sites or native flora) that are particular to Japan. Justas Shōin’s version emphasizes the particularity of the realm throughits steady progression through identifiable places, Tōko’s version foregroundsMount Fuji and other hallmarks of the homeland in its openingcouplets.93 This formulation obliquely claims a homology betweenthe physical magnificence of the homeland and the splendor of its denizens,a metonymy upon which later shishi poets drew. For example, inone of his best-known poems, Saigō Takamori situates Mount Fuji as ametaphor for the “gentleman” idealized in Confucian ethics:八 朶 芙 蓉 白 露 天遠 眸 千 里 拂 雲 煙百 蠻 呼 國 稱 君 子爲 有 高 標 不 二 巓題 富 嶽 圖On an Image of Mount FujiAn eight-petal lotus in the white dew ofautumn;Visible from a thousand miles, it soars upthrough the clouds.Barbarians call Japan a land of gentleman;Because of the lofty heights of peerless Fuji.94As in the Tōko poem, this quatrain progresses from natural scenery tothe human world, a trajectory that recurs in the works of many later shishipoets.95 Saigō’s poem, in turn, was said to inspire the famous MeijiGeneral Nogi Maresuke 乃 木 希 典 (1849–1912) to write the followingquatrain:93In his study of the Mito school, Victor Koschmann invokes Mircea Eliade to suggestthe importance that sacred mountains like Mount Fuji and Nikkō often have to the “archaicmystique of origins.” Eliade’s theory may help to explain the recurrence of the image andthe characteristic associations it has in Tōko’s poem as well as later shishi poetry. SeeKosch mann, The Mito Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 166.94Ōki Shunkurō, Saigō Nanshū Sensei shishū, pp. 204–5.95Occasionally the vector is inverted, but even in such cases, the emphasis remainson asserting the profound bonds linking, and even equating, the people to their homeland.Consider, for example, the final couplet of “Shūchū zatsugin” 囚 中 雜 吟 , a quatrainby Tohara Ukitsu 戸 原 卯 橘 : “Like an autumn stream, my three-foot sword shines cold atthe tip, / But the malevolent fog that pervades the realm is oh so hard to dispel. / Now Ishall die and become the rivers and mountains, / A Righteous Spirit to protect the landfor a thousand years” 秋 水 鋩 寒 三 尺 刀 滔 天 妖 霧 奈 難 消 從 今 一 死 爲 河 嶽 正 氣 千 秋護 本 朝 ; see Koizumi, Ishin shishi kin’ō shiika hyōshaku, pp. 177–78.

158 MATTHEW FRALEIGH崚 嶒 富 嶽 聳 千 秋赫 灼 朝 暉 照 八 洲休 説 區 區 風 物 美地 靈 人 傑 是 神 州詠 富 嶽A Poem on Mount FujiMagnificent Fuji has soared skyward forthousands of years;The brilliant morning sun shines down from iton the Land of Eight Islands.Let us have no more trifling talk about scenicbeauty,For the terrestrial spirits and the people’sgreatness make ours a Divine Land.96Although the poem recognizes Japan’s aesthetic splendor in its first couplet,it emphatically asserts in the second couplet that the land’s truegreatness lies in the inseparable fusion of the territory and its residents.Nogi’s poem makes unambiguous the analogy between the nation (asterritory) and the nation (as its people) that is latent in the works ofTōko, Shōin, Saigō, and other predecessors.