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Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako, by Chimako Tada
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One of Japan’s most important modern poets, Tada Chimako (1930–2003) gained prominence in her native country for her sensual, frequently surreal poetry and fantastic imagery. Although Tada’s writing is an essential part of postwar Japanese poetry, her use of themes and motifs from European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean history, mythology, and literature, as well as her sensitive explorations of women’s inner lives make her very much a poet of the world. Forest of Eyes offers English-language readers their first opportunity to read a wide selection from Tada’s extraordinary oeuvre, including nontraditional free verse, poems in the traditional forms of tanka and haiku, and prose poems. Translator Jeffrey Angles introduces this collection with an incisive essay that situates Tada as a poet, explores her unique style, and analyzes her contribution to the representation of women in postwar Japanese literature.
- Sales Rank: #310608 in Books
- Published on: 2010-08-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .63" w x 6.00" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 176 pages
Review
"Chimako's extraordinary imagery is reflected in this wide-ranging collection of her work, which explores women's sensuality and emotion. This is the first English translation of her work and includes translated and traditional Japanese versions of haiku and tanka."--"Foreword Footnotes"
"All in all this book provides a well-rounded look at an important modern Japanese poet."--"Translation Review"
"The three [volumes] together form the finale to a singular body of poetry that has been finely chosen, sensitively introduced and admirably translated by Jeffrey Angles in this selection."--"Japan Times"
"A unique and most welcome publication."--"Japanese Studies"
"At its best, literary translation offers something that was not there before. Angles has given readers a major poet not previously apparent in English. His translation will have the honor of leading a generation of new readers to discover the work of Tada Chimako."--Charles Martin "American Poet "
"A unique and most welcome publication."--Yasuko Claremont"Japanese Studies" (12/09/2011)
At its best, literary translation offers something that was not there before. Angles has given readers a major poet not previously apparent in English. His translation will have the honor of leading a generation of new readers to discover the work of Tada Chimako. --Charles Martin "American Poet ""
A unique and most welcome publication. --Yasuko Claremont"Japanese Studies" (12/09/2011)"
From the Inside Flap
"Tada Chimako was one of the few overtly intellectual modern Japanese poets, but she donned her erudition with lightness and humor. She was also one of the few who went beyond the realm of "free verse" and tried the traditional forms of tanka and haiku, even occasionally using rhymes. Jeffrey Angles brings across Tada's distinct voice and approach with elegance and skill in his translations, making her poems come alive."—Hiroaki Sato
"Marvelous. An important introduction to modern Japanese literature for the English-reading world."—Liza Dalby, author of Geisha
"Up until now, a few translations in scattered sources have suggested something of the range and depth of the poetry of Tada Chimako; now, this new and extensive collection of translations by Jeffrey Angles reveals an astonishing talent, confirming for readers everywhere the respect and admiration which Japanese readers have long felt for this body of work. Hers is a poetry of that possesses a virtual tactile energy, moving across time and space, absorbed in nature, glancing at the literary heritage of the world (in particularly those of Japan, China, France, and ancient Greece), as well experimenting with literary form (modern verse, tanka, and haiku). All this is accomplished with an astonishing grace and a spiritual fastidiousness, as serene as a mathematic equation. In these limpid and elegant translations, Mr. Angles proves himself at the forefront of his generation in his skill at gently and firmly moving this elegant poetry from one language to another. With this collection, postwar Japanese poetry seems suddenly, wonderfully, different, and truly enriched."—J. Thomas Rimer, co-editor, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature
About the Author
The writing of Tada Chimako (1930-2003) is crucial to understanding modern Japanese poetry although her work is situated outside the poetic mainstream. A solitary visionary, Tada is uniquely admired in Japan for her poems, essays, and translations. Withdrawing to Kobe after the publication of her first collection, she spent most of her life close to nature, far from Tokyo, Japan’s literary epicenter. Writing poetry in both traditional Japanese forms and Western free verse and prose poetry, Tada is known as a poet of intellect and erudition but also as one of sensuality and emotion. Jeffrey Angles is Associate Professor at Western Michigan University. He is coeditor, with J. Thomas Rimer, of Japan: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. He has won translation grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the PEN Club of America.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Intriguing poetry, uncommon creativity
By Kiteflyer
Judging by this book, Tada Chimako is an impressive Japanese poet. Through this generous selection of her work in lucid and sensitive translations by Jeffrey Angles the English-speaking world will discover her uncommon creative talent as well. Her insights are surprising, her wit intriguing. She makes the normal look strange, even shocking. This is a captivating book.
