Kuroiwa Ruikō

Poetry and Music for the Common People

Kuroiwa Ruikō By Unknown author - This image is available from the website of the National Diet Library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11304406

Serial novelist. Son of a low-ranking samurai. Journalist. Nationalist, Activist on behalf of people of color. Mystery devotee. Kuroiwa Ruikō (1862-1920) was all these things and more. After working as a journalist for several years, he founded his own newspaper, Yorozu Chōhō, a publication which added depth to the news business in Taishō Japan. It served as a vehicle for Kuroiwa’s serialized mystery novels, and published society news, entertainment news, and various goings-on-about town in Tokyo and throughout Japan.

Idealogically, Kuroiwa was adjacent to the group of poets and writers that included Yosano Akiko and her husband Yosano Tekkan. Like Akiko and poet Kitahara Hakushu, Kuroiwa was born in Japan’s countryside - specifically Kochi - and moved to the capital to seek his fortune. Like them, he felt nostalgic for Japan’s samurai past but worked hard toward a modern future. Perhaps for this reason, throughout his life he tended to associate a cultural idea of ‘Japan’ with peasants and the countryside. Despite his residence in Tokyo, dependence upon the urban masses for his living, and devotion to Western literature, for Kuroiwa, Tokyo was not really Japan. It was the wave face where traditional Japanese culture met the modern world. In 1892 he founded his newspaper as a part of that leading edge, protecting Japan’s history and culture while leading them into the new world.

By 1904, part of Kuroiwa’s new world was Japan’s war with Russia. Like many Japanese, he saw the war as a way to remove the taint of humiliation brought on by the Triple Intervention when France, Germany, and Russia forced Japan under threat to return the territories it had claimed in the war with China, only to claim those very territories themselves. The war with Russia provided an opportunity for vindication, and revenge. Kuroiwa, already an avid nationalist, decided to use his newspaper as a mouthpiece to bolster Japanese nationalism and support the war effort.

In 1904, Yorozu Chōhō started what became a long-running poetry contest among its readers. The contest was designed to encourage ordinary Japanese, not accomplished literary or musical types, to produce a ‘new’ old kind of poem - what Kuroiwa called riyō seichō (authentic folk songs).^[1] Kuroiwa’s plan was to have amateur Japanese poets - in his mind ‘real Japanese’ - add to the traditions of Japanese poetry. Because they were not elites or literary artists, but ordinary people, he did not want them to submit traditional waka or haiku poetry for the contest. Instead, he asked for submissions of riyō seichō. According to Music historian Nakamura Tōyō, Kuroiwa’s idea was that while waka and tanka and haiku were poetic forms that were frequently referred to as “songs,” they were not actually intended to be set to music. The poems that Kuroiwa called riyō seichō were actually songs sung by peasants. This made them the “authentic” folk song form of Japan.

To guarantee this supposedly authentic folk style, he wrote a set of rules for submissions. Kuroiwa had a vision of what would make a good riyō seichō, but he was never able to really make his definition clear. Borrowing from actually existing poems he had seen in some rural areas, he asked for poems that used a 26-syllable form broken into 3 lines of 7-syllables each, and one line of 5 syllables.^[2] These rules codified a kind of poetry that seems to have existed, but never until 1904 as a set form. He named them traditional and authentic because, he said, they originated with the “folk” and had a rustic style understandable by authentic Japanese rural people. So the twenty-six syllable form came to be defined in the minds of many amateurs as traditional.

However, Kuroiwa did not require these folk songs to have some direct historical connection with ancient songs or poems. With the exception of the 7-7-7-5 verse form, their version of authenticity seems to have had more to do with righteousness than with traditional poetic themes.^[6] Many entries consisted of sentimental emotional nationalism and patriotic sentiment that were unrelated to any local or general Japanese traditions. Despite his attempts at official codification of the riyō seichō style, readers found ways to try to make their poems stand out. One quite frequent innovation was to have them set to music.^[3] Others used what they believed were imaginative or original literary devices. Some departed from the form altogether. Many praised the soldiers and sailors in the Japanese military, or functioned as prayers for victory or acclaimed the heroics of specific people or battles. Few seem to have reached the level of accomplishment found in published volumes of waka and tanka. Of those that did, it is likely that not a few were submitted by actual accomplished poets moonlighting as someone else.

The competition became popular, then heated. Other newspapers got in on the game, creating their own contests. The poems came more and more to represent patriotism over the Russo-Japanese war, which explains why their popularity died out after the war ended. Even Kuroiwa himself came to feel some regret over beginning the contest, as judging it was apparently exceedingly difficult. Still, Riyō seichō added to the popularity of expressions of Japanese culture and essential identity.^[4] This expression lent itself to the nationalism that was on display during the Hibiya Riot of 1905, itself a direct reflection of the Japanese masses (mis)understanding of the Russo-Japanese War. Nevertheless, this essentialization of Japanese ‘tradition’ made its way into popular music, popular movies, and the iconography of Japanese culture, where it can still be seen more than 120 years later.

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^[1] Nakamura, " Early pop song writers and their backgrounds.", 272.

^[2] Kuroiwa Ruiko, "1904 Yorozu Choho riyo seicho solicitation notice," in Standard Versions of Riyo, ed. Kuroiwa Hideo (Tokyo: Bungeisha, 1928). Quoted in Nakamura, " Early pop song writers and their backgrounds.", p. 281.

^[3] ———, " Early pop song writers and their backgrounds."275.

^[4] Ibid., 273.

^[5] Ibid., 273-276.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Urō Nakayama, Nakayama Shimpei sakyoku kokuroku nenpyo [Nakayama Shimpei: A Chronology of a composer] (1980), 321.