“Songs of the Righteous Spirit”after the Meiji RestorationAs Nogi’s Saigō-inspired poem suggests, the legacy of the shishi andtheir literature lingered on well into the twentieth century. In partthis happened as famous phrases from mid-nineteenth-century shishipoems were propagated and circulated in new forms. Yamada Bimyōincorporated Saigō’s line about the shattering jewel, for example, into apoem appearing in Shintaishi sen (Selection of poems in the new style;1886), and this version, in turn, soon became popularized as the waranthem “Teki wa ikuman” (How numerous the enemy) when set tomusic by Koyama Sakunosuke.97 Yet at the same time, anthologies of96An image of the quatrain in Nogi’s own hand is included in Nogi Maresuke zenshū(Kokusho Kankōkai, 1994), 3:554. Incidentally, Ōki Shunkurō states that Nogi wrote thispoem “while he looked at Saigō’s poem, immediately before he committed junshi”; seeSaigō Nanshū Sensei shishū, p. 204. I imagine, however, that this statement is an instance ofthe valedictory reading paradigm asserting itself, for most accounts of Nogi’s spectacularsuicide identify two tanka as the general’s final poems. For a discussion of these two Japanesepoems as well as Nogi’s wife Shizuko’s valedictory tanka, see Doris Bargen, SuicidalHonor: General Nogi and the Writings of Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki (Honolulu: Universityof Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 77–80.97In Yamada Bimyō’s poem, Saigō’s line is transformed into: “Rather than remaining

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 159shishi poetry continued to be published, and in 1909, the Kokumin Shinbunstaged an unprecedented exhibition of poetry, paintings, and calligraphycomposed by the shishi of the late Tokugawa and early Meijiperiod and their antecedents. Prominent Meiji newspaper publisherToku tomi Sohō (1863–1957) explained his motivation for undertakingthe exhibition in terms of his goal of furnishing an inspiring model forcontemporary youth:I believe our motivations in planning this exhibition were [severalfold]:first, to revive the spirit of reverence for the sovereign and love of countrythat reached its climax around the time of the Restoration. Second, the lightof the Restoration era shishi had grown dim and obscure, and we sought toclarify and make it shine again, extolling their efforts. Third, we hoped toprovide practical education to the youth of Meiji, encouraging them andinvigorating their spirits. Fourth, we hoped vividly to depict the great featof the Restoration reforms and the adversities it entailed, thereby awakeningthe hearts of society. Fifth, we hoped to gather historical materials onthe Restoration, fashioning them into a resource for knowing the future bymeans of the past.98An extraordinarily handsome two-volume exhibition catalog was producedthe following year, with full color reproductions of the paintingsand calligraphy as well as transcriptions of the texts. Significantly,this catalog simply reprinted the text of the works themselves in movabletype, without adding any kundoku reading marks or explanatoryapparatus to the texts written in Chinese. That the journalist Tokutomibelieved the unannotated items in the exhibition and the catalog hisnewspaper company had prepared could serve as “practical education”for the Japanese youth of 1910 indicates the continuing vitality of literaryChinese into the twentieth century.Those born after the Meiji Restoration grew up with a nationalschool curriculum that no longer equated the acquisition of literaryChinese with learning itself. Nonetheless, selections from the Confucianclassics, the Chinese dynastic histories, and such Japanese kanbunworks as Rai San’yō’s Nihon gaishi continued to serve as basic texts[intact] as a roof tile, become a jewel and shatter!” (kawara to narite nokoru yori, tamato nari tsutsu kudakeyo ya); see Yamada Bimyō 山 田 美 妙 , ed., Shintaishi sen 新 體 詞 選(Kōun Sho’oku, 1886), p. 21.98Ishin shishi ihōchō 維 新 志 士 遺 芳 帖 (Kokumin Shinbunsha, 1910). I would like tothank Fred Notehelfer for generously making this text available to me.