What struck me first when reading Tada's verse is her astonishing imagination. She can transform ordinary scenes and activities into symbolic and mythic rituals. The central figure of "The Woman in the Garden" wears "virginal robes" but sits next to a "fertile spring," with "children's small forms reflected in her eyes." When they bathe in the spring - or is it her amniotic fluid? - the elderly are rejuvenated and the half-blind regain their sight. Behind the spring is "a transparent crescent moon / A tall cypress that rises beyond this world / A dark tower of the soul."
Tada's insights are sometimes very dark. In her famous poem "Fava Beans" the preparation of a vegetable acquires macabre overtones. She pulls "green infants" from the hull - "each bean from its sleep / I cut out its closed black eyelid with my knife." The poem becomes a meditation on human life and death, and on the connection between the netherworld and heaven. It's witty, almost black-humor funny, horrifying, and deep all at once.
In his concise, informative introduction Angles notes that Tada is regarded as an intellectual poet in her native country. There's certainly great erudition behind her work. But I feel it's often a mask for the passion that lurks below the surface. Whether she elevates her existential crisis to a powerful tanka that compares the cancer that is killing her to pregnancy, or uses a prose-poem allegory to criticize woman's status in Japan, or writes a thoroughly modern poem like "Tulips," which judges flowers as if they were criminals condemned to execution for "bringing pleasure to human hearts," there's a depth of feeling behind the elaborate conceptual framework.
Jeffrey Angles has done readers of poetry in English a huge favor in bringing this poet to their attention.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Forest of Eyes goes beyond expectations!
By Douglas Stewart
The only way to review this book is as follows:
Playful Stars
A Tanka for Tada Chimako
In spring, Japan amidst cherry blossoms.
Ancient misanthropic divines, who dance, abandoning
the rites of their authority, promise
endless summer to any disciple who will drop a coin,
or pour a drop of sake, or sing one Chimako lyric.
3 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Chimako Sings "Born in the Land of the Rising Sun"
By Taneo Ishikawa
Under the influence of excessive raves, I wandered into "Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako" by Jeffrey Angles, a professor at Western Michigan University, whose work on the title earned a translation award from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University, and I came away with the impression that the modernist poet died from a disease of language, rather than from the uterine cancer she actually suffered. In fact, she hallowed her disease as "the god of cancer" "consecrated in the shrine of children." She even linked it with a cosmic event of meteor shower. Then she died with much dignity -- an almost legendary way of facing one's last days. Her lifetime work shows a symptom of modern myth making, first attempting to mythologize the world, then in her last years mythologizing herself.
Here the disease of language -- I did not make this up -- refers to Max Muller's theory of myth that back in antiquity, allegorical descriptions of nature ended up in literal interpretation of natural phenomena as divine workings. Anyway, mythology is fantasy as opposed to reality, which relies on the qualitative, not quantitative, use of language, and with the use of high rhetoric, mythology turned murderers into priests, war dogs war gods, and war criminals celestial divinities. More recently, in the dog-eat-dog world of late 19th-centruy imperialism, there was Nietzchean hallucination on Dionysian orgies, and the Victorian Englishmen claimed "We are Rome." In emulation, the Japanese war cry was "We are Yamato!" The Nazi Germans dreamed up the Arian myth and cosmic identity -- all this collective catastrophic thinking was affected by the ancient disease of language.
Chimako's linguistic disease, like Mishima's, was nurtured in the elite culture of wartime Japan, where life high-up continued to imitate art, ceaselessly aping its betters, and the denizens there not only created a myth, but lived a myth, in an effort to perpetuate their lives, often in association with what they deemed eternal, such as the flag, the tribe, and, above all, the emperor. In the case of Chimako, who was often dubbed "oldie," "out of touch," and "aristocratic," it may be admirable that she kept distance from the cheap sun-marked culture of postwar tribalism, but her decided detachment seems to indicate that there was history -- hidden history -- of complicity in an enormous crime, not as an individual, but as an elite family tree.
