Niikuni Seiichi

Brief orientation

Niikuni Seiichi (1925-1977) was a poet best known for his investigations of the visual aesthetics of the Japanese written language. During his lifetime, his works came to be associated with the international movement known as concrete poetry, an association that Niikuni himself recognised – albeit with the qualification that Niikuni claimed to have only heard of concretism after he had been publishing for several years (Kanazawa 2008: 190-191).

As a native of Sendai, a city in northern Honshu, Japan, Niikuni began his writing career at a remove from Tokyo, which was the centre of the Japanese publishing world and the Japanese city with arguably the strongest ties to international artists and artistic movements. While in Sendai, Niikuni contributed to various coterie magazines. But with his relocation to Tokyo in late 1962, his productivity surged. His first book of poems, 0 on, was published in 1963. From 1964 onwards, Niikuni collaborated and communicated with artists in other countries, including Brazil, France, the United States. In 1965, with a group of like-minded Japanese artists and poets, Niikuni formed the Geijutsu Kenkyū Kyōkai (Association for Study of Arts), which published a journal of the same name (styled ASA). Niikuni’s collaboration with the French poet Pierre Garnier led to the publication in 1966 of their coauthored volume Poèmes franco-japonais (French-Japanese Poems) and other works.

Over the coming years, Niikuni’s work appeared in exhibitions of concrete poetry around the world and was published in several anthologies. But long hospitalisations for poor health – he had been afflicted by a chest ailment since youth (Fujitomi 2009: 35) – sometimes hampered his work. He died at age 52.

Developments

To recount Niikuni’s artistic formation, it is fitting to begin from a statement that Niikuni himself provided at the end of 0 on (1963), the sole single-authored book of poetry he published in his lifetime. (The translation of the title 0 on will be considered further in a later section.) This statement neatly encapsulates some of the principal influences on Niikuni’s work:

1952-1960: member of Hyōga (Glacier) [literary journal]

Focused on [the poets] Hagiwara Sakutarō [1886-1942] in 1948, Murano Shirō [1901-1975] in 1953, Nishiwaki Junzaburō [1894-1982] in 1954. Interested in John Donne’s conceits and the problems of analogy ever since my high school days. Partial toward Imagism, Surrealism, New Criticism. Partial toward French Symbolism via T. S. Eliot’s notion of the objective correlative [shōchō]. Interested in Neue Sachlichkeit and Existentialism. Partial toward modern art, starting from the work of [Piet] Mondrian [1872-1944].

1960-1961: member of Bungei Tōhoku (Arts Tōhoku) [art journal]

I harbour doubts about metaphor in poetry. I make attempts at the analysis of conscious dépaysement [depeizuman, Fr. disorientation] and the pragmatic congelation of the image. Am interested in the constructivism of [Russian sculptor] Naum Gabo [1890-1977]. Paying attention to [American poet] e. e. cummings [1894-1962]. Next, contemporary music via the twelve-tone technique, and musique concrète (including electronic music), and the intermingling of musical thought and poetic thought. As a result, I create the “Short works [shōhin] for images” (not included in this anthology) as a series of variations on the twelve-tone technique; and [I create] the “poems for watching” [shōkeishi], which were inspired by the images in electronic music. Some of these “poems for watching” are included in Part I of the present collection; they were my attempts to overcome the time and space of poetry by developing motifs from the standpoint of visuality, by taking as its utmost unit [kyokugen no yunitto] the symbol-bearing quality of the Chinese written character. These works are to be read aloud.

1961-1962: member of Bungei Tōhoku and Kyū (Sphere) [journals]

What is metaphor? What is symbol? The function of poetry in time and space? Through the function of the word as-is, the chain reaction of words’ sonorous qualities and their rhythms (especially words as sound), I make my theme the contingency [gūisei] that arises naturally from the word as an object in itself. Geschehen [to occur, to be historically] more interesting than Sein [being]. A selection of “poems for speaking” [shōonshi] appear in Part II of the present collection.

All the poems in this collection were written while I was living in Sendai. (Niikuni 1963: 44)

There are many points of interest in this “Note”, as it was titled. Let us begin with what it does not say. First, it minimises the role of schooling: Niikuni studied architecture while at the Sendai Technical High School (where Niikuni apparently learned of John Donne); he studied English literature at Tōhoku Gakuin University, from which he graduated in 1951. The timeline begins, however, in 1952, a year chosen because it coincided with Niikuni’s becoming a member of a literary coterie, one associated with the magazine Hyōga. As a related, second point, each major division in the curriculum vitae that Niikuni provides here is aligned with some shift in his coterie affiliation. This reflects the importance ascribed to coteries in twentieth-century Japanese cultural production, not only by the artists themselves but also by subsequent critics and historians.

Third, the summary provided at the end of 0 on also omits mention of how Niikuni was making a living. For a time, starting in 1957, Niikuni listed as his mailing address the address of the graphic design studio that his younger brother managed (Kanazawa 2008: 187-188). As early as 1960, in the pages of Bungei Tōhoku Niikuni advertised his services as a graphic designer (Kanazawa 2008: 188). Chronologies of Niikuni’s life (Niikuni 1979: 66-68; Kanazawa 2008; Kokuritsu Kokusai Bijutsukan 2009; Kanazawa 2019) tend to downplay his employment history, but in Niikuni’s case there appears to have been a connection between vocation and avocation. For instance, when Niikuni relocated to Tokyo (October 1963), he worked as a graphic designer, including as a layout designer for on-screen captions at Japan Broadcasting’s Art Centre, founded in 1961 (Kanazawa 2008: 190).