160 MATTHEW FRALEIGHof study well into the Meiji period. Moreover, Chinese poetic compositionremained an important practice for many of this generation.The body of Meiji literature in Chinese is vast and extremely diverse;poems that are clear descendants of the shishi tradition form but oneof its many strains. Given the importance that Wen Tianxiang’s “Song”played in the literature of the shishi, it is not surprising that echoes oftheir engagement with this seminal text reverberate in the works of lateMeiji poets. When the statesman Nagaoka Moriyoshi 長 岡 護 美 (1842–1906) visited Fujita Tōko’s gravesite, he composed an elaborate poemin honor of Tōko that includes the following three couplets:正 氣 作 歌 皷 四 方誓 雪 公 寃 非 刀 匕壯 志 未 遂 淪 黄 泉忠 骨 千 古 埋 蒿 里天 鋻 昭 彰 本 分 明安 使 正 氣 久 靡 徙With Righteous Spirit, he wrote a song thatdrummed up the four directions;Vowing to avenge the wrongful charge againsthis lord, he was no mere tool.His grand aspiration not yet achieved, hedescended to the underworld;Everlasting are his loyal bones, buried in thisgraveyard.But Heaven’s oversight is manifest, itsdistinctions clear;How could the Righteous Spirit be suppressedfor long?99Significantly, Nagaoka’s mention of “Song of the Righteous Spirit” occursimmediately before the couplet that recalls Tōko’s death. AlthoughTōko in fact lived for over a decade after composing his famous poem,Naga oka’s eulogistic account gives the work a nearly valedic tory air.That Nagaoka repeats the phrase “Righteous Spirit” in his poemwithout overtly mentioning Wen Tianxiang, and that he allusivelyincor porates phrases derived from Tōko’s poem, shows how closelyidentified the phrase had become with Tōko and other shishi. The shishiof mid-nineteenth-century Japan had so thoroughly naturalized WenTianxiang’s “Song” within Japan’s literary repertoire that a poet’s referenceto the “Righteous Spirit” might call to mind the Japanese shishi99Nagaoka’s undated forty-four-line poem is entitled “Fujita Tōko Sensei no haka niessu; isasaka chōku o utatte motte saibun ni kau” 謁 藤 田 東 湖 先 生 墓 聊 歌 長 句 以 代 祭文 ; see his Unkai shishō 雲 海 詩 鈔 (1900), 1:15a–16a.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 161rather than the Song loyalist. An example of this can be seen in the 1904kanshi by Navy Commander Hirose Takeo 廣 瀬 武 夫 (1868–1904),hero of the Russo-Japanese war.100 The title of the poem, “Song of theRighteous Spirit,” alone is significant, for unlike the compositions ofhis literary predecessors Fujita Tōko and Yoshida Shōin, Hirose makesno reference here to Wen Tianxiang. Though their level of fastidiousnessvaried considerably, both Tōko and Shōin had framed their poemsas “matches,” yet Hirose seemingly ignores the earlier poem:死 生 有 命 不 足 論 Life and death are fated—of this there isno doubt;鞠 躬 唯 應 酬 至 尊 One can only bow and offer homage to themost revered one.奮 躍 赴 難 不 辭 死 To rouse the spirit and face a crisis, never afraidto die;慷 慨 就 義 日 本 魂 To sacrifice oneself heroically in the cause ofrighteousness, that is the Japanese spirit!5 一 世 義 烈 赤 穗 里 At a village in Akō, magnificent righteousnessthat defined an era;三 代 忠 勇 楠 氏 門 At the Kusunoki clan gate, three generations ofloyal bravery.憂 憤 投 身 薩 摩 海 Frustrated and indignant, they threwthemselves into the sea off Satsuma從 容 就 刑 小 塚 原 Calm and composed, they met their deaths atKozukappara.101或 爲 芳 野 廟 前 壁 Taking the form of the front wall at a Yoshinotemple,10 遺 烈 千 年 見 鏃 痕 Past glory is seen for a thousand years in anarrowhead’s marks.102100Hirose Takeo’s poem “Seiki no uta” 正 氣 歌 appears in Maki, Bun Tenshō, FujitaTōko, Yoshida Shōin Seiki no uta shōkai, pp 127–37.101Maki Fujio gives an alternative version of this line: 慷 慨 就 義 小 塚 原 “They sacrificedthemselves heroically in the cause of righteousness at Kozukappara.” Although thiswould also make sense contextually, it seems rather to be a confusion with the fourth lineof the poem: 慷 慨 就 義 日 本 魂 ; see Maki, Bun Tenshō, Fujita Tōko, Yoshida Shōin Seiki nouta shōkai, pp. 127, 132.102This refers to the valedictory poem of Kusunoki Masatsura 楠 正 行 (1326–48),which he is said to have carved with an arrowhead on the wall of the Nyoirinji temple inYoshino before departing for battle: “Having realized / that I shall not return, / I inscribe

