JAPAN LITERATURE

Japanese literature, the body of written works produced by Japanese

authors in Japanese or, in its earliest beginnings, at a time when Japan had no
written language, in the Chinese classical language.

Nise-e

Both in quantity and quality, Japanese literature ranks as one of the major
literatures of the world, comparable in age, richness, and volume to English
literature, though its course of development has been quite dissimilar. The
surviving works comprise a literary tradition extending from the 7th
century CE to the present; during all this time there was never a “dark age”
devoid of literary production. Not only do poetry, the novel, and
the drama have long histories in Japan, but some literary genres not so highly
esteemed in other countries—including diaries, travel accounts, and books of
random thoughts—are also prominent. A considerable body of writing by
Japanese in the Chinese classical language, of much greater bulk and
importance than comparable Latin writings by Englishmen, testifies to the
Japanese literary indebtedness to China. Even the writings entirely
in Japanese present an extraordinary variety of styles, which cannot be
explained merely in terms of the natural evolution of the language. Some
styles were patently influenced by the importance of Chinese vocabulary
and syntax, but others developed in response to the internal requirements of
the various genres, whether the terseness of haiku (a poem in 17 syllables) or
the bombast of the dramatic recitation.
The enduring appeal of Japanese literature
The difficulties of reading Japanese literature can hardly be exaggerated; even a
specialist in one period is likely to have trouble deciphering a work from another period
or genre. Japanese style has always favoured ambiguity, and
the particles of speech necessary for easy comprehension of a statement are often
omitted as unnecessary or as fussily precise. Sometimes the only clue to the subject or
object of a sentence is the level of politeness in which the words are couched; for
example, the verb mesu (meaning “to eat,” “to wear,” “to ride in a carriage,” etc.)
designates merely an action performed by a person of quality. In many cases, ready
comprehension of a simple sentence depends on a familiarity with the background of a
particular period of history. The verb miru, “to see,” had overtones of “to have an affair
with” or even “to marry” during the Heian period in the 10th and 11th centuries, when
men were generally able to see women only after they had become intimate. The long
period of Japanese isolation in the 17th and 18th centuries also tended to make the
literature provincial, or intelligible only to persons sharing a common background; the
phrase “some smoke rose noisily” (kemuri tachisawagite), for example, was all readers
of the late 17th century needed to realize that an author was referring to the Great
Fire of 1682 that ravaged the shogunal capital of Edo (the modern city of Tokyo).
Despite the great difficulties arising from such idiosyncrasies of style, Japanese
literature of all periods is exceptionally appealing to modern readers, whether read in
the original or in translation. Because it is prevailingly subjective and coloured by an
emotional rather than intellectual or moralistic tone, its themes have a universal quality
almost unaffected by time. To read a diary by a court lady of the 10th century is still a
moving experience, because she described with such honesty and intensity her deepest
feelings that the modern-day reader forgets the chasm of history and changed social
customs separating her world from today’s.
The “pure” Japanese language, untainted and unfertilized by Chinese influence,

contained remarkably few words of an abstract nature. Just as English borrowed words
such as morality, honesty, justice, and the like from the Continent, the Japanese
borrowed these terms from China; but if the Japanese language was lacking in the
vocabulary appropriate to a Confucian essay, it could express almost infinite shadings of
emotional content. A Japanese poet who was dissatisfied with the limitations imposed
by his native language or who wished to describe unemotional subjects—whether the
quiet outing of aged gentlemen to a riverside or the poet’s awareness of his
insignificance as compared to the grandeur of the universe—naturally turned to writing
poetry in Chinese. For the most part, however, Japanese writers, far from feeling
dissatisfied with the limitations on expression imposed by their language, were
convinced that virtuoso perfection in phrasing and an acute refinement
of sentiment were more important to poetry than the voicing of intellectually satisfying
concepts.
From the 16th century on, many words that had been excluded from Japanese poetry
because of their foreign origins or their humble meanings, following the dictates of the
“codes” of poetic diction established in the 10th century, were adopted by the
practitioners of the haiku, originally an iconoclastic, popular verse form. These codes of
poetic diction, accompanied by a considerable body of criticism, were the creation of an
acute literary sensibility, fostered especially by the traditions of the court, and were
usually composed by the leading poets or dramatists themselves. These codes exerted
an inhibiting effect on new forms of literary composition, but they also helped to
preserve a distinctively aristocratic tone.

The Japanese language itself also shaped poetic devices and forms. Japanese lacks
a stress accent and meaningful rhymes (all words end in one of five simple vowels), two
traditional features of poetry in the West. By contrast, poetry in Japanese is
distinguished from prose mainly in that it consists of alternating lines of five and
seven syllables; however, if the intensity of emotional expression is low, this distinction
alone cannot save a poem from dropping into prose. The difficulty of maintaining a high
level of poetic intensity may account for the preference for short verse forms that could
be polished with perfectionist care. But however moving a tanka (verse in 31 syllables)
is, it clearly cannot fulfill some of the functions of longer poetic forms, and there are no
Japanese equivalents to the great longer poems of Western literature, such as John
Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Instead, Japanese poets
devoted their efforts to perfecting each syllable of their compositions, expanding the
content of a tanka by suggestion and allusion, and prizing shadings of tone
and diction more than originality or boldness of expression.
The fluid syntax of the prose affected not only style but content as well. Japanese
sentences are sometimes of inordinate length, responding to the subjective turnings and
twistings of the author’s thought, and smooth transitions from one statement to the
next, rather than structural unity, are considered the mark of excellent prose. The longer
works accordingly betray at times a lack of overall structure of the kind associated in the
West with Greek concepts of literary form but consist instead of episodes linked
chronologically or by other associations. The difficulty experienced by Japanese writers
in organizing their impressions and perceptions into sustained works may explain the
development of the diary and travel account, genres in which successive days or the
successive stages of a journey provide a structure for otherwise unrelated descriptions.
Japanese literature contains some of the world’s longest novels and plays, but its genius
is most strikingly displayed in the shorter works, whether the tanka, the haiku, the Noh
plays (also called No, or nō), or the poetic diaries.
Japanese literature absorbed much direct influence from China, but the relationship
between the two literatures is complex. Although the Japanese have been criticized
(even by some Japanese) for their imitations of Chinese examples, the earliest Japanese
novels in fact antedate their Chinese counterparts by centuries, and Japanese theatre
developed quite independently. Because the Chinese and Japanese languages are
unrelated, Japanese poetry naturally took different forms, although Chinese poetic
examples and literary theories were often in the minds of the Japanese poets. Japanese
and Korean may be related languages, but Korean literary influence was negligible,
though Koreans served an important function in transmitting Chinese literary and
philosophical works to Japan. Poetry and prose written in the Korean language were
unknown to the Japanese until relatively modern times.
From the 8th to the 19th century Chinese literature enjoyed greater prestige among
educated Japanese than their own; but a love for the Japanese classics, especially those
composed at the court in the 10th and 11th centuries, gradually spread among the entire
people and influenced literary expression in every form, even the songs and tales
composed by humble people totally removed from the aristocratic world portrayed
in classical literature.

