NEW YORK -- A gentleman named Paul Preusser, describing himself as "a composer and fresh graduate from the New England Conservatory," has recently written to ask if I could help him with poems of Kotaro Takamura (1883-1956). He has been commissioned to compose "a song cycle using poetry which is influenced by war," and plans to include poems in six languages: English, French, German, Polish, Russian and Japanese.
With Takamura, he'd like to use a jingoistic poem as well as one expressing regret over his stance during the war.
Preusser's preliminary research was correct. Takamura wrote both kinds of poems. In his youth a powerful advocate of "Western values," among them the need for an artist to be independent and true to himself, rather than, say, digesting and mastering traditions, he began to accept and uphold his country's nationalist causes during the 1930s as Japan's military meddling in China faced mounting international criticism. Many of the poems he wrote from the end of the decade until Japan's defeat, in 1945, were certainly jingoistic, studded as they were with rightwing slogans and self-serving arguments, such as that Western powers were in East Asia "for profit," while Japan was "for justice."