162 MATTHEW FRALEIGH或 爲 菅 家 筑 紫 月 Appearing as the moon that Michizanegazed upon at Tsukushi,詞 存 忠 愛 不 知 冤 His poems bespeak his loyalty, harboringno grudge.103可 見 正 氣 滿 乾 坤 Behold how the righteous spirit fillsHeaven and Earth;一 氣 磅 礴 萬 古 存 A constant spirit that has suffused all sincetime immemorial.15 嗚 呼 正 氣 畢 竟 在 誠 字 Ah! The Righteous Spirit boils down to theword “sincerity”;呶 呶 何 必 要 多 言 What need is there to prattle on about it?誠 哉 誠 哉 斃 不 已 Sincerity! Sincerity! Not stopping evenin death!七 生 人 間 報 國 恩 To be reborn seven times to repay yourdebt to the nation!104A vast distance separates Hirose’s poem from the original. Its very form,which is heptasyllabic rather than pentasyllabic and uses a single rhymerather than multiple, advertises the poem’s independence. Recall thatin his elaborate preface Fujita Tōko first lavishly celebrated Wen Tianxiang’spoem and extolled his integrity before going on to use thispraise as a springboard for insisting upon the superiority of the Japaneseimperial way. Yoshida Shōin likewise found a similarly unbrokenvector, though in his case the trajectory was spatial, and fittingly, hispointed dismissal of China was configured in geographic terms. Moreover,it was the possibility of drawing an analogy between Wen Tianxiang’sintegrity and the poet’s own that had stirred Taka sugi Shinsaku,Hashimoto Sanai, and other shishi to refer to him in their works; it wasthe parallel in circumstances of imprisonment that had prompted Fujitamy name here, / among those who perished / by the catalpa bow” かえらじとかねて 思へば 梓 弓 なき 数 に 入 る 名 をぞとどむる.103Maki Fujio quotes the poem with the character 祠 (shrine) at the head of this line,yielding “The shrines dedicated to him attest to his loyalty and harbor no grudge.” I haveused the more common reading of 詞 (poetry) instead.104The idea of “giving seven lives to repay the nation” 七 生 報 国 was a slogan widelycirculated during the Pacific War and later by Mishima Yukio, but its origins lie in a vowmade by Kusunoki Masashige’s younger brother Masasue 楠 正 季 during the Battle ofMinato gawa: “I wish I could be born in the human world seven times to exterminate theenemies of the nation” 願 七 生 人 間 以 殺 國 賊 .

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 163Tōko and Yoshida Shōin to write their own versions of “Song of theRighteous Spirit.” Hirose Takeo’s poem, by contrast, hints at no privationspersonally suffered; indeed, it lacks any self-reference whatso ever.Hirose had no need to justify his composition because the theme of the“righteous spirit” had already been domesticated. The four couplets thatcomprise the poem’s truncated gallery expose the agents of this processof naturalization. Hirose’s gallery introduces six figures, and althoughthere seems to be no particular progression guiding these references,it is significant that the shishi of the late Tokugawa period have alreadybecome a locus classicus in their own right. In line 7, Hirose alludes tothe attempted suicide of Saigō Takamori and the priest Gesshō, andin line 8, he refers to the execution grounds of Kozu kappara, where somany shishi lost their lives. Yoshida Shōin’s composure as he met hisfate at the hands of the Kozukappara executioners was legendary, andthus a contemporary reader might well think of Shōin specifically uponreading this line.105 In both its allusion to Shōin and in its lack of anyreference to Wen Tianxiang or any other Chinese precedent, the poemattests to its origins in Japan, specifically in the shishi literature of thenineteenth century.The elision of Wen Tianxiang from Hirose’s poem is thus symptomaticof a shift in his originary status as the immediate referent calledto mind by the phrase “Righteous Spirit.” So long as the shishi versionsof Wen Tianxiang’s “Song” proliferated and were anthologized,he would not disappear entirely from public consciousness; but overthe next few decades, he became defined in Japan principally in termsof his relation to the shishi. Though Wen Tianxiang was one of a host ofChinese exemplars important to the shishi, he came to be the definitiveChinese paragon worth remembering precisely because of the poetrythat he and his “Song” had inspired shishi to write. An anthology ofRestoration-era shishi poetry that was published in a special “wartimebudget edition” in 1938 and advertised as “Recommended by the Ministryof the Army” illustrates this trend. It carries a footnote to the poemthat Hashimoto Sanai wrote on singing “Song of the Righteous Spirit”in prison, in which Wen Tianxiang is identified as follows: “he was ashi of fierce loyalty that is rarely seen in Chinese history, and he was105Yoshida Shōin was said to greet his executioner by saying the equivalent of “otsukaresama”(something like “Thanks for your hard work”).