Origins

The first writing of literature in Japanese was occasioned by influence from China. The
Japanese were still comparatively primitive and without writing when, in the first four
centuries CE, knowledge of Chinese civilization gradually reached them. They
rapidly assimilated much of this civilization, and the Japanese scribes adopted Chinese
characters as a system of writing, although an alphabet (if one had been available to
them) would have been infinitely better suited to the Japanese language. The characters,
first devised to represent Chinese monosyllables, could be used only with great
ingenuity to represent the agglutinative forms of the Japanese language. The ultimate
results were chaotic, giving rise to one of the most complicated systems of writing ever
invented. The use of Chinese characters enormously influenced modes of expression and
led to an association between literary composition and calligraphy lasting many
centuries.

Early writings

The earliest Japanese texts were written in Chinese because no system of transcribing
the sounds and grammatical forms of Japanese had been invented. The oldest known
inscription, on a sword that dates from about 440 CE, already showed some modification
of normal Chinese usage in order to transcribe Japanese names and expressions. The
most accurate way of writing Japanese words was by using Chinese characters not for
their meanings but for their phonetic values, giving each character a pronunciation
approximating that used by the Chinese themselves. In the oldest extant works,
the Kojiki (712; The Kojiki: Records of Ancient Matters) and Nihon shoki, or Nihon-
gi (720; Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697), more than 120 songs,
some dating back to perhaps the 5th century CE, are given in phonetic transcription,
doubtless because the Japanese attached great importance to the sounds themselves. In
these two works, both officially commissioned “histories” of Japan, many sections were
written entirely in Chinese; but parts of the Kojiki were composed in a complicated
mixture of languages that made use of the Chinese characters sometimes for their
meaning and sometimes for their sound.
Origin of the tanka in the Kojiki
The Kojiki, though revered as the most ancient document concerning the myths and
history of the Japanese people, was not included in collections of literature until well
into the 20th century. The myths in the Kojiki are occasionally beguiling (see Japanese
mythology), but the only truly literary parts of the work are the songs. The early songs
lack a fixed metrical form; the lines, consisting of an indeterminate number of syllables,
were strung out to irregular lengths, showing no conception of poetic form. Some songs,
however, seem to have been reworked—perhaps when the manuscript was transcribed
in the 8th century—into what became the classic Japanese verse form, the tanka (short
poem), consisting of five lines of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables. Various
poetic devices employed in these songs, such as the makura kotoba (“pillow word”), a
kind of fixed epithet, remained a feature of later poetry.
Altogether, some 500 primitive songs have been preserved in various collections. Many
describe travel, and a fascination with place-names, evident in the loving enumeration
of mountains, rivers, and towns with their mantic epithets, was developed to great
lengths in the gazetteers (fudoki) compiled at the beginning of the 8th century. These
works, of only intermittent literary interest, devote considerable attention to the folk
origins of different place-names, as well as to other local legends.

The significance of the Man’yōshū

A magnificent anthology of poetry, the Man’yōshū (compiled after 759; Ten Thousand
Leaves), is the single great literary monument of the Nara period (710–784), although it
includes poetry written in the preceding century, if not earlier. Most of the 4,500 or so
poems are tanka, but the masterpieces of the Man’yōshū are the 260 chōka (“long
poems”), ranging up to 150 lines in length and cast in the form of alternating lines in five
and seven syllables followed by a concluding line in seven syllables. The amplitude of
the chōka permitted the poets to treat themes impossible within the compass of the
tanka—whether the death of a wife or child, the glory of the imperial family, the
discovery of a gold mine in a remote province, or the hardships of military service.
The greatest of the Man’yōshū poets, Kakinomoto Hitomaro, served as a kind of poet
laureate in the late 7th and early 8th centuries, accompanying the sovereigns on their
excursions and composing odes of lamentation for deceased members of the imperial
family. Modern scholars have suggested that the chōka may have originated
as exorcisms of the dead, quieting the ghosts of recently deceased persons by reciting
their deeds and promising that they will never be forgotten. Some of Hitomaro’s
masterpieces so convincingly describe the glories of princes or princesses he may never
have met that they transcend any difference between “public” expressions of grief and
his private feelings. Hitomaro’s chōka are unique in Japanese poetry thanks to their
superb combination of imagery, syntax, and emotional strength. His tanka also display
the evocative qualities often associated with later Japanese poetry.
The chōka often concluded with one or more hanka (“envoys”) that resume central
points of the preceding poem. The hanka written by the 8th-century poet Yamabe
Akahito are so perfectly conceived as to make the chōka they follow at times seem
unnecessary; the concision and evocativeness of these poems, identical in form with the
tanka, are close to the ideals of later Japanese poetry. Nevertheless, the supreme works
of the Man’yōshū are the chōka of Hitomaro, Ōtomo Tabito, Ōtomo
Yakamochi (probably the chief compiler of the anthology), and Yamanoue Okura. The
most striking quality of the Man’yōshū is its powerful sincerity of expression. The poets
were certainly not artless songsmiths exclaiming in wonder over the beauties of nature,
a picture that is often painted of them by sentimental critics, but their emotions were
stronger and more directly expressed than in later poetry. The corpse of an unknown
traveler, rather than the falling of the cherry blossoms, stirred in Hitomaro an
awareness of the uncertainty of human life.
The Man’yōshū is exceptional in the number of poems composed outside the court,
whether by frontier guards or persons of humble occupation. Perhaps some of these
poems were actually written by courtiers in the guise of commoners, but the use
of dialect and familiar imagery contrasts with the strict poetic diction imposed in the
10th century. The diversity of themes and poetic forms also distinguishes
the Man’yōshū from the more polished but narrower verse of later times. In Okura’s
famous Dialogue on Poverty, for example, two men—one poor and the other destitute—
describe their miserable lots, revealing a concern over social conditions that would be
absent from the classical tanka. Okura’s visit to China early in the 8th century, as the
member of a Japanese embassy, may account for Chinese influence in his poetry. His
poems are also prefaced in many instances by passages in Chinese stating the
circumstances of the poems or citing Buddhist parallels.
The Man’yōshū was transcribed in an almost perversely complicated system that used
Chinese characters arbitrarily, sometimes for meaning and sometimes for sound. The
lack of a suitable script probably inhibited literary production in Japanese during the
Nara period. The growing importance, however, of Chinese poetry as the mark of
literary accomplishment in a courtier may also have interrupted the development of
Japanese literature after its first flowering in the Man’yōshū.
Eighteen Man’yōshū poets are represented in the collection Kaifūsō (751), an anthology
of poetry in Chinese composed by members of the court. These poems are little more
than pastiches of ideas and images borrowed directly from China; the composition of
such poetry reflects the enormous prestige of Chinese civilization at this time.

