Rabindranath Tagore: The Foreigner Who Visited the Juku

2017/04/04

Around the time of his visit to the Juku in 1916

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941, or Robindronath Thakur in his native Bengali), the 1913 Nobel Laureate in Literature, first visited Japan in 1916 (Taisho 5) and came to Mita. He did so not once, but twice. His lecture on July 2, held in the former Main Auditorium at the site of the current West School Building, is well-known because it became part of a seminal book sounding an alarm against modern civilization. However, his first visit to the Juku on June 13 has been almost forgotten. The Mita-hyoron (official monthly journal published by Keio University Press), which had begun publication as a Juku periodical in January of the previous year, records the event as follows.

"On June 13 at 8:30 a.m., the Indian poet-saint Mr. Tagore, who has been visiting our country recently, arrived at the Juku by carriage accompanied by Dr. Anesaki and his attendant Mr. Andrews. On the Juku side, President Kamada and various other professors welcomed the party at the library entrance and guided them to the Memorial Room, where they were served tea and sweets. From there, Mr. Tagore toured the library, the Gepparo room, the reading room, and other facilities. He then stood on the upstairs balcony and, while wearing a satisfied smile toward the more than 6,000 students from the college, Keio Futsubu School, Commercial and Industrial School, and Yochisha Elementary School, delivered a greeting as summarized below. He then rested again in the Memorial Room, engaged in cordial conversation with the President, secretaries, and professors, signed the guest book, and quietly departed at 9:00 a.m. through the ranks of students."

His short greeting to the students clearly conveys the thoughts of a poet-educator who managed his own school, so I would like to quote it here.

"Seeing you gathered here, I feel as if I am facing the beauty of flowers in full bloom. Because of my natural disposition to love and cherish youth, meeting you students who overflow with the spirit of youth throughout your country makes me feel deeply nostalgic for my own past youth, and conversely, I feel a keen sense of hope for the prosperity of the Land of the Rising Sun. You are by no means strangers; rather, you are my most beloved friends who should work together in unity for the sake of world humanity. It is my hope that you will hold ever firmer convictions and leap forward toward your ideals."

On July 2, Tagore visited the Juku again for a lecture held at 4:00 p.m. The lecture was a joint event organized by a three-university alliance including Waseda University and Japan Women's University. President Eikichi Kamada served as the moderator, and after Tameyuki Amano, President of Waseda University, gave the opening remarks, Tagore delivered a lecture titled 'The Spirit of Japan.'

When the "passionate lecture spanning tens of thousands of words" concluded, Jinzo Naruse, President of Japan Women's University, gave the closing remarks. The Asahi Shimbun reported that the Main Auditorium was overflowing with an audience of about 1,000 people, and the event was as successful as his lecture at Tokyo Imperial University on June 11.

It is often said that Tagore's popularity ebbed like the tide because his lecture at Tokyo Imperial University was poorly received due to its criticism of Japan. However, the Mita lecture was so popular that tickets were impossible to obtain. While Tagore's popularity after winning the Nobel Prize in 1913 had reached an extraordinary peak, an atmosphere of cool detachment had also existed even before his arrival in Japan. In the May 1916 issue of Mita Bungaku, Yonejiro Noguchi (the poet Yone Noguchi), who was a professor of English literature at the Juku, stated the following at the beginning of an essay titled "Tagore as a Short Story Writer":

"I feel regret regarding the Tagore fever in Japan, which seems to have blown in like a sudden gust of wind and then immediately blown away somewhere else. While Mr. Tagore may not possess the absolute value he was momentarily credited with, it is also true that he is not so worthless as to be discarded like old shoes and ignored."

This conditional evaluation seems to have been the reaction of intellectuals. As Kyoko Niwa has pointed out, Tagore's popularity was supported by the "younger generation, including women" (Tagore, translated by Kyoko Niwa, 'Nihon Ryokosha' [A Traveler to Japan], Hongo Shosen, 2016, "Commentary"). It is perhaps better understood in the context of the early stages of mass culture, which was deeply connected to Taisho Vitalism.

In fact, Tagore's lecture once again included sharp criticisms of Japan, but the audience seemed more captivated by the tall figure of the poet, who possessed the air of an ancient sage, than by what was being said. From mid-June, Tagore stayed at Sankeien Garden in Yokohama, owned by Sankei Hara. The young Yukio Yashiro, who would later achieve fame as a Botticelli scholar, was hired as his interpreter. His memoirs reveal just how deep an impression Tagore's appearance made.

"I remember Tagore in that noble and distinguished form, with his long, half-white hair flowing behind him in waves and his long, half-white beard fluttering in the cool breeze, moving forward with a gentle smile on his beautiful, deep features... with his slender fingers pressed together in prayer before his chest, like an Eastern saint depicted in a famous painting" (Quoted from Yashiro's memoirs in Hideo Shirasaki's 'Sankei: Tomitaro Hara', p. 133).