164 MATTHEW FRALEIGHsomeone whom the shishi of the Restoration period deeply admiredand to whom they were strongly attached.”106 For the readers of thisanthology, Wen Tianxiang was someone encountered only through themediation of the Japanese shishi.Whereas the shishi had been inspired directly by Wen Tianxiangand alluded to his works in their poems, a later poet like Hirose Takeowas instead responding to the poetry of these shishi. Nevertheless, eveninto the 1930s, there were some Japanese kanshi poets who maintainedan affinity to both Wen Tianxiang’s original poem and the literature ofthe shishi. Kokubu Seigai (1857–1944), one of the best-known kanshipoets of the modern period, wrote his own version of “The Song ofthe Righteous Spirit” between late 1932 and early 1933—this was whenWestern condemnation of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria was intensifyingand as Japan prepared to withdraw from the League of Nations. Asa professional poet and a central figure in modern kanshi circles, Seigainot surprisingly rose to the challenge of using Wen Tianxiang’s originalrhymes.107正 氣 所 磅 礴 Everywhere the Righteous Spirit fills the world,羣 類 爰 流 形 Leaving its traces in myriad forms of life.神 聖 立 厥 極 The gods and sages established their ultimate order:斯 道 如 日 星 Fixing this Way as the sun and stars.5 昔 在 草 昧 世 At the dawn of time, when the world was in chaos,披 霧 見 蒼 冥 The mists were parted and the blue sky appeared.自 神 武 以 來 Ever since the reign of Emperor Jinmu,賢 良 翼 王 庭 Worthies and talented men have helped the royalcourt.奕 葉 樹 德 厚 In era upon era, they have established robustregimes of virtue;10 功 烈 炳 汗 青 Their meritorious deeds shine brilliantly in thehistory books.乾 綱 久 而 弛When the bonds of imperial authority at lastgrew loose,106Koizumi, Ishin shishi kin’ō shiika hyōshaku, p. 24.107Kokubu Seigai 國 分 青 厓 , Seigai shizon 青 厓 詩 存 , rpt. in Shishū Nihon kanshi 詩 集日 本 漢 詩 , ed. Iritani Sensuke 入 谷 仙 介 , vol. 20 (Kyūko Shoin, 1990), p. 574. The poem istitled “Seiki no uta; Bunzan no gen’in o mochiu” 正 氣 歌 用 文 山 原 韻 .

