Paper short abstract:

The pre-war poetry of Sarashina Genzō links proletarian politics, Ainu ethnography and transnational literary consciousness. As a historical source it offers insights into the ideological currents of the time. Poetic ethnography also raises key questions about interdisciplinarity and translation.

Paper long abstract:

Historians of Japan have long relied on poetry as source, although more often in reference to the pre-modern period. In the modern era, poetry is often cited to qualify traumatic events, such as Yosano Akiko's pacifist poem to her brother during the Russo-Japanese War. Translating and analysing 1920s and 30s' Hokkaido poetry offers new insights into the socio-political tensions of the time. It also raises intriguing methodological questions.

The poetry of Sarashina Genzō (1903-1984) is particularly valuable as it is located at the crossroads of proletarian politics, Ainu ethnography and transnational literary consciousness. Sarashina's work sheds light on the conflicted feelings of impoverished migrant-settlers toward the Ainu; they identified with the plight of the natives but also wished to distance themselves from their fate. His ambiguous take on Darwinism challenged the official ideology of development in Hokkaido and echoed the tenets of transnational anarchist thought. Inter-textual analysis reveals the poet's belief in a 'humanistic ethnography' which nuances the conventional interpretation of ethnography of the period as an ideological tool used to justify Japanese colonial expansion.

Methodological questions arise because of the interdisciplinary nature of the historical investigation. Sarashina's work, with its varied and intermingling voices from different cultures, is both creative writing and ethnography. While the time-consuming and often arduous translation process allows a heightened understanding of what specific historical events mean in their ideological context, this same process creates an emotional bond with the text, which enhances subjectivity. The historian as translator must therefore establish a distance from the text while analysing the poetry as poetry, which is to say a complex and multi-layered artistic production. This back-and forth movement between the fictional and the non-fictional, the subjective and the objective, validates Japanese pre-war anarchist poetry as historical source.