After Commodore Matthew Perry (1794-1858) demanded the opening of Japan to the world in 1853, renowned Japanese thinker and educator Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835-1901) visited the United States of America twice, in 1860 and 1867. Fukuzawa translated into Japanese Thomas Jefferson’s drafted “The Declaration of Independence” (1776), the democratic spirit of which he incorporated into his own million seller An Encouragement of Learning (1872). While Fukuzawa promoted Japan’s modernization and reform of its education system by advocating the Anglo-American example, it is also true that influence went the other way, too, with traditional Japanese literature shaping western modernist writings around the turn of the century during the heyday of Japonisme.
A striking instance of this is Yone Noguchi (Noguchi Yonejirō, 1875-1947), an international poet in the US and the UK who had studied at Keio University, the private school Fukuzawa established in 1858. Noguchi taught western poets such as William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound the essence of Noh theatre and haiku poetry. He argued too for a literary analogy between the master of Japanese haiku, Matsuo Bashō (1644-94), and the major voice of American Romantic poetry Walt Whitman (1819-92). Hence, Pound’s masterpiece: “In a Station of the Metro” (1913): “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” Deeply inspired by the Haiku poetics of Arakida Moritake (1473-1549), with this poem Pound succeeded in creating the exemplary Imagist poem, and revolutionizing western literature in the process.
While Noguchi stimulated Anglo-American modernists, Nishiwaki Junzaburō studied in England in the 1920s and digested the literary fruits of the modernist movement as represented by Pound and T.S. Eliot. Nishiwaki transplanted Modernist seeds in the Japanese literary soil with his translation of Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land (1922), and by publishing his own surrealist poems. Take a glance at his first collection of poetry Ambarvalia (1933), which opens with the following poem entitled “Weather”: “On a morning of an upturned gem / Someone whispers to somebody at the doorway. / This is the day a god is born.” This is undoubtedly a beautiful poem filled with sublime images. However, we would be remiss if we failed to notice how it opens with an allusion to British poet John Keats’ Endymion (1818). Nishiwaki simply translated Keats’ passage “an upturned gem” directly into Japanese. What is more, the poet composed its second and third lines with an eye to Edward Burne-Jones’ illustration for Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400). Whereas the romantic geniuses that shaped Yone Noguchi’s opus were well-known for their emphasis on originality, the modernist poets with whom Nishiwaki Junzaburō felt strong affinities pioneered the poetics of quotations, which was laid out in the idea of the “simultaneous order” of literary history detailed in Eliot’s Modernist manifesto “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). Then, Pound, who met Noguchi in the 1910s, so highly esteemed Nishiwaki’s poetry as to recommend him as a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.
In this way, Modernist literature is nothing less than the fruits of intercultural transactions. Although Noguchi and NIshiwaki have rarely been mentioned in Anglo-American literary history, we should not ignore the fact that these Japanese geniuses promoted a Modernist poetics of transnational intertextuality.
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