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 165正 名 義 公 筆 The Righteous Lord took up his brush to rectify thenames.108君 辱 臣 乃 死 When their lord was insulted, his vassals vowedto die;雪 夜 勵 忠 節 The snowy night stirred up their loyal integrity.10915 綗 齋 儒 林 英 Keisai—a flower blooming in the Confucian grove;遺 言 瀝 心 血 He wrote his testament with drops of heartfeltblood.110仲 繩 志 士 魁 Chūjō—the pioneer of the shishi慷 慨 談 爛 舌 In his fervor, he discoursed with a brillianttongue.111襲 輿 櫻 田 門 Attacking the palanquin at the Sakurada Gate,20 落 花 散 紅 雪 The falling flowers scattered on crimson snow.倡 義 十 津 川 Mustering the troops at Totsugawa River,一 蹶 死 何 烈 A single slip, but their deaths so magnificent.112妻 兒 病 且 飢 Though his wife and children were sick and hungry,手 欲 攘 胡 羯 He rose up to rid the land of the barbarian hordes.25 悲 哉 南 嶼 囚 Pitiful is the prisoner of a southern island,望 闕 鐵 腸 裂 Who gazes at the palace gates, his iron innardssundered.稟 生 在 日 城是 氣 誰 不 存一 遇 龍 飛 運Of those who receive life in the Sun kingdomWho is the man that lacks this spirit?Each time the dragon soars up to take the imperialthrone,108The “Righteous Lord” 義 公 was Mito daimyo Tokugawa Mitsukuni, the founder ofthe Mito school who commissioned the compilation of the Dai Nihon shi in 1657, a projectthat was not completed until the beginning of the twentieth century. For a discussion ofthe ideological foundations of the Dai Nihon shi project see Victor Koschmann, The MitoIdeology, pp. 29–55.109The “loyal rōnin” of the Akō Incident carried out their attack on a wintry evening inthe twelfth month of Genroku 15 (30 January 1703).110The reference is to Asami Keisai, author of Seiken igen.111Chūjō refers to Takayama Hikokurō, one of the famed “Three Great Men of theKansei Era.”112Referring to the 1863 Tenchūgumi Incident, the first in which imperial loyalisttroops rose against the shogunate. Led by Nakayama Tadamitsu 中 山 忠 光 and YoshimuraToratarō 吉 村 寅 太 郎 (1837–1863), the uprising was followed by a coup that resulted inthe radical pro-imperial forces being ejected from the capital and making them the targetof both the court and the shogunate.

166 MATTHEW FRALEIGH30 侃 諤 立 朝 論 They unreservedly debate the affairs of court.國 礎 賴 以 固 The national foundation relies on them for solidity;國 體 賴 以 尊 The national polity relies on them for prestige.赫 赫 中 興 業 Shining bright is the great enterpriseof Restoration;大 義 實 爲 根 The great righteousness, truly is the root.35 萬 國 既 會 同 The myriad nations have already conferred,玉 帛 豈 弗 力 How can the jewels and silks of tribute bepowerless?狼 心 或 渝 盟 With their wolfish hearts, they may violate the pact,鼙 鼓 震 朔 北微 吾 仁 義 師Then timbrels and drums will shake the North.Unless we use our army of benevolence andrighteousness,40 泰 平 安 可 得 How can peace be maintained?近 時 楊 墨 徒 In recent times, followers of Yang and Mo流 毒 乘 闇 黑 Have spread poison, taking advantage ofdarkness.113文 書 換 干 戈 Learning is exchanged for weaponry, and四 鄰 企 蠶 食 On all four sides, they scheme to corrode.45 民 懈 良 風 荒 The people grow lazy and the benevolent waysdecay;莠 長 美 田 瘠 Ugly weeds grow, and corpses lie in rice paddies.執 律 凜 冰 霜 If the law is upheld with the cold severity of icyfrost,邪 心 庶 能 易 Then evil thoughts may be possible to change.嗟 我 大 八 洲 Ah, our great Land of the Eight Islands!50 夙 稱 君 子 國 Long we have styled ourselves a country ofgentlemen!乾 靈 有 明 敕 The Heavenly Gods (Amatsukami) have a brightorder,114斷 不 容 此 賊 And they certainly will not countenance thesebandits!113According to Mencius (IIIB.9), the followers of “Yang and Mo” are those whoblock the realization of Confucian morality; see Mencius, trans. D. C. Lau, p. 114. The categoryincludes both extreme individualists, who embody the self-interest advocated byYang Zhu, and those favoring indiscriminate, universal love, in the manner of Mozi.114The term “bright order” also refers to an imperial rescript.