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Paper short abstract

This paper shows how state-sanctioned poets used waka and shintaishi to disseminate political myths, shaping subjects through the New Year’s Imperial Poetry Reading, school songs, and wartime verse that framed the emperor as paternal ruler of a divinely sanctioned nation-family.

Paper long abstract

A Chicago Tribune article from January 1904, titled “Japan, the Land that Poets Rule: The Emperor’s New Year’s Poem Sets the Motive for Fashion in Art, Dress and Ceremony”, portrayed a country swept each year by the fervour of the New Year’s Imperial Poetry Reading (utakai hajime). Its imperially assigned poetic theme was said to shape practices across society, from amateur poetry circles to trends in art, fashion, photography, and the postcard industry. Examples from the international press show how Japan’s politicised poetry came to be perceived abroad as a defining national trait, especially during the Russo-Japanese War.

This phenomenon was rooted in the activities of conservative poets who served as government ideologues in the Imperial Bureau of Poetry (Outadokoro). They sought to forge a link between waka, regarded as quintessentially Japanese, and the newly articulated nation of restored imperial rule. Within this framework, waka for the utakai hajime became a tool of subject formation. Beyond organising the ceremony, Outadokoro poets dominated the literary world until the 1890s, publishing widely in newspapers and cultural journals for audiences ranging from intellectuals to women and youth. They also composed ideologically-laden school songs for national holidays and for the curriculum.

My paper examines how Outadokoro poets employed waka and shintaishi to disseminate political myths centred on the imperial institution, which played a central role in Meiji state ideology. These included the myth of an unbroken imperial line descending from the sun goddess Amaterasu and the foundational myth of Emperor Jinmu, reinforced by Confucian thought and, from the 1880s, by a conception of the nation as a family with the emperor as its father. Numerous poems published under the Bureau’s auspices reflect these ideological elements: from Emperor Meiji’s 1904 poems portraying him as a concerned father of a nation at war, to military poems, school hymns, and utakai hajime compositions that highlight mythological motifs and the continuity of Japan as a land granted to the emperors by the kami.