Here, I would like to consider the circumstances that made Tagore's visit to the Juku possible. No direct documents showing the details of the process have been found. Based on circumstantial evidence, it appears that Jinnosuke Sano acted as an intermediary. In 1905, Tagore consulted Ekai Kawaguchi about wanting to invite teachers of judo and Japanese to his school in Santiniketan.

The details of the selection process are unknown, but the person who ultimately took on the role was Jinnosuke Sano, who had just graduated from the Juku. During his time as a student, Sano, who was from Hokkaido, lived in a room at the residence of Yukichi Fukuzawa and joined Yukichi Fukuzawa on his early morning walks after his serious illness. Furthermore, Sei'ichiro Takahashi, who was also a member, wrote that Sano was part of the Jison-to, a self-cultivation group organized by the teacher's third son, Sanpachi, and fourth son, Daishiro.

Sano, who had learned closely from Yukichi Fukuzawa in this way, traveled to India and taught at the newly founded Santiniketan before spending several years moving around various parts of India. His movements were recorded by Shintaro Ishida (1870-1927), who was then a Juku secretary. Ishida was a graduate of the Juku's literature department and had a distinguished career in army education, serving as the vice-principal of the Tokyo Army Junior Military School. At the time, he was President Kamada's right-hand man as a secretary. He used his connections in the army to secure a recommendation from Ogai Mori to invite Kafu Nagai as a professor of literature and entrust him with the editing of Mita Bungaku. Since Sano's name appears on the list of attendees for the New Year's card exchange meeting in 1916, the relationship between the Juku and Sano must have been close. Sano served as a member of the welcome committee for Tagore's visit to Japan. Additionally, Sano translated Tagore's representative novel, 'Gora'.

Tagore caused a massive boom in the early Taisho era, and even during my student days (the 1960s), he was a great poet whose existence was known to every university student. Today, he is almost forgotten in Japan, but it is no exaggeration to say that he still reigns over the entire cultural life of his homeland, Bengal (West Bengal in India and Bangladesh).

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded for 'Gitanjali' (Song Offerings), a collection of poems Tagore translated into English himself. However, as Bengalis say in unison, the Bengali poems are far better than the English translations. I believe he is a great poet on the level of Goethe in Germany—the kind of poet who appears once in a thousand years. There is a richness of sound that simply cannot be conveyed through translation (though he did not touch the epic poetry that was popular in the preceding period).

It is not just poetry. He produced outstanding works in every genre of literature (novels, short stories, plays, travelogues, essays, journals, diaries, and recorded lectures). The era in which Tagore was active coincided with the transition from literary to colloquial style, and he left masterpieces in both.

Furthermore, he produced his own plays and performed the lead roles himself. He set his poems to music, numbering over 1,000 songs. Singing these songs composed by Tagore—called Rabindra Sangeet in Bengali and Tagore Songs in English—has become a refined pursuit for the middle class, especially women. His plays include musical dramas with many songs. Some works take the form of dance dramas, and he also provided dance instruction. What is notable about these attempts at song and dance is that while he respected both Indian classical and folk traditions, he remained strictly faithful to his own sensibilities without being bound by any authority.

Tagore sought a quiet environment, but he actively committed himself to social issues, including politics and economics. His educational projects, such as managing the school at Santiniketan and writing textbooks, were an important part of the global New Education Movement. He also worked on the revitalization of impoverished rural villages. Overall, his activities—having been called the Shelley of Bengal in his youth—clearly belong to the Romantic lineage. Amidst the crisis following World War I, this evolved into a sharp critique of modern civilization, becoming the voice of India's conscience sent out to the world alongside Gandhi.

Tagore's stance of communicating to the world became clear through his lectures in Japan. In particular, the lecture at Mita, 'The Spirit of Japan,' was, as Ujaku Akita noted in his diary, "higher in tone and more magnificent than the one at the Imperial University." Let us conclude by summarizing what Tagore was trying to appeal for in this lecture delivered in the midst of World War I. It was an alarm born from Tagore's responsibility as a "world poet" who had received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In this lecture, while praising the "Japanese people who have mastered the secrets of nature," Tagore clearly criticized a Japan driven by nationalism. To the Japanese of that time, who were gaining confidence in having joined the ranks of first-class nations based on nationalism, this criticism seemed like nothing more than the "delusions of a poet from a fallen nation." There was some shared ground for his sense of crisis regarding Western modern mechanical civilization and commercialism, which lay at the root of his critique of nationalism. However, the critique of nationalism itself was impossible for them to accept.

This was also true in India during its independence movement; Tagore's critique of nationalism was a voice crying in the wilderness. The strength he displayed in maintaining his critique of nationalism while surrounded by enemies on all sides is worthy of admiration. We should reflect on the source that supported it.

Nationalism is an issue that still pierces us today. I believe Tagore's Mita lecture is worth rereading.