Classical literature: Heian period (794–1185)

The foundation of the city of Heian-kyō (later known as Kyōto) as the capital
of Japan marked the beginning of a period of great literary brilliance. The earliest
writings of the period, however, were almost all in Chinese because of the continued
desire to emulate the culture of the continent. Three imperially sponsored anthologies of
Chinese poetry appeared between 814 and 827, and it seemed for a time that writing in
Japanese would be relegated to an extremely minor position. The most distinguished
writer of Chinese verse, the 9th-century poet Sugawara Michizane, gave a final lustre to
this period of Chinese learning by his erudition and poetic gifts, but his refusal to go
to China when offered the post of ambassador, on the grounds that China no longer had
anything to teach Japan, marked a turning point in the response to Chinese influence.
Poetry
The invention of the kana phonetic syllabary, traditionally attributed to the celebrated
9th-century Shingon priest and Sanskrit scholar Kūkai, enormously facilitated writing in
Japanese. Private collections of poetry in kana began to be compiled about 880, and in
905 the Kokinshū (A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern), the first major work of
kana literature, was compiled by the poet Ki Tsurayuki and others. This anthology
contains 1,111 poems divided into 20 books arranged by topics, including 6 books of
seasonal poems, 5 books of love poems, and single books devoted to such subjects as
travel, mourning, and congratulations. The two prefaces are clearly indebted to the
theories of poetry described by the compilers of such Chinese anthologies as
the Shijing (“Classic of Poetry”) and Wen xuan (“Selections of Refined Literature”), but
the preferences they express would be shared by most tanka poets for the next 1,000
years. The preface by Tsurayuki, the oldest work of sustained prose in kana, enumerated
the circumstances that move men to write poetry; he believed that melancholy, whether
aroused by a change in the seasons or by a glimpse of white hairs reflected in a mirror,
provided a more congenial mood for writing poetry than the harsher emotions treated in
the earlier, pre-kana anthology Man’yōshū. The best tanka in the Kokinshū captivate the
reader by their perceptivity and tonal beauty, but these flawlessly turned miniatures lack
the variety of the Man’yōshū.
Skill in composing tanka became an asset in gaining preference at court; it was also
essential to a lover, whose messages to his mistress (who presumably could not read
Chinese, still the language employed by men in official documents) often consisted of
poems describing his own emotions or begging her favours. In this period the tanka
almost completely ousted the chōka, the length of which was indefinite, because the
shorter tanka were more suited to the lover’s billet-doux or to competitions on
prescribed themes.
For the poets of the Kokinshū and the later court anthologies, originality was less
desirable than perfection of language and tone. The critics, far from praising novelty of
effects, condemned deviation from the standard poetic diction—which was established
by the Kokinshū and consisted of some 2,000 words—and insisted on
absolute adherence to the poetic codes first formulated in the 10th century. Although
these restrictions saved Japanese poetry from lapses into bad taste or vulgarity, they
froze it for centuries in prescribed modes of expression. Only a skilled critic can
distinguish a typical tanka of the 10th century from one of the 18th century.
The Kokinshū set the precedent for later court anthologies, and a knowledge of its
contents was indispensable to all poets as a guide and source of literary allusions.
Love poetry occupies a prominent place in the Kokinshū, but the joys of love are seldom
celebrated; instead, the poets write in the melancholy vein prescribed in the preface,
describing the uncertainties before a meeting with the beloved, the pain of parting, or
the sad realization that an affair has ended. The invariable perfection of diction,
unmarred by any indecorous cry from the heart, may sometimes make one doubt the
poet’s sincerity. This is not true of the great Kokinshū poets of the 9th century—Ono
Komachi, Lady Ise, Ariwara Narihira, and Tsurayuki himself—but even Buddhist priests,
who presumably had renounced carnal love, wrote love poetry at the court competitions,
and it is hard to detect any difference between such poems and those of actual lovers.
The preface of the Kokinshū lists judgments on the principal poets of the collection.
This criticism is unsatisfying to a modern reader because it is so terse and unanalytical,
but it nevertheless marks a beginning of Japanese poetic criticism, an art that developed
impressively during the course of the Heian period.

Prose

Ki Tsurayuki is celebrated also for his Tosa nikki (936; The Tosa Diary), the account of
his homeward journey to Kyōto from the province of Tosa, where he had served as
governor. Tsurayuki wrote this diary in Japanese, though men at the time normally kept
their diaries in Chinese; that may explain why he pretended that a woman in the
governor’s entourage was its author. Events of the journey are interspersed with the
poems composed on various occasions. The work is affecting especially because of the
repeated, though muted, references to the death of Tsurayuki’s daughter in Tosa.
Tosa nikki is the earliest example of a literary diary. Most of the later Heian diarists who
wrote in the Japanese language were court ladies; their writings include some of the
supreme masterpieces of the literature. Kagerō nikki (The Gossamer Years) describes
the life between 954 and 974 of the second wife of Fujiwara Kaneie, a prominent court
official. The first volume, related long after the events, is in the manner of an
autobiographical novel; even the author confesses that her remembrances are probably
tinged with fiction. The next two volumes approach a true diary, with some entries
apparently made on the days indicated. The writer (known only as “the mother of
Michitsuna”) describes, with many touches of self-pity, her unhappy life with her
husband. She evidently assumed that readers would sympathize, and often this is the
case, though her self-centred complaints are not endearing. In one passage, in which she
gloats over the death of a rival’s child, her obsession with her own griefs shows to worst
advantage. Yet her journal is extraordinarily moving precisely because the author dwells
exclusively on universally recognizable emotions and omits the details of court life that
must have absorbed the men.
Other diaries of the period include the anecdotal Murasaki Shikibu nikki (“The Diary of
Murasaki Shikibu”; Eng. trans. Murasaki Shikibu: Her Diary and Poetic Memoirs), at
once an absorbing literary work and a source of information on the court life the author
(Murasaki Shikibu) described more romantically in her masterpiece Genji
monogatari (c. 1010; The Tale of Genji) and in Izumi Shikibu nikki (The Diary of Izumi
Shikibu), which is less a diary than a short story liberally ornamented with poetry.
These “diaries” are closely related in content and form to the uta monogatari (“poem
tales”) that emerged as a literary genre later in the 10th century. Ise
monogatari (c. 980; Tales of Ise) consists of 143 episodes, each containing one or more
poems and an explanation in prose of the circumstances of composition. The brevity and
often the ambiguity of the tanka gave rise to a need for such explanations, and, when
these explanations became extended or (as in the case of Ise monogatari) were
interpreted as biographical information about one poet (Ariwara Narihira), they
approached the realm of fiction.
Along with the poem tales, there were works of religious or fanciful inspiration going
back to Nihon ryōiki (822; Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition),
an account of Buddhist miracles in Japan compiled by the priest Kyōkai. Priests
probably used these stories, written in Chinese, as a source of sermons with the intent of
persuading ordinary Japanese, incapable of reading difficult works of theology, that they
must lead virtuous lives if they were not to suffer in hell for present misdeeds. No
such didactic intent is noticeable in Taketori monogatari (10th century; Tale of the
Bamboo Cutter), a fairy tale about a princess who comes from the Moon to dwell
on Earth in the house of a humble bamboo cutter; the various tests she imposes on her
suitors, fantastic though they are, are described with humour and realism.
The first lengthy work of fiction in Japanese, Utsubo monogatari (“The Tale of the
Hollow Tree”), was apparently written between 970 and 983, although the last chapter
may have been written later. This uneven, ill-digested work is of interest chiefly as
an amalgam of elements in the poem tales and fairy tales; it contains 986 tanka, and its
episodes range from early realism to pure fantasy.
The contrast between this crude work and the sublime Genji monogatari is
overwhelming. The Genji monogatari is the finest work not only of the Heian period but
of all Japanese literature and merits being called the first important novel written
anywhere in the world. Genji monogatari was called a work of mono no aware (“a
sensitivity to things”) by the great 18th-century literary scholar Motoori Norinaga; the
hero, Prince Genji, is not remarkable for his martial prowess or his talents as a
statesman but as an incomparable lover, sensitive to each of the many women he wins.
The story is related in terms of the successive women Genji loves; each of them evokes a
different response from this marvelously complex man. The last third of the novel,
describing the world after Genji’s death, is much darker in tone, and the principal
figures, though still impressive, seem no more than fragmentations of the peerless
Genji.
The success of Genji monogatari was immediate. The author of the touching Sarashina
nikki (mid-11th century; “Sarashina Diary”; Eng. trans. As I Crossed a Bridge of
Dreams) describes how as a girl she longed to visit the capital so that she might read the
entire work (which had been completed some 10 years earlier). Imitations and
derivative works based on Genji monogatari, especially on the last third of it, continued
to be written for centuries, inhibiting the fiction composed by the court society.
Makura no sōshi (c. 1000; The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon) is another masterpiece of
the Heian period that should be mentioned with Genji monogatari. Japanese critics
have often distinguished the aware of Genji monogatari and the okashi of Makura no
sōshi. Aware means sensitivity to the tragic implications of a moment or
gesture, okashi the comic overtones of perhaps the same moment or gesture. The lover’s
departure at dawn evoked many wistful passages in Genji monogatari, but in Makura
no sōshi Sei Shōnagon noted with unsparing exactness the lover’s fumbling, ineffectual
leave-taking and his lady’s irritation. Murasaki Shikibu’s aware can be traced through
later literature—sensitivity always marked the writings of any author in the aristocratic
tradition—but Sei Shōnagon’s wit belonged to the Heian court alone.
The Heian court society passed its prime by the middle of the 11th century, but it did not
collapse for another 100 years. Long after its political power had been usurped by
military men, the court retained its prestige as the fountainhead of culture. But in the
12th century, literary works belonging to a quite different tradition began to
appear. Konjaku monogatari (early 12th century; “Tales of Now and Then”; partially
translated into English as Ages Ago and as Tales of Times Now Past), a massive
collection of religious stories and folktales drawn not only from the Japanese
countryside but also from Indian and Chinese sources, described elements of society
that had never been treated in the court novels. These stories, though crudely written,
provide glimpses of how the common people spoke and behaved in an age marked by
warfare and new religious movements. The collection of folk songs Ryōjin
hishō, compiled in 1179 by the emperor Go-Shirakawa, suggests the vitality of this
burgeoning popular culture even as the aristocratic society was being threatened with
destruction.