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 167蒼 蒼 者 彼 天 Blue is the color of the sky,仰 見 皦 日 白 As I look up at the bright white sun.55 天 潢 流 逾 遠 Like the Heavenly River, the Imperial line flowsever on;寳 祚 曷 有 極 The Jeweled Rank of Emperor—how could itever end?君 仁 而 臣 忠 The sovereign benevolent and his retainers loyal:儼 乎 今 猶 昔 A solemn truth, now as in the past.維 嶽 神 秀 姿 These peaks—figures of the divine,60 萬 年 獻 瑞 色 Have offered their auspicious beauty for eternity.Like Yoshida Shōin’s version, Kokubu Seigai’s “Song of the RighteousSpirit” preserves the rhymes and four-part structure of the original WenTianxiang poem. The prologue in the first section (lines 1–10) assertsthe universal way. The second section (lines 11–26) comprises a gallerythat alludes to eight historical episodes. Each of Seigai’s eight allusionsis made in a single couplet, without the shifts in allusive densityand use of anaphora evident in Wen Tianxiang’s original and in the versionsby Yoshida Shōin and Fujita Tōko. Seigai does, however, make useof the same sort of cross-couplet syntactic links that animated Shōinand Tōko’s versions, such as those that tie lines 15–16 with lines 17–18(re peated proper name, figuration through bodily appendage, and thelike).Moreover, in composing the gallery, Kokubu departs from thestrategies that his two Japanese predecessors used in their versions.Shōin chose to weave the gallery portraits together along a spatial axis,with the references to incidents from over a thousand years of historytriggered by the poet’s own procession across Japan from east to west.Tōko chose to invoke a chronologically sequenced array of historicalexemplars from antiquity to the Tokugawa period. Seigai instead limitshis allusions entirely to the brief time-span of a single era. In spite ofthe reference to the remote antiquity of Emperor Jinmu that occursin the lines preceding the gallery (lines 7–8), the gallery is concernedsolely with the Tokugawa period, and Seigai alludes exclusively to freshinduc tees to the pantheon of cultural heroes.Another important feature of the portraits in Seigai’s gallery is thatmany of the referents are scholars and others who made specific contributionsto Japan’s kanshibun written tradition, such as Toku gawa

168 MATTHEW FRALEIGHMitsukuni 徳 川 光 圀 (1628–1700), in lines 11–12) and Confucianscholar and popularizer of Wen Tianxiang Asami Keisai (lines 15–16).Seigai further emphasizes this shared connection to kanshibun by alludingspecifically to the poetry of the shishi and their Tokugawa ancestors.For example, line 23 ( 妻 兒 病 且 飢 ) refers to the following poemby Umeda Unpin:妻 臥 病 牀 兒 叫 飢挺 身 直 欲 當 戎 夷今 朝 死 別 與 生 別唯 有 皇 天 后 土 知訣 別PartingMy wife lies in her sickbed; the children cry outin hunger;I put myself forward, ready to do battle with thebarbarians.Our parting this morning—will it be final orwill we meet again?Only the gods of Heaven and Earth know.115The second line of Seigai’s couplet ( 手 欲 攘 胡 羯 ) likewise recalls afamous poem by a fallen late Tokugawa shishi—Rai Mikisaburō, theson of Rai San’yō:排 雲 欲 手 掃 妖 熒失 脚 墮 來 江 戸 城井 底 癡 蛙 過 憂 慮天 邊 大 月 缺 高 明身 臨 鼎 鑊 家 無 信獄 中 作Composed in prisonWith a force to part the clouds, I sought tosweep away the evil stars;But I lost my footing, and find myself here inthe city of Edo.Foolish frog deep in the well, my laments grewto excess;But the great moon on the edge of Heavenseemed rather dim.116Now my body may be boiled alive; and thereare no letters from home.115The poem by Umeda Unpin 梅 田 雲 濱 (1815–1859) is reprinted in Takano, Shishibungaku, p. 94.116I have interpreted the first line of this couplet to refer to Rai Mikisaburō himselfand the second to refer to the shogunal officials, but others have interpreted both lines ofthe couplet as criticisms of the shogunal officials.