Yes, trees are the central symbol in her world of poetry, and she talked about them as World Tree or Cosmic Tree. In her 1968 "The Town of Mirrors, or Forest of Eyes," Chimako created a paracosmic community, complete with factories, greenhouses, murderers, the police, the clergy and a code of laws, even including a giant with one hundred eyes, who lived in the mirror and died long ago, yet still moaning underground. From his eyes sown on the ground, a forest grew up. Chimako continued with this image of woody symbolism, saying in her 1980 "Lotophagi," "Each era gets its own forest / Each era gets its own graveyard." Then in her 1998 narrative poem "Chewing on a Eucalyptus Leaf" she talked about a fast-growing giant tree, in which "I" and her dog started living an arboreal life -- an evolutionary throwback -- as the tree continued to grow to the point of becoming "a living Tower of Babel" or a virtual Cosmic Tree. Her dog now howled at the ground below. She noticed that her dog was pregnant, perhaps impregnated by "that mysterious pair of eyes." Finally in her last years she talked about her own life as a cancer-affected cosmic tree, with its year rings illegible in tomograms.
What's wrong with all this woody symbolism? It seems good but not good enough. Poets sing and think about human conditions. Chimako's myth poetry may seem to have achieved a cosmic height but apparently failed to reach the full depths of human conditions. She repeats her subterranean vision that in the earth, there are layers of corpses, moaning and writhing still. So what? She never got down there to share their never-ending agonies. Her vision of the netherworld is a mere show of intellectual clairvoyance -- one very cliched in shamanic seance as well as in literature. Instead of descending, she climbed up the fast-growing cosmic tree -- a transition from flat, low-lying expanse of forestry to a skyscraping cosmic tree. This is an almost superficial reflection of postwar Japan's transformation from a flattened country to a towering economic giant. This is a social commentary at best, and it doesn't go beyond the symbolism.
Worse, her mythopoeia is even scandalous from a postmodern perspective where writers, including poets and scientists, must be scrutinized not only for what they wrote, but also for what they did not write -- something they chose not to write about. Here I am referring, once again, to Chimako's "Chewing on a Eucalyptus Leaf" -- that cosmic tree thing -- which is a symbolic representation of Japan's mobility cult during the 1980s, back when the whole nation was uplifted on land-price bubble economy. The "Chewing" was published in 1998. Yes, 1998, the year when the country was still drowning in the depth of its post-bubble depression, and it was three years after the Kobe earthquake of 1995, which claimed more than 6,000 lives; most of them died, virtually moaning and writhing under the debris of collapsed houses and buildings. It was a huge man-made disaster -- an overkill not road kill -- that would have brought up the exact image of Chimako's underworld where "countless corpses / form layers and / raise their voices / as they writhe incessantly." And it happened right before her eyes, or right below from her home on the Kobe bluff, an upland community of villas. Where was Chimako then? Travelling abroad to write travelogue for a lifestyle magazine?
Darn it. Chimako's Kobe-based poetry industry was a scandalous establishment, not only out of touch, but out of date -- an avatar of imperialist intellect whose anthropological interests scandalously served, not the interests of subject peoples, but the interests of empire builders, who more often than not overlooked disasters, even caused famines and mass starvation as they advanced on a global scale, looting graves, measuring bones, and talking about ancient civilizations, origins of myth, family trees of languages and races -- all about long-dead people, not much about living people, not much about dying people in war and disaster.
Come on, Chimako. Get down here to level with people. You can no longer stay up there, embalmed with quasi cosmic identity. You smell like an ancient Egyptian mummy, redux in some artificial globalized community, say, that sun-marked imperial circle, where French-speaking career diplomats and other out-of-touch elitist scholars and artists run the show. This is a celestial community or, if you like, a self-segregated cultural ghetto, where nostalgia for empire is a pathological norm and the behavioral norm is that of colonial masters, if not slave masters, if not topknotted samurai warlords, but the problem is the same -- a culture of nonresponsibility and infantalization, puffed up with empty talks about legacy, heritage and, yes, vintage. Among others, noh and kabuki theaters, tea ceremony, calligraphy, flower arrangement, and poetry of traditional 5-7 mora meter are toxic cultural memes that endlessly rain down from high above.
Look. Here is full disclosure -- the moment these high-end people show their color. At the height of emotion, the incontinent people spring a leak, both ways, pees and tears, sitting on VIP box seats watching "Super Kabuki: Yamato Takeru," saga of the ancient imperial brat on civilizing mission. It is in the finale, when the hero, in a fabulous avian costume coursing in the air, intones: "Soaring high in the sky, this is me, my soul!" Yes, shamanic; here the emperor can fly, and the people look up to "Clouds above the Hill." And they got this: Mushroom Clouds above the Hell, twice, Hiroshima and Fukushima. Very, very stupid. And now the whole nation cries out for "Prayer," "Reconstruction," "Solidarity," and "Sun Mark." Unbelievable. Damn it!