Modern literature

Even after the arrival of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s U.S. Navy fleet in 1853 and the
gradual opening of the country to the West and its influence, there was at first little
noticeable effect on Japanese literature. The long closure of the country and the general
sameness of Tokugawa society for decades at a time seemed to have atrophied the
imaginations of the gesaku writers. Even the presence of curiously garbed foreigners,
which should have provoked some sort of reaction from authors searching for new
material, initially produced little effect. The gesaku writers were oblivious to the
changes in Japanese society, and they continued to grind out minor variants on the
same hackneyed themes of the preceding 200 years.
It was only after the removal in 1868 of the capital to Edo (renamed Tokyo) and the
declaration by the emperor Meiji that he would seek knowledge from the entire world
that the gesaku writers realized their days of influence were numbered. They soon fell
under attack from their old enemies, the Confucian denouncers of immoral books, and
also from advocates of the new Western learning. Although the gesaku writers
responded with satirical pieces and traditional Japanese fiction deriding the new
learning, they were helpless to resist the changes transforming the entire society.

Introduction of Western literature

Translations from European languages of nonliterary works began to appear soon after
the Meiji Restoration. The most famous example was the translation (1870) of Samuel
Smiles’s Self-Help; it became a kind of bible for ambitious young Japanese eager to
emulate Western examples of success. The first important translation of a
European novel was Ernest Maltravers, by the British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
which appeared in 1879 under the title Karyū shunwa (“A Spring Tale of Blossoms and
Willows”). The early translations were inaccurate, and the translators unceremoniously
deleted any passages that they could not understand readily or that they feared might be
unintelligible to Japanese readers. They also felt obliged to reassure readers that,
despite the foreign names of the characters, the emotions they felt were exactly the same
as those of a Japanese.
It did not take long, however, for the translators to discover that European literature
possessed qualities never found in the Japanese writings of the past. The literary
scholar Tsubouchi Shōyō was led by his readings in European fiction and criticism to
reject didacticism as a legitimate purpose of fiction; he insisted instead on its artistic
values. His critical essay Shōsetsu shinzui (1885–86; The Essence of the Novel) greatly
influenced the writing of subsequent fiction not only because of its emphasis
on realism as opposed to didacticism but because Shōyō, a member of the samurai class,
expressed the conviction that novels, hitherto despised by the intellectuals as mere
entertainments for women and children, were worthy of even a scholar’s attention.
The first modern Japanese novel was Ukigumo (1887–89; “Drifting Cloud”;
Eng. trans. Japan’s First Modern Novel), by Futabatei Shimei, who was
familiar with Russian literature and contemporary Western literary criticism.
Futabatei wrote Ukigumo in the colloquial, apparently because his readings in
Russian literature had convinced him that only the colloquial could suitably be
used when describing the writer’s own society. Despite Futabatei’s success
with this experiment, most Japanese writers continued to employ the literary
language until the end of the century. This was due, no doubt, to their
reluctance to give up the rich heritage of traditional expression in favour of the
unadorned modern tongue.

Western influences on poetry

Translations of Western poetry led to the creation of new Japanese literary forms. The
pioneer collection Shintaishi-shō (1882; “Selection of Poems in the New Style”)
contained not only translations from English but also five original poems by the
translators in the poetic genres of the foreign examples. The translators declared that
although European poetry had greater variety than Japanese poetry—some poems are
rhymed, others unrhymed, some are extremely long, others abrupt—it was invariably
written in the language of ordinary speech. An insistence on modern language and the
availability of many different poetic forms were not the only lessons offered by
European poetry. The translators also made the Japanese public aware of how much of
human experience had never been treated in the tanka or haiku forms.
Shimazaki Tōson

