Songs of Wandering (Hōrō no uta, 1925) is an anthology of shintaishi or “new-form verse” composed by the twenty-five poet members of the “Wandering Poetry Society” (Hōrō no shisha). The anthology’s editor, poet Isshin Yamazaki, would go on to become a prolific anthologist of Japanese-language Japanese American literature, producing the volumes Hokubei bungeisenshū (Selected Literary Works of North America, 1927), Amerika bungeishū (Collected Literary Works of America, 1930), and Amerika bungaku (Literature of America, 1937).
Featuring a cover engraving designed by Shiei Kōtoku (幸徳死影)—nephew of the Japanese anarchist martyr Kōtoku Shūsui (幸徳秋水)—the contents of the anthology were politically and formally wide-ranging. The opening poem, “The Morning the Glaciers Melt” (氷河の解ける朝), by socialist organizer Yoshio Nishimura (西村義雄), is also the collection’s longest: a seven-page paean to Marxist-Leninist philosophy. Printed only six months after the April 1925 passage of the anti-communist Peace Preservation Law in Japan, this poem illustrates how Nishimura and other leftist members of the Wandering Poetry Society took advantage of their relative freedom to produce poems in the United States that would not have been publishable in Japan.
Some of the shorter, less explicitly political poems in the collection speak to the daily lives and loves of Japanese expatriates and immigrants residing in the United States. The second poet, Seiko Yamaguchi (山口精子)—also the only poet in the collection with a feminine given name—contributed three shorter poems. Although highly condensed, the poems invoke three separate feminine personae ranging from the domestic, to the erotic, to the maternal. A woman rinses vegetables but pauses to view the sunset in “An Evening in Late Autumn;” a mourner invites a young traveler to share the warmth of her room during a “Winter Night;” and a mother sings a “Lullaby” to her child while remembering the loss of her own mother in a land far away.
Still other poems blend the political and the personal, imagining communal solidarity through fellow feeling and mutual enjoyment of song, drink, and dance. One of the most notable poems in this hybrid category is Yojūrō Sujishi’s (筯師與十郞) “Moon” (月). Set to the rhythm of a drinking song, Sujishi’s poem addresses a pan-ethnic collective of “we Asian immigrants” (Ajia imin no warera) whose cross-national literary traditions include many poems celebrating the consumption of wine in moonlight. Since Sujishi was writing at the height of Prohibition (1919-1933), readers would have appreciated the poem’s two-pronged indictment of the US’s exclusion of Asian immigration and prohibition of alcohol.
Taken as a whole, Songs of Wandering provides a wide-ranging composite portrait of Japanese-language Japanese American poetry in the mid-1920s. Although most of the contributors resided in California, the anthology also included contributions from poets in Oregon, Colorado, and New York. The poets also seem to have taken full advantage of the situational freedoms afforded by publishing a Japanese-language Japanese American poetry anthology in the United States. On the one hand, there were no Japanese censors who could restrict leftist political content in the name of “peace preservation,” and on the other, no American postmasters would have been proficient enough in Japanese to recognize potentially “obscene, lewd or lascivious” accounts of sex, prostitution, or drug and alcohol use. The result is a collection of vibrant, uninhibited poems that shatter stereotypical images of the “Issei,” or first-generation Japanese Americans, as socially quiescent and emotionally restrained.