was a Japanese poet, activist, and survivor of the

atomic bombing of Hiroshima The United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, respectively. The two bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the onl ...

Biography

He was born Mitsuyoshi Tōge in

Osaka is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third most populous city in Japan, following Special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. With a population of ...

as the youngest son of Ki'ichi Tōge, a successful manufacturer of bricks. From the start Tōge was a sickly child, suffering from asthma and periodic vomiting. He graduated from Hiroshima Prefecture's school of commerce in 1935, and started working for the Hiroshima Gas Company. In 1938 Tōge was diagnosed, wrongly, with

tuberculosis Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by '' Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections show no symptoms, i ...

. Believing himself to have only a few years to live, he spent most of his time as an invalid. In 1948 Tōge learned that the diagnosis was wrong. He had bronchiectasis, an enlargement of the bronchial tube. He started composing poems in the second year of middle school. Early influences included

Tolstoy Count Lev Nikolayevich TolstoyTolstoy pronounced his first name as , which corresponds to the romanization ''Lyov''. () (; russian: link=no, Лев Николаевич Толстой,In Tolstoy's day, his name was written as in pre-refor ...

, Heine,

Tōson Shimazaki was the pen-name of Haruki Shimazaki, a Japanese writer active in the Meiji, Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan. He began his career as a Romantic poet, but went on to establish himself as a major proponent of Japanese Naturalism. Ea ...

, and Haruo Sato. In 1938 he read his first piece of

proletarian literature Proletarian literature refers here to the literature created by left-wing writers mainly for the class-consciousness, class-conscious proletariat. Though the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' states that because it "is essentially an intended device of ...

. In December 1942, he was baptized into the Catholic Church. By 1945 he composed three thousand

tanka is a genre of classical Japanese poetry and one of the major genres of Japanese literature. Etymology Originally, in the time of the '' Man'yōshū'' (latter half of the eighth century AD), the term ''tanka'' was used to distinguish "short p ...

and even more

haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or s ...

. They were mostly lyric poems. Twenty-four-year-old Tōge was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city. By 1951 he was writing poetry startlingly different from his earlier efforts. In 1949 Toge joined the

Japanese Communist Party The is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left List of political parties in Japan, political party in Japan. With approximately 270,000 members belonging to 18,000 branches, it is one of the largest non-governing Communis ...

. His first collection of the atomic bomb works, ''Genbaku Shishu'' ("Poems of the Atomic Bomb") was published in 1951. Tōge died at the age of 36 in the operating room in Hiroshima. His first-hand experience with the atomic bomb, his passion for peace and his realistic insight into the event made him the leading poet in Hiroshima.

''Genbaku Shishu'' (Poems of the Atomic Bomb)

References

External links

Unpublished writings by Sankichi Toge, well-known A-bomb poet, are discoveredHiroshima Piano (2020 Film) (Official Website)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Toge, Sankichi Hibakusha 1917 births 1953 deaths 20th-century Japanese poets

Biography

''Genbaku Shishu'' (Poems of the Atomic Bomb)

See also

References

Further reading

External links