Innumerable Western critics have sarcastically commented on the

Japanese proclivity for imitating foreign literary models and on
their alleged indifference to their own traditions. It is true that without Russian
examples Futabatei could not have written Ukigumo, and without English examples
such poets as Shimazaki Tōson could not have created modern Japanese poetry. But far
from recklessly abandoning their literary heritage, most writers were at great pains to
acquaint themselves with their traditional literature. The outstanding novelists of the
1890s—Ozaki Kōyō, Kōda Rohan, Higuchi Ichiyō, and Izumi Kyōka—all
read Saikaku and were noticeably influenced by him. Ichiyō’s short
novel Takekurabe (1895; Growing Up) described the children of the Yoshiwara quarter
of Edo in a realistic manner quite unlike that of the usual stories about prostitutes and
their customers, but she used the language of Saikaku for her narration. Kyōka, though
educated partly at a Western mission school, wrote superbly in the vein of late
Tokugawa fiction; something of the distant Japanese literary past pervaded even his
writings of the 1930s, the final years of his life.
In poetry, too, the first products of Western influence were comically inept experiments
with rhyme and with such unpromising subjects as the principles of sociology. Tōson’s
“Akikaze no uta” (1896; “Song of the Autumn Wind”), however, is not merely a skillful
echo of Percy Bysshe Shelley but a true picture of a Japanese landscape; the irregular
lines of his poem tend to fall into the traditional pattern of five and seven syllables.
A decade after the works of English Romantic poets such as Shelley and William
Wordsworth had influenced Japanese poetry, the translations made by Ueda Bin of the
French Parnassian and Symbolist poets made an even more powerful impression. Ueda
wrote, “The function of symbols is to help create in the reader an emotional state similar
to that in the poet’s mind; symbols do not necessarily communicate the
same conception to everyone.” This view was borrowed from the West, but it accorded
perfectly with the qualities of the tanka.
Because of the ambiguities of traditional Japanese poetic expression, it was natural for a
given poem to produce different effects on different readers; the important thing, as in
Symbolist poetry, was to communicate the poet’s mood. If the Japanese poets of the
early 1900s had been urged to avoid contamination by foreign ideas, they would have
declared that this was contrary to the spirit of an enlightened age. But when informed
that eminent foreign poets preferred ambiguity to clarity, the Japanese responded with
double enthusiasm.

Revitalization of the tanka and haiku

Even the traditional forms, tanka and haiku, though moribund in 1868, took on new life,
thanks largely to the efforts of Masaoka Shiki, a distinguished late 19th-century poet in
both forms but of even greater importance as a critic. Yosano Akiko, Ishikawa
Takuboku, and Saitō Mokichi were probably the most successful practitioners of the new
tanka. Akiko’s collection Midaregami (1901; Tangled Hair) stirred female readers
especially, not only because of its lyrical beauty but because Akiko herself seemed to be
proclaiming a new age of romantic love. Takuboku emerged in the course of his short
life (he died in 1912 at age 26) as perhaps the most popular tanka poet of all time. His
verses are filled with strikingly individual expressions of his intransigent personality.
Saitō Mokichi combined an absorption with Man’yōshū stylistics and a professional
competence in psychiatry. Despite the austere nature of his poetry, he was recognized
for many years as the leading tanka poet. In haiku, Takahama Kyoshi built up a
following of poets strong enough to withstand the attacks of critics who declared that the
form was inadequate to deal with the problems of modern life. Kyoshi himself eventually
decided that the function of haiku was the traditional one of an
intuitive apprehension of the beauties of nature, but other haiku poets employed the
medium to express entirely unconventional themes.
Most tanka and haiku poets continued to use the classical language, probably because its
relative concision permitted them to impart greater content to their verses than modern
Japanese permits. Poets of the “new style,” therefore, were readier to employ
the colloquial. Hagiwara Sakutarō, generally considered the finest Japanese poet of the
20th century, brilliantly exploited the musical and expressive possibilities of the modern
tongue. Other poets, such as Horiguchi Daigaku, devoted themselves to translations of
European poetry, achieving results so compelling in Japanese that these translations are
considered to form an important part of the modern poetry of Japan.

The novel between 1905 and 1941

The dominant stream in Japanese fiction since the publication of Hakai (1906; The
Broken Commandment), by Shimazaki Tōson, and Futon (1907; The Quilt), by Tayama
Katai, has been naturalism. Although the movement was originally inspired by the
works of the 19th-century French novelist Émile Zola and other European naturalists, it
quickly took on a distinctively Japanese colouring, rejecting (as a Confucian scholar
might have rejected gesaku fiction) carefully developed plots or stylistic beauty in favour
of absolute verisimilitude in the author’s confessions or in the author’s minute
descriptions of the lives of unimportant people hemmed in by circumstances beyond
their control.
By general consent, however, the two outstanding novelists of the early 20th century
were men who stood outside the naturalist movement, Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki.
Ōgai began as a writer of partly autobiographical fiction with strong overtones of
German Romantic writings. Midway in his career he shifted to historical novels that are
virtually devoid of fictional elements but are given literary distinction by their concise
style. Sōseki gained fame with humorous novels such as Botchan (1906; “The Young
Master”; Eng. trans. Botchan), a fictionalized account of his experiences as a teacher in a
provincial town. Botchan enjoyed phenomenal popularity after it first appeared. It is the
most approachable of Sōseki’s novels, and the Japanese found pleasure in identifying
themselves with the impetuous, reckless, yet basically decent hero. The coloration of
Sōseki’s subsequent novels became progressively darker, but even the most gloomy have
maintained their reputation among Japanese readers, who take it for granted that
Sōseki is the greatest of the modern Japanese novelists and who find echoes in their own
lives of the mental suffering he described. Sōseki wrote mainly about intellectuals living
in a Japan that had been brutally thrust into the 20th century. His best-
known novel, Kokoro (1914; “The Heart”; Eng. trans. Kokoro), revolves around another
familiar situation in his novels, two men in love with the same woman. His last
novel, Meian (1916; Light and Darkness), though unfinished, has been acclaimed by
some as his masterpiece.
An amazing burst of creative activity occurred in the decade following the end of
the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Probably never before in the history of
Japanese literature were so many important writers working at once. Three novelists
who first emerged into prominence at this time were Nagai Kafū, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō,
and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. Nagai Kafū was infatuated with French culture and
described with contempt the meretricious surface of modern Japan. In later years,
however, though still alienated from the Japanese present, he showed nostalgia for the
Japan of his youth, and his most appealing works contain evocations of the traces of an
old and genuine Japan that survived in the parody of Western culture that was Tokyo.
Tanizaki’s novels, notably Tade kuu mushi (1929; Some Prefer Nettles), often presented
a conflict between traditional Japanese and Western-inspired ways. In his early works
he also proclaimed a preference for the West. Tanizaki’s views changed after he moved
to the Kansai region in the wake of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, and his
subsequent writings traced his gradual accommodation with the old culture of Japan
that he had previously rejected. Between 1939 and 1941 Tanizaki published the first of
his three modern-language versions of Genji monogatari. He willingly sacrificed years
of his career to this task because of his unbounded admiration for the supreme work of
Japanese literature.
Tanizaki’s longest novel, Sasameyuki (1943–48; The Makioka Sisters), evoked with
evident nostalgia the Japan of the 1930s, when people were preoccupied not with the
prosecution of a war but with marriage arrangements, visits to sites famous for their
cherry blossoms, or the cultural differences between Tokyo and Ōsaka. Two postwar
novels by Tanizaki enjoyed great popularity, Kagi (1956; The Key), the account of a
professor’s determination to have his fill of sex with his wife before impotence overtakes
him, and Fūten rōjin nikki (1961–62; Diary of a Mad Old Man), a work in a comic vein
that describes a very old man’s infatuation with his daughter-in-law. No reader would
turn to Tanizaki for wisdom as to how to lead his life, nor for a penetrating analysis of
society, but his works not only provide the pleasures of well-told stories but also convey
the special phenomenon of adulation and rejection of the West that played so prominent
a part in the Japanese culture of the 20th century.
Akutagawa established his reputation as a brilliant storyteller who transformed
materials found in old Japanese collections by infusing them with modern psychology.
No writer enjoyed a greater following in his time, but Akutagawa found less and less
satisfaction in his reworkings of existing tales and turned eventually to writing about
himself in a sometimes harrowing manner. His suicide in 1927 shocked the entire
Japanese literary world. The exact cause is unknown—he wrote of a “vague malaise”—
but perhaps Akutagawa felt incapable either of sublimating his personal experiences
into fiction or else of giving them the accents of the proletarian literature movement,
then at its height.
The proletarian literature movement in Japan, as in various other countries, attempted
to use literature as a weapon to effect reform and even revolution in response to social
injustices. Although the movement gained virtual control of the Japanese literary world
in the late 1920s, governmental repression beginning in 1928 eventually destroyed it.
The chief proletarian writer, Kobayashi Takiji, was tortured to death by the police in
1933. Few of the writings produced by the movement are of literary worth, but the
concern for classes of people who had formerly been neglected by Japanese writers gave
these works their special significance.
Other writers of the period, convinced that the essential function of literature was
artistic and not propagandistic, formed schools such as the “Neosensualists” led
by Yokomitsu Riichi and Kawabata Yasunari. Yokomitsu’s politics eventually moved far
to the right, and the promulgation of these views, rather than his efforts to achieve
modernism, coloured his later writings. But Kawabata’s works (for which he won
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968) are still admired for their lyricism and intuitive
construction. Though Kawabata began as a modernist and experimented with modernist
techniques to the end of his career, he is better known for his portraits of women,
whether the geisha of Yukiguni (1948; Snow Country) or the different women whose
lives are concerned with the tea ceremony in Sembazuru (1952; Thousand Cranes).
Japanese critics have divided the fiction of the prewar period into schools, each usually
consisting of one leading writer and his disciples. Probably the most influential author
was Shiga Naoya. His characteristic literary form was the “I novel” (watakushi
shōsetsu), a work that treats autobiographical materials with stylistic beauty and great
intelligence but is not remarkable for invention. Shiga’s commanding presence caused
the I novel to be more respected by most critics than outright works of fiction, but the
writings of his disciples are sometimes hardly more than pages torn from a diary, of
interest only if the reader is already devoted to the author.
The postwar novel