Excuse me, Chimako. I am still talking about you -- your celestial persona in a broader cultural context. Unlike the emperor, you didn't fly, but you did climb up Cosmic Tree, or Corridor Tree in shamanic terms, or, if you like, Skytree -- the so-called world's highest communication tower recently raised ad nauseam in Tokyo. The tower is a shaky emblem of the nation's never-ending cult of technology, centrality, and upward mobility. In my view, Chimako, you went up there, like a shaman, with your dog Asa, a Shiba, not a cur. In your poetic myth, dogs, not lapdogs, but watchdogs, are one of the recurrent symbols, along with eyes and blood. Here dogs and eyes are related to Big Brother's watchdog functions -- security and law enforcement. In particular, big "pure-bred" dogs are one of the invented traditions of the modern age of imperial aspirations; German Shepherd and Japanese Akita and Shiba, for example, were promoted as loyal as well as royal canine companions to an ever edifying empire, as Aaron Skabelund's recent volume, "Empire of Dogs," shows with superb lucidity. So, Chimako, your dog Asa and Shibuya's Hachiko are of the same ideological pedigree, both under scholarly masters.
On the other hand, your obsession with blood is bifurcated, symbolizing either violence or female principle. Apparently, violence is not your forte, but your blood-violence nexus serves as a window or an initiation into greater violence of the world. Here blood is ritual, not lethal, but what it signifies is something on the order of devastating destruction. So you wrap it up as a dream-speak, or more often you present it as a drug-induced daydream. This writing strategy characterizes your myth making poetry. It may be good for a con artist, but a good poet who sings straight and thinks hard about human conditions doesn't do that. Meanwhile, your blood-womanhood nexus represents, of course, a woman's life creating potency, as opposed to a man's bloody destructive inclination. Here we see a classical binary distinction of male-female, yin-yan principle, and you see it within yourself.
Now we must get down to the problem of your sexuality. Well, Professor Chimako. Stop it. You don't have to pull down your jeans. We are not talking about your genes. Anyway, you have a gender problem of the most convoluted kind. Basically, you are bisexual, but you have an undeniable taste for transvestite fantasy on one hand, and on the other, you show pedophiliac interests in cherubic boys. You see them through the eyes of ancient Greek heroes, or pedophile priests or sports coaches of our time, not so much through the eyes of samurai hot ass. Here your own womanhood is subdued under a mixed sense of hero worship and its contingent pedophilia. You long for a beautiful, youthful shining hero, and sometimes you see him in yourself. This is the moment you go transvestite, meanwhile, Chimako, you perhaps felt the same fascination in your family members -- not your husband, but your own son or nephew. It's incestuous in the most common sense of the word, and this moment is captured in one of your tanka poems, when you sing this: "a shower on / the taut nude of form / one pair of / the young man's flesh / heavily bears fruit."
This is not a moment of Oedipus complex, nor cheap porn fantasy of mom-son intercourse. This is what I call Professor Chimako's Octopus complex, a product of imitation Classic that gave birth to a monster with the body of a woman and the eyes of a man. This is you, Chimako. You suffered mythological disorder, or in more technical terms, disease of language, and you got cancer down there, then you got nuked down there through radiation treatment. Yes, you've gotten Hiroshima and Fukushima inside. Wait. You don't have to show it. You just sing it out, from the rooftop down to the streets. Then people will look up to you as sharing the common predicament of human conditions. We need this kind of solidarity, human solidarity, not sun-marked solidarity. Come on, Chimako. You sing it out. We'll sing along, all together, like in a Bruce Springsteen's concert, where a huge mass of voice sings: "Born in the Land of the Rising Sun. Born in the Land of the Rising Sun...."
O.K. Chimako. Your turn. Go ahead. You may recite your masterpiece called "Dawn", a paean to the Egyptian Sky Goddess Nut. Show time. Here is Chimako Tada, Hip-On Queen from Nippon.
