Beyond the Metropolis. Louise Young
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and exclusive society that reveled in its alienation from the broader urban social world, the local bundan were better integrated into their communities. In part this reflected their diminished status relative to Tokyo—local intellectuals lacked many of the cultural and social resources used by metropolitan intellectuals to place themselves in a world above the clouds. In the context of their own communities, however, they enjoyed great status, and here the smaller scale of the city gave them a certain advantage. As big fish in small ponds, local intellectuals found it easier to command the attention of their communities against the competing attractions of the modern cityscape, since provincial cities possessed a tiny fraction of Tokyo’s myriad department stores, restaurants, movie palaces, entertainment districts, newspapers, and publishing houses.
Intellectuals’ leadership in local cultural movements made a powerful impact on the cultural and social life in their communities. New poetry movements promoted through the elite schools and the local press offered one point of contact. Though the old-boy web of connections smoothed the way to publishing opportunities for cultural elites, the frequent poetry contests held by newspapers and magazines encouraged aspiring writers of all backgrounds to send their selections in. Young men such as Shimada Seijirō sent scores of their poems around to juried competitions published in their own local papers as well as other regional and national papers.74 In Kanazawa, poetry banquets sponsored by student organizations were advertised on the street, and these organizations actively sought to involve poets from the broader community. Such activities identified the cultural production of the bundan with an intellectual community that transcended the exclusive world of the higher school. Unlike Tokyo—where isolation defined the bundan—Kanazawa literati were identified with their urban community.
Indeed, the event Kubokawa Tsurujirō remembers capturing his interest as a freshman at Fourth Higher was not even hosted by a student group. Shortly after he arrived in Kanazawa, he noticed an advertisement posted on a wall announcing a haiku party at the Kenrokuen Public Gardens. During this unforgettable event, participants wrote poem after poem, inspired by the convivial atmosphere of food, drink, and cherry blossoms. In a particularly elegant touch, the poets were requested to affix their favorite creation to the branch of a blooming tree, and the reveling crowds were invited to take away those they judged superior. In its focus on process rather than product, and in defining aesthetic value in terms of both creative writing and critical judgment, the practice of poetry writing as social event harked back to the poetry circles of the late Tokugawa. As in the previous era, the practice of writing served to create an intellectual community. Where the Taishō-era banquet departed from precedent was its expansion of the social range of participants; the exclusive social world of the literati poetry circle now embraced the Kanazawa public.75 In the different forums it provided for poetry writing, the literary scene in Kanazawa offered the simultaneous experience of old and new cultural forms. Literary youth and other amateur poets could shift from the social and performative mode of the banquet to print culture, where publication monumentalized the literary product and where newspapers and magazines provided a medium of anonymous communication between a solitary writer and a solitary reader. The oversized importance of the higher school or the local newspaper in the provincial city magnified the importance of literati within the urban cultural scene. These new forms of cultural practice were at once more public and more part of “our city” in a place like Kanazawa.
The democratization of literary practices symbolized by the haiku banquet revealed one of the most dramatic shifts in the cultural landscape in the early twentieth century. Public schools and the press encouraged this social opening, as did institutions such as public libraries. Despite limited public support, a network of libraries sprang up in the teens and twenties in most areas of the country. In Niigata prefecture, for example, there were 199 libraries by 1924, 123 of which were privately funded. The three main cities, Takada, Nagaoka, and Niigata, all had public libraries; the largest of these was based in the capital city of Niigata. Established in 1915, by 1925 the Niigata Prefectural Library housed a collection of more than 50,000 volumes, 2,503 of which were in western languages. The library was open 326 days a year, and in 1924 the library recorded 370,153 visitors, an average of more than a thousand patrons a day.76 People went to the library to read books and magazines they could not afford and especially to read newspapers. For literary youth of modest backgrounds, libraries offered crucial access to the world of literature and ideas. Shimaki Kensaku, a leading figure in the agrarian literature movement, who grew up in a poor Sapporo household, wrote that his love of literature and ambition to become a writer were acquired by visiting the local library.77
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