The aggressive wars waged by the Japanese militarists in the 1930s inhibited literary
production. Censorship became increasingly stringent, and writers were expected to
promote the war effort. In 1941–45, as World War II was being fought in the Pacific,
little worthwhile literature appeared. Tanizaki began serial publication of The Makioka
Sisters in 1943, but publication was halted by official order, and the completed work
appeared only after the war. The immediate postwar years signaled an extraordinary
period of activity, both by the older generation and by new writers. The period is vividly
described in the writings of Dazai Osamu, notably in Shayō (1947; The Setting Sun).
Other writers described the horrors of the war years; perhaps the most powerful
was Nobi (1951; Fires on the Plain) by Ōoka Shōhei, which described defeated Japanese
soldiers in the Philippine jungles. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in 1945 also inspired much poetry and prose, though it was often too close to
the events to achieve artistic integrity. A few works, especially Kuroi ame (1966; Black
Rain) by Ibuse Masuji, succeeded in suggesting the ultimately indescribable horror of
the disaster.

Ōe Kenzaburō reading the first paragraph of his novel Kojinteki-na taiken (1964; A Personal
Matter); audio in Japanese.
The Japan of the immediate postwar period and the prosperous Japan of the 1950s and
1960s provided the background for most of the works of Mishima Yukio, an
exceptionally brilliant and versatile novelist and playwright who became the first
Japanese writer generally known abroad. Mishima’s best-known works
include Kinkaku-ji (1956; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), a psychological study,
based on an actual incident, of a young monk who burned a famous architectural
masterpiece; and Hōjō no umi (1965–70; The Sea of Fertility), a tetralogy, set in Japan,
that covers the period from about 1912 to the 1960s. Abe Kōbō was notable among
modern writers in that he managed, sometimes by resorting to avant-garde techniques,
to transcend the particular condition of being Japanese and to create universal myths of
suffering humanity in such a work as Suna no onna (1962; The Woman in the Dunes).
The unique nature of traditional Japanese culture, which made it infertile ground
for Christianity in the 16th century, was treated in several moving novels by Endō
Shūsaku, notably Chimmoku (1966; Silence). The novels of Kita Morio were
characterized by an attractive streak of humour that provided a welcome contrast to the
prevailingly dark tonality of other contemporary Japanese novels. His Nire-ke no
hitobito (1963–64; The House of Nire), though based on the careers of his grandfather
and his father (the poet Saitō Mokichi), was saved by its humour from becoming no
more than an I novel.
Ōe Kenzaburō achieved fame early in life, winning a major literary award,
the Akutagawa Prize, in 1958, when he was 23. His early works were mainly set in the
remote valley on the island of Shikoku where he was born and raised, and he returned to
this setting in some later works, finding in it an essential key to his life. In 1994 he
received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the second awarded to a Japanese. Although his
style is complicated and difficult, he was able to move readers, particularly through his
accounts of life with his brain-damaged son. Unlike most authors of the preceding
generation, Ōe devoted his efforts also to political concerns, bringing him popularity
especially with university students and others committed to political and social reform.
For more than 20 years after he won the Akutagawa Prize, Ōe was considered to be the
youngest writer of importance, and critics lamented the dearth of promising new
writers. However, a new generation, represented by Nakagami Kenji and Haruki
Murakami, found favour not only in Japan but abroad, where their novels were
translated and admired. Nakagami, the son of an unwed mother, was born into
the burakumin (Japan’s traditional underclass). His background, which he did not
attempt to hide, gave his novels an intensity, a deliberate coarseness, and sometimes a
fury not to be found in the works of his contemporaries, most of them from prosperous
families. Though looked down on by Ōe because he perceived them to
lack intellectual concerns, Murakami’s novels—among them Noruwei no
mori (1987; Norwegian Wood), Umibe no Kafuka (2002; Kafka on the Shore),
and 1Q84 (2009–10)—drew critical acclaim and sold remarkably well. This popularity
was due in part to his familiarity with American popular culture, an integral part of the
lives of young people all over the world, but also to his skill as a highly accomplished
storyteller, able to mix real and unreal events convincingly.

