Japanese Approach to Emily Dickinson's Poetry / エミリ・ディキンスンの詩と日本人

Abstract:In 1931, when the fame of Emily Dickinson was still not well established in her home country, a Japanese scholar, Bunsho Jugaku, evaluated her poetry highly, specifying the unique, concise form of her poems as well as her love of nature. The Emily Dickinson Society of Japan was founded in 1980, eight years prior to the incorporation of the Emily Dickinson International Society in the United States. The fact that Dickinson's poetry is actively studied in Japan may well be due to the characteristics it shares with the Japanese love of nature and our cultural forms such as haiku and black-and-white drawings. According to a Japanese specialist in the history of sciences, Masao Watanabe, to Japanese there is no clear distinction between human beings and living things in nature. Furthermore, Japanese take pleasure in using their imagination to insert the unwritten in a poem or fill the white space in artwork. Tenshin Okakura calls such Japanese aestheticism "a worship of the Imperfect" in his book The Book of Tea. Therefore, it could be said that we Japanese are eager to study Dickinson's poetry because we feel in it some affinity with Japanese culture and our love of nature.