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

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.