Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the representations of the Russo-Japanese War’s battlefields and soldiers in Mori Ōgai’s Uta nikki (1907), analyzing the indirect or absent representations of the enemy Russia, and the relationship between these depictions and the illustrations included in the published book.

Paper long abstract

This paper will examine the representations of the Russo-Japanese War’s battlefields and soldiers in Mori Ōgai’s Uta nikki (Verse Diary, 1907), analyzing the indirect or absent representations of the enemy Russia, and the relationship between these depictions, and the illustrations and photographs included in the published book. It is well established that Ōgai’s professional and intellectual activities encompassed writing, poetry, translating, criticism, military medicine and bureaucracy. He served in the Russo-Japanese War from February 1904 to January 1906 as Chief Medical Officer of the Second Army, experiencing the battles in Manchuria. During this period, Ōgai diligently composed short poems, long poems, tanka and haiku between the demands of his duties as a doctor. After returning to Japan, in September 1907, he published Uta nikki from the publisher Shunyō-dō, which contained over 400 poems he had written during the Russo-Japanese War alongside translated war poems from German into Japanese. Moreover, this war poetry anthology included 46 illustrations and photographs; the illustrations were drawn by three artists, Ashiwara Ryokushi, Kubota Beisai and Terasaki Kōgyō, who were friends with Ōgai. Previous studies revealed that Uta nikki was an experimental war poetry anthology, which disrupted the boundaries of Japanese poetic genres, expanded Japanese poetic vocabulary and diversified versification. Many scholars also focused on Ashiwara’s life and the characteristics of his illustrations in Uta nikki from the perspective of Japanese Art History. However, considerable scope remains for further research into the representations of war, battlefields, Russia as the enemy, and Japan and its soldiers in Uta nikki, as well as the unique combination of Ōgai’s poetry with illustrations and photographs. In clarifying these points, it is worth paying attention to the indirect representation or even the absence of representation of Russia from both Ōgai’s poetry and the illustrations and photographs that accompany it. This reveals, on the one hand the image of Russia as an enemy nation held by Ōgai, the military doctor, but also his different perspective on Russia and its soldiers as a poet and private individual, a perspective imbued with sympathy and a faint sense of affinity toward them in severe circumstances.