［essay］Introduction / Ryuichi Tani

I am researching changes in the modern and contemporary poetry scene in Kansai.

Home to the Osaka Literature School, the Kansai Folk movement in the 1960s and ’70s, and occasional flurries of public readings, the region has emerged as a cultural sphere quite distinct from the Tokyo-based literary scene.

I have been conducting research on individual topics and subjects, taking a sporadic rather than a comprehensive approach, searching for what has and has not appeared in Kansai poetry.

I encountered contemporary poetry online while a student at Higashi Maizuru High School in Kyoto, and began writing my own, but eventually, after various vicissitudes, began a career in theater.

From high school to my time at Yamaguchi University, I was mainly involved in theater in Yamaguchi, and also, from around the turn of the century, helping a partner in crime to organize events in the Kyoto poetry scene.

Though I understand how I felt in terms of the changes that took place around that period, and what was said, I didn’t have the opportunity to put things in order systematically. And that situation of not being able to sort things out in my own way remained the case until the present.

For the research in this project, I wanted to seek out the places, people, and incidents yet to become poetry by arranging what’s what in Kansai (and specifically, Kyoto) poetry in my own manner.

This would seem, in effect, to lead to a search for examples of the obscure or local, which don’t get written down in poetry.

I am especially interested right now in the work of Kazuyuki Hosomi.

Born in Tamba-Sasayama, Hyogo, Hosomi is both a poet and a teacher at Kyoto University, known for his writings on poets and the trauma of the Holocaust, and Gim Si-jong, who migrated to Japan from the Korean Peninsula, and lived in Osaka’s Korea Town.

I am particularly curious about Hosomi’s research on Yoshiro Ishihara. He was a poet who was interned as a prisoner of war in Siberia until he returned to Japan. Former Siberian internees were repatriated first to Maizuru, on the Sea of Japan coast of Kyoto Prefecture. I lived there during high school and remember being taken by my grandfather when I was young to the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum.

Hosomi has recently returned to Sasayama and, as a reader, his poetry seems to have changed quite a lot with his collections Family Portrait (Kazoku no shozo) and Dark Bath (Yamiburo). His work has veered more toward the local, the obscure.

That being said, in terms of what I will do at Kyoto Experiment, my first motivation is to repay my debt to the Kansai poetry scene for shaping the basis for building a career in the arts. Well, at any rate, these are personal, obscure tidbits. I hope you enjoy my contributions to Kansai Studies.