Modern poetry

At the beginning of the 20th century it was predicted that the traditional forms of
Japanese poetry would be abandoned by poets who craved freedom in their choice of
subjects and vocabulary and who did not wish their poems to be squeezed into 31 or 17
syllables. Masaoka Shiki conjectured, drawing on mathematics, that sooner or later it
would become impossible to compose a new poem in the traditional forms. But the
Japanese continued to find the short poem congenial: a momentary perception that
would be diluted if expanded into several stanzas can be captured perfectly in a haiku,
and, if the traditional forms are too short to narrate the poet’s emotions in detail,
overtones can hint at depths beyond the words, just as traditional paintings suggest
rather than state.
By no means did all poets “return” to traditional forms. Hagiwara Sakutarō wrote
only free verse, and this was true of most other modern poets. Some poets were strongly
affected by modern European and American poetry; during the postwar period a school
of poetry that took its name from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land echoed Eliot at
his gloomiest. Some poets used poetry for patriotic purposes during the Pacific
campaigns of World War II or to express political views during the turbulent days
following the defeat in 1945. But most Japanese who wrote modern poetry in the second
half of the 20th century were closer to their counterparts in other countries than ever
before, sharing their anxiety over the same crises and feeling the same intense need for
love.
Sakai Hōitsu: One Hundred Paintings by Kōrin (Kōrin hyakuzu)

The younger brother of a feudal lord, Sakai developed artistic talents in

many directions. In 1797, giving poor health as the reason, he became a
monk affiliated with the Nishihongan Temple and was raised to a high rank.
In 1809, however, he retired to Negishi in Edo and led the life of a
gifted dilettante. He studied painting with masters of various schools but was
particularly influenced by the decorative style of Ogata Kōrin, which he
succeeded in reviving. He published Kōrin hyakuzu (One Hundred Paintings
by Kōrin) and Ogata-ryū ryakuin-fu (“Album of Simplified Seals in the Ogata
Style”) in observance of the 100th anniversary of Kōrin’s death. These works
were instrumental in making Kōrin’s art very influential posthumously. Apart
from being a revivalist, Sakai became a very successful painter and haiku poet.
The screen painting Summer and Autumn Grasses is his masterpiece.

Japan, island country lying off the east coast of Asia. It consists of a great
string of islands in a northeast-southwest arc that stretches for approximately
1,500 miles (2,400 km) through the western North Pacific Ocean. Nearly the
entire land area is taken up by the country’s four main islands; from north to
south these are Hokkaido (Hokkaidō), Honshu (Honshū), Shikoku,
and Kyushu (Kyūshū). Honshu is the largest of the four, followed in size by
Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku. In addition, there are numerous smaller
islands, the major groups of which are the Ryukyu (Nansei) Islands (including
the island of Okinawa) to the south and west of Kyushu and
the Izu, Bonin (Ogasawara), and Volcano (Kazan) islands to the south and east
of central Honshu. The national capital, Tokyo (Tōkyō), in east-central
Honshu, is one of the world’s most populous cities.
 The Japanese landscape is rugged, with more than four-fifths of the land
surface consisting of mountains. There are many active and dormant
volcanoes, including Mount Fuji (Fuji-san), which, at an elevation of 12,388
feet (3,776 metres), is Japan’s highest mountain. Abundant precipitation and
the generally mild temperatures throughout most of the country have
produced a lush vegetation cover and, despite the mountainous terrain and
generally poor soils, have made it possible to raise a variety of crops. Japan
has a large and, to a great extent, ethnically homogeneous population, which is
heavily concentrated in the low-lying areas along the Pacific coast of Honshu.

The Kinkaku Temple (Golden Pavilion) in Kyōto, Japan, was originally built in the 15th century;
the present structure dates to the 1950s.
Complexity and contrast are the keynotes of life in Japan—a country possessing an
intricate and ancient cultural tradition yet one that, since 1950, has emerged as one of
the world’s most economically and technologically advanced societies. Heavy emphasis
is placed on education, and Japan is one of the world’s most literate countries. Tension
between old and new is apparent in all phases of Japanese life. A characteristic
sensitivity to natural beauty and a concern with form and balance are evident in such
cities as Kyōto and Nara, as well as in Japan’s ubiquitous gardens. Even in the
countryside, however, the impact of rapid Westernization is evident in many aspects of
Japanese life. The agricultural regions are characterized by low population densities and
well-ordered rice fields and fruit orchards, whereas the industrial and urbanized belt
along the Pacific coast of Honshu is noted for its highly concentrated population, heavy
industrialization, and environmental pollution.
Humans have occupied Japan for tens of thousands of years, but Japan’s recorded
history begins only in the 1st century BCE, with mention in Chinese sources. Contact with
China and Korea in the early centuries CE brought profound changes to Japan, including
the Chinese writing system, Buddhism, and many artistic forms from the continent. The
first steps at political unification of the country occurred in the late 4th and early 5th
centuries CE under the Yamato court. A great civilization then developed first at Nara in
the 8th century and then at Heian-kyō (now Kyōto) from the late 8th to the late 12th
century. The seven centuries thereafter were a period of domination by military
rulers culminating in near isolation from the outside world from the early 17th to the
mid-19th century.
The reopening of the country ushered in contact with the West and a time of
unprecedented change. Japan sought to become a modern industrialized
nation and pursued the acquisition of a large overseas empire, initially in
Korea and China. By late 1941 this latter policy caused direct confrontation
with the United States and its allies and to defeat in World War II (1939–45).
Since the war, however, Japan’s spectacular economic growth—one of the
greatest of any nation in that period—brought the country to the forefront of
the world economy. It now is one of the world’s foremost manufacturing
countries and traders of goods and is a global financial leader.

Land
Japan is bounded to the west by the Sea of Japan (East Sea), which separates it from the
eastern shores of South and North Korea and southeastern Siberia (Russia); to the north

by La Perouse (Sōya) Strait, separating it from Russian-held Sakhalin Island, and by

the Sea of Okhotsk; to the northeast by the southern Kuril Islands (since World War
II under Soviet and then Russian administration); to the east and south by the Pacific;
and to the southwest by the East China Sea, which separates it from China. The island
of Tsushima lies between northwestern Kyushu and southeastern South Korea and
defines the Korea Strait on the Korean side and the Tsushima Strait on the Japanese
side.

The mountainous character of the country is the outcome of orogenic (mountain-

building) forces largely during Quaternary time (roughly, the past 2.6 million years), as
evidenced by the frequent occurrence of violent earthquakes, volcanic activity, and signs
of change in sea levels along the coast. There are no sizable structural plains and
peneplains (large land areas leveled by erosion), features that usually occur in more
stable regions of the Earth. The mountains are for the most part in a youthful stage of
dissection in which steep slopes are incised by dense river-valley networks. Rivers are
mostly torrential, and their valleys are accompanied by series of river terraces that are
the result of movements in the Earth’s crust, as well as climatic and sea-level changes
in Holocene times (i.e., the past 11,700 years). Recent volcanoes are juxtaposed with old
and highly dissected ones. The shores are characterized by elevated and depressed
features such as headlands and bays, which display an incipient stage of development.
The mountains are divided into many small land blocks that are separated by lowlands
or deep saddles; there is no long or continuous mountain range. These land blocks are
the result of intense faulting (movement of adjacent rock masses along a fracture) and
warping (bending of the Earth’s crust); the former process is regarded as dominant. One
consequence is that mountain blocks are often bounded by fault scarps and flexure
slopes that descend in step formation to the adjacent lowlands.
Coalescing alluvial fans—cone-shaped deposits of alluvium that run together—are
formed where rivers emerge from the mountains. When the rivers are large enough to
extend their courses to the sea, low deltaic plains develop in front of the fans; this occurs
most frequently where the rivers empty into shallow and sheltered bays, as in
the deltas of Kantō (Kwanto), Nōbi, and Ōsaka. In most places, however, fan surfaces
plunge directly into the sea and are separated by low, sandy beach ridges.
Dissected plains are common. Intense disturbances have caused many former alluvial
fans, deltas, and sea bottoms to be substantially uplifted to form flat-topped uplands
such as those found in the Kantō Plain. Frequently the uplands have been overlain with
volcanic ash, as in the Kantō and Tokachi plains.