夢 斬 鯨 鯢 劍 有 聲風 雨 多 年 苔 石 面誰 題 日 本 古 狂 生JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 169In my dreams, I cut down the whales; my swordmakes a sound.Wind and rain will batter for many years itsmossy stone surface;Who will write in memory of this old crazystudent of Japan?117Moreover, the couplet in Seigai’s poem about the Sakuradamon Incident(lines 19–20) may also be a reference to a specific shishi poem, forthe diction harks back to the fourth line of the following valedictorypoem by Kurozawa Chūsaburō 黒 澤 忠 三 郎 (1830–1861), who participatedin the attack:呼 狂 呼 賊 任 人 評多 歳 愁 雲 今 日 晴方 是 櫻 花 好 時 節櫻 天 門 外 血 如 櫻走 筆 作 詩Letting the brush run, I compose a poemCall me crazy, call me a thug—I’ll let themdecideThe dismal clouds endured for years, are at lasttoday clear.And now happens to be the best season forcherry blossoms;Outside the Sakuradamon Gate, blood likecherries.118The final couplet of the gallery, using terms derived from two of hispoems, refers to Saigō Takamori. During Saigō’s second exile, to thesouthern island of Okinoerabu-jima, he was kept prisoner in a cagedenclosure for the first part of his period of banishment, leading himto refer to himself as a “prisoner of a southern island.”119 The secondpoem referenced here is the following, written as Saigō watcheddomain troops:117This poem by Rai Mikisaburō 頼 三 樹 三 郎 (1825–59) is held to be his last; it isreprinted in Takano, Shishi bungaku, pp. 105–6; and in Shimaoka, Shishitachi no uta, pp.125–26. Kusaka Genzui also composed a poem in which Rai Mikisaburō’s line 手 欲 掃 妖熒 appears.118The poem by Kurozawa Chūsaburō is reprinted in Takano, Shishi bungaku, p. 135.119Saigō used this phrase, for example, in the following couplet from his poem“Gokuchū kan ari” 獄 中 有 感 : “My confidantes in the capital have all become ghosts /While I, prisoner on a southern island, alone cheat death” 洛 陽 知 己 皆 爲 鬼 南 嶼 俘 囚 獨竊 生 ; see Ōki, Saigō Nanshū Sensei shishū, pp. 1–3.

170 MATTHEW FRALEIGH送 藩 兵 爲 天 子 親 兵 赴 闕 下The domain troops, serving as imperial soldiers,depart the city gates;I write this poem to send them off王 家 衰 弱 使 人 驚憂 憤 捐 身 千 百 兵忠 義 凝 成 腸 鐵 石爲 楹 爲 礎 築 堅 城The decline of the imperial house leaves thepeople shocked;With righteous indignation, the soldiersoffer themselves up by the hundreds andthousands.Loyalty and righteousness crystallized as ironand stone in their viscera;As pillars, as foundations, they built a sturdyfortress.120Through the incorporation of key phrases that allude to shishi poems,Kokubu Seigai elevates the shishi and their literary compositions intothe gallery of his “Song of the Righteous Spirit”; they have become lociclassici in their own right. The self-referential possibilities exploited bythe shishi poets in the late Tokugawa period made them part of a constantlyevolving domestic tradition of Chinese-language poetry—onethat continued to have a vital relevance well into the Shōwa period.121Moreover, as the publication of annotated shishi poetry anthologiesand the proliferation of key terms such as gyokusai demonstrate, the shishihad an important role as mediators of Chinese discourse, and theirkanshi left their mark on Japanese language discourse as well.We should not ignore the Chinese elements of kanshi, reading themonly in kundoku or as coded waka, for the shishi poet’s understandingof and appreciation for Chinese historical and literary prece dents, aswell as his ability to write with a sensitivity to the kanshi as Chineselanguagediscourse, were important premises for his composition ofChinese verse. However, the strategies that Japanese writers employedin the domestication of Wen Tianxiang and his “Song of the Righteous120Ōki, Saigō Nanshū Sensei shishū, p. 61.121Composition of kanshi continued as a somewhat diminished though still significantform of poetry in Japan through the Pacific War, and even today it remains alive as a rarefiedhobby. In addition to its survival intact as kanshi, the influence of the kanshi form onnew “modern” forms of poetry in Japanese, such as the shintaishi, has been noted by severalscholars; see, for example, Tanikawa, “Shi no arika,” p. 54.

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 171Spirit” also show how the kanshi form could be completely localizedand its referential worlds could be adorned entirely with Japanese portraits.In looking at shishi literature in literary Chinese, and at kanshibunin general for that matter, we must maintain a dualistic perspective thatremains cognizant of both of these features, resisting a schema basedon “national literature,” which might force us into choosing a single orientationor an exclusivist reading paradigm.