"Culture and Bushido"

The way of the gentleman in the West is simply chivalry transformed by capitalist systematization. In the West, in order to prevent foreign incursions, citizens from early on banded together as soldiers taking up military service to meet the enemy. There, among them, the spirit of the warrior (bushido) would quite early pass into the hands of the people. Gallant calls for freedom and people's rights as well as pushes to purge the land of feudalism all exhibit a resolute bushido spirit rooted in the citizenry.

          Japan's misfortune is not that feudalism continued so long as it did, but that the bushido produced by feudalism did not spread to the citizenry. Japanese samurai once exhibited a bushido spirit likely unmatched in the world. Yet the common people of Japan are unmatched in the world in being un-bushido-like commoners, and ungentlemanly. Even the Meiji capitalist revolution was not led by commoners but by samurai. Thus the biggest misfortune is that from the Edo arts produced by this people, Japanese culture as a whole became vulgar, letting go of any high-toned nobility or romanticism.

(Hagiwara Sakutarō, Hagiwara Sakutarō zenshū, vol. 5. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1976, 82.)

"The New Lust"

People are in search of a new lust. As when one thinks of something that should be there but is not, people now thirst for a new undefined lust. The new passion, even if just reflecting our daring fantasies, still seems to present magnificent landscapes. In this way the future—from a distance—does not appear strange so much as feel rather like a cubist reality to us. Within this reality, though an [artistic] movement cannot yet be discerned, various styles of architecture and related underlying patterns—as in designs for upcoming world expositions—will likely catch the eye and stir new interests in the hearts of people in the world. Yet, until this time comes, I think we prefer to keep secret the "most scintillating areas" of our emotions. Now we sleep, lying low while designing new styles of architecture. So let us work together to constitute a design so as to bring together both those people who do not dream and those people who are full of aspiration.

(Hagiwara Sakutarō, Hagiwara Sakutarō zenshū, vol. 4. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1975, 13-14.)

Aphoristic Writings by Hagiwara Sakutarō (萩原朔太郎)

In the coming months I will be posting translations of prose by Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942), one of the most influential poets of prewar modern Japan. In these short essays and excerpts, he seems drawn to exploring modern life in light of the paradoxes of Japanese state ideology, Western thought and culture, and anachronistic appropriations of premodern institutions (such as bushido) all within a frame modeled after Nietzsche's aphoristic critiques of modernity. Hagiwara's interrogations of modern phenomena often contradict himself in other aphorisms and thus (like Nietzsche) he presents multiple positions and masks. 

The passages chosen for translation are not meant to hold Hagiwara up on a pedestal in admiration. My intention is to try to better understand the social antagonisms of Japanese society at the various times of their writing and thus fill in a better genealogical understanding of Japanese society and cultures in the interwar period and also cultural inflections of nationalism and militarism in the 1930s. His multifaceted aphoristic fragments perhaps may help us discern complicated tensions in the society at the time of writing, tensions that often get smoothed over in reductive summaries of the period.

The two posts to follow are two passages from two of his collections of aphorisms. The first is taken from a preface to his work The New Lust (Atarashii yokujō, 1922) in which he sees an avant-garde art and architecture movement in the making, borne of an amorphous aesthetic intuition that resembles a sexual longing but suggests an orientation toward the formation of the next global art movement. The second post is from Escape from Despair (Zetsubō no tōsō, 1935), an aphorism titled "Culture and Bushido" (translated in full).