Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the Outadokoro poets’ embarking upon socio-literary commentaries to unfolding international and domestic events from 1904 onwards, in the form of tanka columns published in the pro-government newspaper Kokumin Shinbun.

Paper long abstract:

The Imperial Poetry Bureau (Outadokoro 御歌所) was established in 1869 as a court ministry in the Imperial Household Agency and as part of a tide of Meiji-era institutions which sought to imitate the Nara-era prestige of the imperial court in order to legitimize the political myth of the Meiji imperial restoration. The bureau consisted mostly of scholars affiliated with kokugaku and Shinto studies. In addition to editing and critiquing poetry by members of the imperial family and court nobility, the most long-lasting of the Outadokoro's activities was the reinvention of the New Year’s imperial poetry competition, utakai hajime 歌会始. In my paper I turn to a less established form of literary and political commentary from 1904 onwards, namely the publication of waka poems by Outadokoro poets in the Kokumin Shinbun 国民新聞. Its leader, Takasaki Masakaze 高崎正風, and other members such as Chiba Taneaki 千葉胤明, Ōguchi Taiji 大口鯛二 and Ban Masaomi 阪正臣 regularly wrote tanka on unfolding international and domestic events, such as the extensively researched Russo-Japanese War. Other significant political events adorned with literary commentary ranged from the Emperor Meiji’s participation to military drills, his visits to Yasukuni shrine, the launching of military vessels during the war, to the 1905 visit of American Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, or the 1909 assassination of Itō Hirobumi. I argue that such tanka publications in columns by Outadokoro members, occasionally accompanied by poems of military generals or state diplomats, can be seen as a literary voice of the government, or state poetry, in the context of the Kokumin Shinbun’s tight relations to the late Meiji government, which gained it the biting epithet of ‘government’s mouthpiece.’ The use of printed media such as national newspapers in the creation of national identity has been thoroughly analyzed by existing scholarship (Anderson 1983). In the pages of late Meiji’s Kokumin Shinbun, the national consciousness was reaffirmed and the government’s watchful eye expressed through the Outadokoro poets’ socio-literary commentary in tanka of warring qualities from the imperial panegyric to empathetic listening to the people’s plight.