Stretching her supple body
The goddess forms a lofty arc over the earth
Stars scattered over her azure body
Like fine flecks of gold in lapis lazuli
Nut, the loving vault of heaven
Gives birth to the sun each morning
And with the blood of her holy delivery
She dyes the eastern sky deep, deep red
Wonderful! Bravo! You deserve a second look. I like the rhythm, a bit like hip-hop. When do you record and market it on a global scale? Chimako's Hip-On Hip-Hop! You can beat Yoko Ono's big tit music industry, I mean her band and Sean Lemon and John Venom. More seriously, however, your "Dawn" is a moribund museum piece, with no value on the global market, except here, land of morning sun cult, where in wartime, the whole nation was ready to die for the bloody red sun mark flag, and now their most blissful moment is to worship the morning sun rise atop Mt. Fuji, and the emperor's daily ritual schedule still includes the very early first-hours invocation of the spirit of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. There are many more seasonal rites observed in the innermost circle of the imperial precinct -- all related one way or another to the fecundity of the solar deity and the fecundity of the imperial house itself -- and these "traditional" rituals are in fact modern inventions created from the fundamentalist reading of the ancient books of mythistory as well as the other premodern text of imperial rituals. Perhaps detesting empty symbols and attributes of bogus origins, the eccentric, short-lived Taisho Emperor, father to Emperor Hirohito, refused to perform all the heliocentric court rituals, rather amusing himself in other more playful things. For example, he once made an imperial survey on the members of the House of Peers -- a noble assembly of old Tokugawa daimyo dogs -- looking at them through the hole of a make-believe telescope he made rolling up a document waiting for his review. Conspiracy theory has it that the "deranged" head of the empire was poisoned to death -- a modern case of regicide that left his youthful son with such an enormous trauma that Hirohito became a pathetic practitioner of heliocentric court religion -- virtually communing, communicating, and even sleeping with the spirit of the Sun Goddess -- as the nation grew from warlike to warholic. The upshot? BANG! Hiroshima.
Now the nation's biggest problem is that these court rituals serve as the greatest source of imperial diseases, physical and mental, damaging the health of the aged emperor himself, and also giving the empress and princesses all sorts of troubles, ranging from culture shock to severe mental disorder; Empress Michiko once suffered speech loss; Poor Princess Masako is still under heavy medication to keep her from eccentric behavioral disorder. Before marriage, she was a hopeful Harvard-educated diplomat, once a shining flower in the Paris community of international dignitaries. Alas, the nation's court ritual has sapped the life out of the nation's best and brightest mind. Further, the same sun cult has damaged, not only the imperial fecundity, but the nation's fecundity as well. Blinded by the sun cult, this country has long been killing and diminishing its population without any afterthought. Think about this: Toden's company religion includes the worship of "Sky Illuminating Great Bright Sun Goddess," whose talismanic tablet was found on the wall of the control room at the Fukushima plant. Unbelievable. Again, the power company, once condemned as the ringleader of war crime industries, put the whole nation on the verge of nuclear annihilation, this time, mushroom clouds above the Fukushima reactors. For more than a half century, this country's learning curve has remained a flat line, stretched too long alongside the upward curve of sun-marked voodoo science and technology. The upshot? BANG! A bang-bang history, from Hiroshima to Fukushima.
Now, Chimako, you see we're all poor victims of sun cult religion. Yet still, you sing the "Dawn." I don't see any light coming from it; instead it looks like a "deep, deep red" blood-drenching devastation looming on the horizon, because -- I repeat this -- your bloody symbolism signifies both gratuitous violence and female fecundity, which reminds me of the wartime slogan: Give Birth and Multiply -- the war-addled empire's population policy in sync with Hirohito's fertility ritual in the court with the solar deity. It was indeed an era of collective enactment of the mythological concept of creative destruction, acted out in real earnest with all-out insanity, from the emperor on down to neighborhood leaders of the infamous war-support group known as Taisei Yokusankai, Imperial Rule Assistance Association. In this context, your "Dawn" is the second coming of the same old sun cult, this time, in the guise of multiculturalism and global perspectives, disseminating the old social disease from high above -- above the House of the Rising Sun, a Buddho-Shinto culture complex, where Sun Buddha, Sun Goddess, Sun Emperor, and the People of Sun Tribe congregate in celebration of its long history of heliocentric tribalism, under the war-tarnished Sun Mark, in hopes of attracting johns from half a world around. But the appeal is limited, only an in-house celebration of incestuous infatuation. It could not go global, failing to reach even the ear of our closest neighbors, Koreans and Chinese. For them, Chimako, your "Dawn" could be a deja-vu nightmare, more of the same sun cult and its contingent war crimes. Through painful history under the sun flag, they have learned this: the wartime manipulation of universal, cosmic symbols was to totalize Asia against the West to exploit fellow Asians for the benefits of the Sun Mark -- a shrewd rhetorical strategy good for a spin master. Come on, Chimako. Where is your intellectual integrity? Did you sell it to the contemporary movement of Taisei Yokusankai? No? Then show it. Where do you have it? O.K. Go ahead. Now you're going to recite a tanka poem, composed when you heard the news that Hirohito was dying. Here you go. Show Time. Chimako Tada,"one of Japan's most important modern poets" acclaimed as "very much a poet of the world."
