The Human Inquiry School — Nakamura Kusatao, Katō Shūson, Ishida Hakyō: From Flowers and Birds to the Human

The Name “Ningen Tankyū-ha”

The label Ningen Tankyū-ha — the Human Inquiry School — is generally traced to the critic Yamamoto Kenkichi in 1939 (Shōwa 14), in the magazine Haiku Kenkyū. The three poets it named:

1. Nakamura Kusatao (1901-1983)
2. Katō Shūson (1905-1993)
3. Ishida Hakyō (1913-1969)

All three were haiku poets from the Hototogisu lineage, but they did not push outward reform as strongly as Shūōshi and Seishi of Shinkō Haiku. Instead they took the style of searching for the human interior and the meaning of living inside haiku. Remaining within kachō-fūei while, through flowers and birds, letting human existence be reflected — an intermediate position.

Nakamura Kusatao — “Falling snow — Meiji has grown distant”

Nakamura Kusatao, given name Seiichirō, was born in 1901 (Meiji 34) in Amoy, Fujian province, China, at the Japanese consulate (his father was a consular staff member). At age three he returned to Japan and grew up in Matsuyama (fellow provincial of Shiki, Kyoshi, and Hekigotō). From the German literature program at Tokyo Imperial University he became a teacher at a Tokyo middle school and stayed in that role for many years.

He studied under Takahama Kyoshi, joining Hototogisu in Shōwa 9 (1934). But Kusatao read Kyoshi’s kachō-fūei in the direction of “reflecting the human heart through scenes of flowers, birds, and landscape.”

Falling snow — Meiji has grown distant (1931)

Kusatao’s verse at 30. On a snowy day in Shōwa 6 he was walking near his alma mater, Tokyo Imperial University, and the verse formed in front of the old campus building put up in the Meiji era.

• Furu yuki ya — snow is falling
• Meiji wa tōku — the Meiji era has grown distant
• nari ni keri — has become so (the exclamatory kireji “keri”)

In 1931 (Shōwa 6) he composed “Meiji has grown distant.” Only 19 years after the end of Meiji 45 (1912) — still perhaps too close to say “Meiji is distant.” Yet the verse inscribes the rapid change in the sense of time: in only 19 years, Meiji has receded. The subject is the very speed of Japan’s modernization.

The kireji “keri” leaves lingering emotion in a superb closing. One of the Shōwa haiku most often recited by modern Japanese.

Amid tenfold green my child’s tooth begins to bud (1939)

Kusatao at 38, on the first tooth of his daughter Naoko.

• Banryoku — the whole world green (a summer kigo, established as a kigo by Kusatao)
• Ako — my child
• ha hae somuru — a tooth begins to sprout

“Banryoku” originated in Chinese classics (Wang Anshi’s line 万緑叢中紅一点 — “one point of red amid ten thousand greens”), but as a Japanese kigo it was Kusatao’s verse that fixed it. Amid the total summer green, a small white first tooth appears in the young daughter. A skillful contrast.

The snake dead, the great sky bright — end of mourning (1946)

• Hebi shinde — the snake is dead
• Ōzora akaraki — the great sky is bright
• Ki-aki kana — the end of mourning

A verse just after the war. Against the darkness of defeat, he layers the snake’s death with the brightness of the sky, using “the end of mourning” as an allusion to Japan’s defeat.

Nakamura Kusatao’s View of Haiku

Throughout his life Kusatao held the position “haiku includes kachō-fūei and goes beyond it.” He remained within Kyoshi’s frame while deeply expanding its content. His claim:

“Haiku is a poem in 17 sounds. As a poem, it must ask the roots of human existence.”

This differs from the explicit departures of Shūōshi and Seishi — it is reform from within. Kusatao did not leave Hototogisu and yet held to his own view of haiku.

His disciples include Kōzai Teruo, Narita Sensora. His journal was Banryoku (founded 1946).

Katō Shūson — “Oki now: the trees bud, ringed by the Pacific”

Katō Shūson (1905-1993), given name Ken’yū, was born in Tokyo in 1905. After the Tokyo University of Literature and Science (now Tsukuba), he became a teacher at the old-system middle school in Kasukabe, Saitama (now Kasukabe Prefectural High School).

Like Kusatao he began under Kyoshi, but in Shōwa 15 (1940) he founded his own journal Kanrai and became independent. Shūson is characterized by deep reading of the East Asian classics (especially Du Fu), and he brought the heavy introspection of Chinese classical poetry into haiku.

Oki now: the trees bud, ringed by the Pacific (1943)

Shūson at 38 in Shōwa 18. Composed on a visit to Oki Island in Shimane (the place of Emperor Go-Toba’s exile).

