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

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