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

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