On hearing of the Showa Emperor's critical condition
because he spilled
the blood of tens of thousands
he receives
big blood transfusions
and he cannot die
Wonderful! Bravo! You deserve still another look. It's Vintage Chimako. There is everything in there -- style, elegance, humor, intellect, and above all, the blood. I like it, I mean the way you say it, when I say: "The emperor is dying. Long live the emperor!" More seriously, however, the tanka poem is flawed on a couple of crucial points. First, there is unforgivable understatement about the size of bloodshed the Showa Emperor was accountable for. You say "the blood of tens of thousands." Whose blood are you talking about? Heroic death of officers up? Rather you should say "the blood of millions." Yes, millions, paying due respect to all the war dead, military and civilian, Japanese and other Asian. Don't understate the emperor's responsibility as the war criminal in chief.
Second, the problem is in the flow of blood. You describe it as if it were a give-and-take ritual of blood sacrifice, and the whole process is unduly sanitized. The fact is that the emperor suffered blood cancer, the rarest of the rare diseases that rotted his blood. Why he got this disease? A consequence of incestual imperial tradition like the ancient Egyptian dynasties? Or because he caused the bloodshed of millions? We never know. But this is where you can show your intellectual integrity by showing where justice is, say, by calling rotten blood rotten. Intellectual integrity is not a mask you can wear and then discard. It's a deep commitment to looking into human conditions. Come on, Chimako. Come clear. Get down there and rewrite it.
Japan's postwar culture has long been poisoned at the hands of intellectual crooks -- those hatted apes, if not top-knotted samurai dogs, who run the show in the House of the Rising Sun. Among them, nostalgia for empire is the source of all diseases, ideological and spiritual, leading the nation on the unsustainable logic of self-sacrifice and self-aggrandizement -- the legacy of empire building where a toxic mix of tribalism and infantilization continues to ail the nation in the guise of globalization and peaceful coexistence. This collective catastrophic thinking does not help us orient in reality, nor in the least help us understand the wider world. Worse, it does not help us understand the geography of our own past. Here the crooked intellect practices an almost willful, collective forgetting, an intentional loss of memory, and finally accepts it as the necessary censorship of sun-marked disaster. This is how this country has become an Alzheimer's state. And this is where a poet has to stand up and sing out, from the rooftop of the House of the Rising Sun, preferably with a stentorian voice, and if not, even with a broken mouthpiece.
Let us see. Are you finished, Chimako? Good. This is the revision. O.K. Sing it out, standing on this stump as on the rooftop. Here you go.
Born in the Land of the Rising Sun
Born in the Land of the Rising Sun
because we emperor spilled
the blood of millions
we suffered
cancer of blood
rare disease of rotten blood
and we still moan underground
Born in the Land of the Rising Sun
Born in the Land of the Rising Sun
Hirohito Domofugu Yamatonchu
Hideyoshi Toyotomi Daimyojin
Hideki Tojo Yasukuni Omitama
Hitler, Himmler, Hitogoroshi
Damn it. All these Hi-names
Urinate on their war crimes
This public ritual
Sorry, men's only
Is to ensure a change:
War gods back into war dogs
Yes, a big culture revolution
From a man's small piss
For the great cause of peace
Viva la revolucion!
Viva la revolucion!
In the name of Che Guevara
In the name of Jose Marti
Excellent! Chimako, you've found a new voice, voice of a revolutionary poet. And you've gotten a new life too. No more disease of language. Wonderful. You're cured. You have shown the therapeutic power of language. Wonderful. Congratulations. Now you can market yourself on the global market, and I am sure you can beat Yoko Ono's world peace industry, which is becoming more and more shamanic, showing her color in the wrong way. I tell you this: Her problem is not with money, but she has an ideological cancer. To get cured, she has yet to urinate on the face of her "great" father; instead she celebrates it -- that big flat. You are O.K. now, Chimako.
All said. I've got to go now. Sleep well, lady. I no longer bother you. I've got to go, got to go. Where? Back to a simple place in time where human solidarity, not sun-marked solidarity, survives and thrives. So long.
Taneo, come back.
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