Tekkan Yosano

Tekkan Yosano, a Japanese author and poet working under the pen name Yosano Hiroshi, who advocated for the reform of Japanese poetry, was also responsible for bringing the first Parisian Cubist artworks to public view in Tokyo in 1913.

The son of a Buddhist priest from Kyoto’s Yosa district, Yosano graduated from the private Keio University in Minato, Tokyo. He initially taught Japanese at an all-female rural school until he was forced to resign for inappropriate conduct. After relocating to Tokyo, he began to write for local newspapers and, in 1894, penned the critical manifesto “Bokoku no ne” (Sounds of a Decaying Country), in which he called for the reform of waka (classical Japanese poetry). The movement he led aimed to make Japanese writing more modern and populist by reviving the ancient practice of tanka, a type of short-verse poem consisting of thirty-one syllables in five lines. Following the publication of his manifesto, Yosano released a selection of poetry, Tōzai namboku (East-West, North-South, 1896), which featured tanka, shintaishi and renga: three styles of poetry that contributed to the renewal of Japanese literature around the turn of the twentieth century. Three years later, in 1899, he helped to found the New Poet Society, and, in February 1900, to launch its literary mouthpiece, the avant-garde monthly journal Myōjō (Bright Star), which was published until November 1908. Myōjō immediately drew the attention of established tanka poets including Kitahara Hakushū, Yoshii Isamu, and Ishikawa Takuboku. Among its earliest contributors was Yosano’s future wife Hō Shō, who, after their marriage in 1901, began to write as Yosano Akiko.

Little is known about Yosano’s sojourn in Paris. His wife secured funds for a trip to Europe in late 1911 to motivate and re-inspire Yosano, whose creative spirits had fallen; she joined him the following spring. According to newspaper reports, the couple was still in France by September 1912. Yosano returned to Japan from Paris with three Cubist paintings—a landscape painting by André Lhote and two pictures recorded as Landscape and River by Jean Metzinger—that were shown at the Shirakaba-ha’s (White Birch Society) Sixth Art Exhibition (Dai roku kai bijutsu tenrankai) from April 11 to 20, 1913. Organized at the Toranomon Diet Members Club, the exhibition also included the work of Paul Cézanne, Honoré Daumier, Maurice Denis, Kees van Dongen, Otto Fritz, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Rudolph von Hoffmann, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Odilon Redon, Auguste Rodin, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. A coterie of artists, critics, and writers, including Arishima Ikuma and Mushanokōji Saneatsu, who renounced Confucianism and traditional Japanese literary and artistic styles, the White Birch Society promoted Western aesthetics—chiefly Post-Impressionism and Expressionism—as well as cultural ideals such as idealism, humanism, and individualism. Although its homonymous journal was the primary outlet for Shirakaba-ha, the modern European art exhibitions that it organized between 1911 and 1923, the year its journal ceased publication, were equally important venues for circulating Western ideas. Presenting a mix of reproductions and also original paintings by Lhote, Metzinger, Picasso and likely others, the Shirakaba-ha’s Sixth Art Exhibition provided the first opportunity for audiences in Japan to see Cubist works of art. As reported in the society’s journal and in other publications at the time, its display was met with controversy and confusion.