was an influential

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

ese

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral or w ...

of the modern era of

Japanese literature Japanese literature throughout most of its history has been influenced by cultural contact with neighboring Asian literatures, most notably China and its literature. Early texts were often written in pure Classical Chinese or , a Chinese-Japanes ...

. He was cofounder (with Hagiwara Kyojiro) of the Dadaist-Anarchist poetry journal ''Aka tokuro'' (Red and Black, 1923–24) and ''Bungei Kaiho'' (Literary liberation, 1927).

History

Tsuboi was born on the island of

Shōdoshima Shōdoshima or is an island located in the Inland Sea of Japan. The name means "Island of Small Beans". There are two towns on the island: Tonoshō and Shōdoshima, composing the district of Shōzu. The island is famous as the setting for th ...

and studied briefly at Waseda University in Tokyo, but he never graduated. He started as a

modernist Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

and

anarchist Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish the institutions it claims maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including, though not necessar ...

, but as

Marxism Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...

grew stronger in Japan, he broke up with the anarchists (which cost him a broken arm) and started to work for the

proletarian The proletariat (; ) is the social class of wage-earners, those members of a society whose only possession of significant economic value is their labour power (their capacity to work). A member of such a class is a proletarian. Marxist philoso ...

movement, writing short political prose pieces and being an active organizer. He was imprisoned twice; for the second time he was imprisoned with other left-wing writers and tortured until he renounced his right to publish anti-government works. This action of the government was intended to discredit the whole movement. He went home to recuperate from his ill treatment in prison. Later Tsuboi returned from the country in despair, feeling as a traitor (he wrote about it in his poems ''Self-portrait'', ''Mask'', and ''Criminal''). He spent the whole war in Tokyo, inactive apart from forming ''Sancho kurabu'' (Sancho Panza Club), writing short humorous prose pieces with hidden anti-war messages. After the war he helped to form two magazines, ''Shin nihon bungaku'' (New Japanese literature) and ''Gendai shi'' (Contemporary poetry) and wrote one of his most popular collections of poetry, ''Fusen'' (Air-balloon, 1957). In 1962 he joined a half dozen other left-wing writers to found the journal ''Shijin kaigi'' oets' Conference dedicated to helping workers, male and female, express their dissatisfactions about the status quo. His wife was the popular Japanese

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspire ...

. Tsuboi's poetry includes influences from traditional Japanese forms like

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 ...

to European movements such as anarchism, Marxism,

dada Dada () or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (in 1916). New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Pari ...

and

surrealism Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to ...

Works

* ''Egg in my Palm: Selected Poetry of Tsuboi Shigeji''. Translated and compiled by

Robert Epp Robert Charles Epp (born December 15, 1926) is a translator of Japanese literature into English. Among others, he has translated the poetry of Hagiwara Sakutarō, Maruyama Kaoru, Tachihara Michizō, and Daisaku Ikeda. A.M., Ph.D. Harvard Univers ...

. Stanwood, WA: Yakusha, 1993, 278 pages.

References

*Novák, Miroslav, ''Ulice plná plášťů do deště'', SNKLU,

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...

, 1963 {{DEFAULTSORT:Tsuboi, Shigeji 1897 births 1975 deaths Japanese activists Japanese Marxists Marxist writers 20th-century Japanese poets