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

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