The near-perfect volcanic cone of Japan's Mount Fuji.

Japan is one of the world’s most geologically unstable areas. The country experiences
some 1,000 tremors annually, most of them minor, though major quakes—as in Tokyo-
Yokohama in 1923 and Kōbe in 1995—cause considerable loss of life and widespread
destruction. Violent volcanic eruptions occur frequently, and at least 60 volcanoes have
been active within historical time. Volcanoes born since 1900 include Shōwa Volcano
on Hokkaido and Myōjin Rock off the Beyoneisu (or Bayonnaise) Rocks in the Pacific.
Among the major eruptions since 1980 are those of Mounts O (1983) and Mihara (1986)
in the Izu Islands and Mount Unzen (1991) in Kyushu. The country’s abundant hot
springs are mostly of volcanic origin. Many of the gigantic volcanoes are conical in shape
(e.g., Mount Fuji), while others form steep lava domes (e.g., Mounts Dai and
Unzen). Conspicuous shield volcanoes (broad, gently sloping volcanic cones) are rare,
and extensive lava plateaus are lacking. One of the characteristics of the volcanic areas is
the prevalence of calderas (large, circular, basin-shaped volcanic depressions),
especially in the northeast and southwest, many of which are filled with water, such as
Lakes Kutcharo, Towada, and Ashi.
The cause of this instability—indeed, the reason for Japan’s existence—is the tectonic
movement of several of the Earth’s major crustal plates in the vicinity of the archipelago.
Most important is the subduction (sinking) of the Pacific Plate (in the north) and the
Philippine Plate (in the south) beneath the Eurasian Plate, upon which Japan lies. The
movements of these plates have formed six mountain arcs off the northeastern coast of
Asia: from northeast to southwest, the Chishima Range of the Kuril Islands;
the Karafuto (Sakhalin) Mountain system of Hokkaido; the Northeast, Southwest, and
Shichito-Mariana ranges of Honshu; and the Ryukyu Island formations.

Soils of Japan

The soils of Japan are customarily divided from northeast to southwest into a weak
podzolic (soils with a thin organic mineral layer over a gray leached layer) zone, a brown
earth zone, and a red earth zone. There are some local variations. The northern half of
the Tōhoku area of northern Honshu is included in the area of brown forest soils. The
northern tip of Hokkaido is classed as a subzone of the podzolic soils; the remainder of
the island is included in the subzone of the acidic brown forest soils. Most of western
Honshu is a transitional zone. Yellow-brown forest soils extend along the Pacific coast
from southern Tōhoku to southern Kyushu, while red and yellow soils are confined to
the Ryukyu Islands. The widespread reddish soils are generally regarded as the products
of a former warmer, more humid climate. Immature volcanic ash soils occur on the
uplands.
Kuroboku soils (black soils rich in humus content) are found on terraces, hills, and
gentle slopes throughout Japan, while gley (sticky, blue-gray compact) soils are found in
the poorly drained lowlands. Peat soils occupy the moors in Hokkaido and Tōhoku.
Muck (dark soil, containing a high percentage of organic matter) and gley paddy soils
are the products of years of rice cultivation. Polder soils (those reclaimed from the sea)
are widely distributed. Soil fertility increases in the lowlands where agriculture is
practiced, the result of a combination of natural alluvium washed down from the
uplands and centuries of intense reworking of the soil medium by rice farmers.

Climate

In general, Japan’s climate is characterized as monsoonal (i.e., governed by wet and dry
seasonal winds). The main influences are the country’s latitudinal extent, the
surrounding oceans, and its proximity to the neighbouring Asian landmass. There are
numerous local climatic variations, the result of relief features. In winter the high
pressure zone over eastern Siberia and the low pressure zone over the western Pacific
result in an eastward flow of cold air (the winter monsoon) from late September to late
March that picks up moisture over the Sea of Japan. The winter monsoon deposits its
moisture as rain or snow on the side of Japan facing the Sea of Japan and brings dry,
windy weather to the Pacific side. The pressure systems are reversed during the
summer, and air movements from the east and south (the summer monsoon) from mid-
April to early September bring warmer temperatures and rain. Cyclonic storms and
frequent and destructive typhoons (tropical cyclones) occur during late summer and
early fall, especially in the southwest.
The warm waters of the Kuroshio (Japan Current), which corresponds in latitude and
general directional flow to the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic, flow northward along Japan’s
Pacific coast as far as latitude 35° N. The Tsushima Current branches westward from the
Kuroshio off southern Kyushu and washes the coasts of Honshu and Hokkaido along the
Sea of Japan; it is this current that lends moisture to the winter monsoon. The Pacific
counterpart of the Atlantic’s Labrador Current, the cold Oya (Kuril) Current, flows
southeastward from the Bering Sea along the east coast of Hokkaido and northeastern
Honshu. Its waters meet those of the Kuroshio, causing dense sea fogs in summer,
especially off Hokkaido.
The physical feature that most affects climate is the mountainous backbone of
the islands. The ranges interrupt the monsoonal winds and cause the gloomy weather
and heavy snows of winter along the Sea of Japan coast and the bright and windy winter
weather along the Pacific. Temperatures and annual precipitation are about the same on
both coasts, but they drop noticeably in the mountainous interior.

Temperature

Temperatures are generally warmer in the south than in the north, and the transitional
seasons of spring and fall are shorter in the north. At Asahikawa, in central Hokkaido,
the average temperature in January, the coldest month, is 18 °F (−8 °C), and the average
temperature in August, the warmest month, is 70 °F (21 °C), with an annual average
temperature of 44 °F (7 °C). At Tokyo the average temperature for January is 42 °F (6
°C), the average for August 81 °F (27 °C), and the annual average 61 °F (16 °C). Inland
from Tokyo, Nagano is cooler, with an annual average temperature of 53 °F (12 °C),
whereas an annual average of 57 °F (14 °C) occurs on the Sea of Japan coast
at Kanazawa. The warmest temperatures occur on Kyushu and the southern islands;
at Kagoshima, the mean temperature for January is 46 °F (8 °C), the mean for August is
82 °F (28 °C), and the average is 64 °F (18 °C).

The environment

The tremendous growth in population from the late 19th to the mid-20th century and
the rapid industrialization after 1945 put increased pressure on Japan’s natural plant
and animal communities, primarily through loss of habitat and environmental
pollution. Once-abundant creatures, such as the eastern white stork (kōnotori) and the
Japanese crested ibis (toki), have become extinct. Awareness of pollution grew from the
1960s, and after 1970 a number of strict measures were taken. Although domestic air
and water quality improved, air pollution from the East Asian mainland increased the
incidence of acid rain in Japan.