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This paper analyzes a set of 9,035 salaryman senryū poems over an eighteen-year period (1990-2007) in order to track salaryman reactions to workplace transition from an organizational behavioralist perspective. Major findings include: (i) the number of submissions and votes for the major poetry competition, Salaryman Senryū, have been falling since 1994, suggesting a decline in shared salaryman mentality; (ii) there has been a shift in the relative importance of broad themes, so that the workplace as a category of senryū poems is of less centrality in 2007 than it was in 1990; (iii) within the workplace category, (negative) interpersonal relations, especially with supervisors, still dominate; and (iv) workstyle is also a strong subtheme, with workers showing more interest in work processes than actual work conditions. The analysis also shows that the years 1996 and 1997 are a watershed where poems shift from a more jocular to strident tone. The overall implication of the study is a potential breach of the social contract between Japanese employers and regular employees, which will require the assiduous application of supportive employment practices (SEP) in order to ensure a high level of employee performance and engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irisawa Yasuo (b. 1931) is one of the most theoretical and experimental poets that postwar Japan has produced. His poetry is highly individual; its themes and techniques place it firmly in the mainstream of contemporary international poetry. Like T. S. Eliot, Irisawa insists on the impersonality of the poet in creative expression. The point of his work is arrived at through implication, through the allusiveness contained in language; in language games reminiscent of James Joyce, and echoes from past time reminiscent of Eliot's work. Irisawa creates ambivalent images tied to the theme of mortality. This paper explores the variety of his narrative techniques, his creation of myths, his use of satire and even nonsense poetry. It considers the theory of the restructuring of language he expounds in Memorandum on the Structure of Poetry: if words are divorced from their daily usage, they may be joined together in new ways to create 'a meaning beyond meaning'. Irisawa does this in abstract conceptions filled with references and allusions to existing literature, as we see in My Izumo, a poem about spiritual identification with the past, which alludes to ancient Japanese works such as Izumo Fudoki and the Kojiki. This article shows how Irisawa's work exemplifies a dominant trend in modern Japanese poetry: the denial of meaning as it is ordinarily interpreted and in its place the use of language to create abstract visions which contain a 'meaning beyond meaning' - Irisawa's central thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the textual transformation of noblewomen/poets such as Izumi Shikibu into yūjo or courtesans and bodhisattvas. In trying to make sense of this remarkable reconfiguration, it looks at the many contending Buddhist discourses that shaped medieval texts. It argues that while the practice of poetry, in the hands of male poets, becomes a revered michi which is seen as being concomitant with the Buddhist Way, the noblewoman's poetry is not granted the same status. Women are seen as inherently sinful and lustful and hence their poetry cannot be easily assimilated to the goal of enlightenment. It is by recasting the noblewoman as yūjo , thereby foregrounding and indeed exaggerating her sexuality, that medieval texts, drawing on tantric and other practices, are able to salvage both the noblewoman and her poetry . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the changing image of the city in the poetry, prose and critical essays of the free verse poet Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886-1942). Sakutarō's growing disillusionment with Japan's modernisation and slavish imitation of Western models is reflected in changes in his poetic representations of the city, from a modern, sophisticated utopia, through the liberating home of the crowd, and the symbol of the existential despair of modern man, to the hallucination of a fevered imagination. The progressive disenchantment with the city in Sakutarō's poetry is accompanied by a corresponding rise in his estimation of the countryside. We can also see the city as a metaphor for modernity and the West on the one hand, and the countryside a trope for Japan and tradition on the other. In calling for a fusion of elements derived from both Western and Japanese culture Hagiwara Sakutarō sought to negotiate a distinctive Japanese modernity in the interwar period, but was, in the end, profoundly disappointed with the colourless intellectual desert he saw emerging from the blend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]