Behind the Words: Hanami

So this was part of a series of political stories I wrote at the end of the first decade of the century while the economy was turning to shit and I was trying to understand what was going wrong and what, if anything, could be done about it (I already wrote about this here). Hanami is the point where this line of curiosity merged with my interest in Japanese history.

The two great eras of modern Japan are Meiji (1868-1912) and Shōwa (1926-1989). Japanese eras are defined by the reign of the monarch, though the era receives a name that they hope will define it. Shōwa is actually the reign of Hirohito but no one in Japan ever refers to him that way: he is known as the Shōwa Emperor (Shōwa means Enlightened Peace or Radiant Japan depending on your reading/political leanings). In between these two long, nation-defining periods came Taishō (1912-1926), a 14 year reign marked by the weakness of the emperor and by domestic political turbulence, both good and bad.

We know how the Taishō era ended, with the rise of militarism, increased incursion into the Asian mainland and finally the Pacific War, but for people at the time, there was considerable optimism in the air. Taishō democracy was nascent, press freedoms, an increase in social freedom and disposable income, particularly for young women (this was the era of the moga - the modern girl. Sarah Frederick’s book Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan is worth a read if you’re interested in this), and a generation born into a modern, western-looking Japan, meant new fashions of clothes, culture and intellectual thought were everywhere. Taishō is often overlooked by historians and those interested in Japan, but it fascinates me.

Hanami is set in this period and is inspired by, though I strongly stress NOT based on Ōsugi Sakae and Itō Noe, anarchists who, along with Ōsugi’s nephew, were murdered by the police in 1923. Ōsugi (the image at the top is of him) wrote an autobiography which is historically interesting but really not worth bothering with. This story is entirely my invention motivated by my fascination with the period, the politics, and the sadness of a hypothetical Japan that was snuffed out first by Japanese militarism and then by US “red terror”.

I might return to Taishō one day. What ifs are the lifeblood of fiction and those 14 years are packed with them.

The poem at the end was written by Narihara, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, and included in his book One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. It is for my money the most perfect example of the death poem, mixing shock, sadness and acceptance in a few mere words. Beautiful.