• Oki — Oki Island off Shimane
• ima — now
• Ki no me — new spring buds on trees (kigo)
• kakomu Taiheiyō — the Pacific enfolding [the island]

Oki is enfolded by the Pacific (actually the Sea of Japan, but Shūson writes it “Taiheiyō” in bold characters). In the spring of that isolated island, buds emerge on the trees. Solitude, classics, and season overlap in 17 sounds. One of Shūson’s signature verses.

Sardine clouds — nothing that should be told to another (1939)

• Iwashi-gumo — autumn clouds (kigo)
• hito ni tsugu beki — should be told to another
• koto narazu — it is not such a thing

Looking up at the autumn sky, one is about to tell something to another and realizes “it is not the kind of thing to be put into words.” A paradox that renders the sentiment that cannot be told in the form of its very unspeakability.

The pheasant’s eye still glittering — sold in the market (1940)

• Kigishi no me — the pheasant’s eye
• kōkō to — glittering brightly (onomatopoeia)
• rare keri — was sold

At the market, the eye of the pheasant on sale still glitters. The eye of a creature just before losing its life, set against the human trade in it. Displays the sharpness of Shūson’s human observation.

Katō Shūson’s View of Haiku and Later Years

Shūson revered Du Fu all his life, translating and studying the Chinese classics. His disciples included Mori Sumio, Sawaki Kin’ichi, Kaneko Tōta; Kaneko Tōta in particular came out of Shūson’s line and became the center of shakaisei haiku and avant-garde haiku (next article).

His journal Kanrai continues to this day. Shūson died in 1993 at 88, still writing haiku and studying the classics until the end.

Ishida Hakyō — From Inside Illness and War

Ishida Hakyō (treated in the previous article on Shinkō Haiku) joined Shinkō Haiku as Shūōshi’s disciple and is also placed in the Human Inquiry School — a dual position. Amid tuberculosis and war experience, Hakyō brought the sick body, the destroyed city, and postwar reconstruction into haiku.

Frost columns — haiku, its kireji, resounds (1946)

• Shimobashira — frost columns of a winter morning
• Haiku wa kireji — haiku is kireji [its heart is kireji]
• hibiki keri — resounded

A self-referential verse making the very principle of haiku its subject. A declaration of aesthetic: the kireji “ya,” “kana,” “keri” resound cold and hard like winter frost columns.

Cotton insects — that door, where the dead pass out (1946)

• Wataboshi — the white cotton-like winter insect (yukimushi, kigo)
• soko wa — that place
• shikabane no ide-yuku mon — the door through which the dead are carried out

Just after the war, when Hakyō was hospitalized. He overlays the whiteness of the cotton insect on the dead being carried out through the hospital gate. A representative of the sickroom haiku of the Human Inquiry School.

Placing the Three

Element	Nakamura Kusatao	Katō Shūson	Ishida Hakyō
Birth	1901	1905	1913
Lineage	Kyoshi disciple	Kyoshi → independent	Shūōshi disciple
Journal	Banryoku (1946-)	Kanrai (1940-)	Tsuru (1937-)
Feature	From flowers/birds to human	East Asian classics and introspection	City, illness, war
Signature verse	“Furu yuki ya”	“Oki ya ima”	“Shimobashira”

All three shared beginning within the frame of Kyoshi/Shūōshi and reaching for “the human interior” beyond kachō-fūei. But they approached the human in different directions:

• Kusatao: through life and the memory of the era
• Shūson: through East Asian classics and the solitude of nature
• Hakyō: through the body of illness and war

The Significance of “Human Inquiry”

The Human Inquiry School was a major turning point of 20th-century haiku:

1. It established that haiku can render not only nature but the human
2. It opened a middle path between kachō-fūei and Shinkō Haiku — neither radical departure nor mere conservation
3. In the postwar haiku world, these three and their disciples occupied a central corner

Kusatao’s Banryoku, Shūson’s Kanrai, and Hakyō’s Tsuru were all comprehensive haiku journals that continued for a long time postwar and formed the skeleton of the late-Shōwa haiku scene.

Toward the Next Article

Where the Human Inquiry School broadened the subject “from flowers and birds to the human,” in the 1950s a group went one step further, making “society” the subject. At its center was Kaneko Tōta — from Saitama, disciple of Shūson, later head of Kaitei, standard-bearer of avant-garde haiku. Carrying the memory of the southern front in wartime, he attempted to bring postwar Japanese society itself into haiku. The next article traces the 98 years of that man.