In the main, the chronology provided by Niikuni at the end of 0 on charted his interests insofar as those had a bearing on the works published in that collection. While Niikuni’s starting point was modern Japanese poetry, twentieth-century Euro-American ideas about musical and poetic composition assumed greater and greater importance for him, as can be seen in the references to a number of Western artists. A closer inspection of 0 on will provide a point of entry into the avant-garde strategies that Niikuni pursued.

Avant-garde strategies

Niikuni’s first works were lineated poems, published in Hyōga starting in 1952. Stylistically, Niikuni’s early poems most resembled the work of the Japanese modernist and surrealist poet Nishiwaki Junzaburō, whose essay collection Surrealist Poetics Niikuni would go on to read in 1954. By 1955, Niikuni began publishing the texts that he called “poems to look at” (miru shi). Evocative of certain typographical effects that may be observed in the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s long poem “Un coup de dés” (1897), Niikuni’s first visual poems were texts in which written characters, singly or in small clusters, were distributed over one or two pages. However, while Mallarmé’s poem may be read clearly from beginning to end – there are syntactically, semantically meaningful sentences – the written characters in Niikuni’s visual poems do not add up to units of obvious sense. As Niikuni put it,

[These works] are not to be read in the manner of traditional verse. They may be read starting from anywhere, and may be thought of in any way you wish. Rather than regarding these works as things to be read, I would have you think of them as things to see or watch, with your mind unbound [yori jiyūna kokoro de]. (quoted in Okuno 2021b: 203)

It is worth noting that, since the issues of Hyōga at this time were mimeographed, it was comparatively straightforward to print the poems – they were handwritten. (Reproductions of early handwritten versions of Niikuni’s visual poems are available in Okuno 2021b: 200-202.) Later printings of Niikuni’s works would set the poems in type.

As visual poetry, Niikuni’s “poems to look at” – identified within 0 on as “visual text (poems for watching)”, in English with no corresponding Japanese (1963: 2) – were distinctive from other major tendencies in modern Japanese visual poetics. Precursors in modern Japanese visual poetry, who had explored the possibilities of typographical layout, included such different poets as Kawaji Ryūkō (1888-1959), Hagiwara Kyōjirō (1899-1938), and Kitasono Katué (1902-1978). Of these, the first two seem to have had little importance for Niikuni’s work – they were both pre-war figures – but Kitasono, who was active before, during, and after World War II, played a comparatively important role in experimental Japanese poetry throughout Niikuni’s lifetime. Niikuni knew of Kitasono’s long-running journal VOU, for example, which functioned as a laboratory for various modes of visuality in poetry, including the use of photographs (Solt 1999). But, perhaps surprisingly for a poet of Niikuni’s bent, he did not publish in VOU. Reviewing an exhibition of works by members of the VOU coterie in Sendai in 1962, Niikuni wrote: “I respect the ambition of the members of VOU, but it is impossible to say that as poets they have a first-rate grasp of sound; nor can one say their grasp of colour is especially fine” (quoted in Kanazawa 2008: 190). Niikuni was charting a path different from that of the VOU group.

Many studies of Niikuni have placed greatest emphasis on his work as a visual poet, but he also had a keen interest in the auditory qualities of his work and in text as a representation of sound. Contemporary music was an important influence on Niikuni’s work in this regard. As Niikuni’s “Note” to 0 on specified, by the early 1960s he was developing an interest in modern musical techniques, including dodecaphony – the so-called twelve-tone technique that is frequently associated with the composer Arnold Schoenberg (1875-1951). Niikuni was also affected by the work of the composer John Cage (1912-1992). In October 1962 – which was also the month in which Niikuni married the painter Miura Kiyo and relocated to Tokyo (Niikuni 1979: 66) – John Cage and the pianist David Tudor (1926-1996) were beginning a multi-city tour of Japan, with stops in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Sapporo (Kanazawa 2008: 190). Their 1962 tour caused such a stir in Japanese art circles that its impact was called the “Cage shock” (Chong 2012: 70). Within at least a year of the tour, Niikuni mentioned Cage’s work, in an essay published in Bungei Tōhoku in September 1963 (Kanazawa 2008: 191). The scholar Kanazawa Hitoshi has surmised that Cage’s work has a connection with the title 0 on: “zero sound” describes a state of silence (Kanazawa 2008: 191). The implicit connection here would be to compositions such as John Cage’s 4’ 33” (1952) – four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. However, Niikuni evidently anticipated that his works would be read aloud: the “poems for speaking”, to judge from their title, are intended for vocal enunciation; according to Niikuni’s “Note” to 0 on, even the visual “poems for watching” are to be read aloud.

Among Niikuni’s more sound-oriented texts, Niikuni’s “poems for speaking” – identified within 0 on in English as “phonic or phonetic text (poems for speaking)” (Niikuni 1963: 20) – are notable for being written exclusively in phonetic signs. (For contrast, every visual poem in the collection is composed primarily of ideographic Chinese characters.) These “poems for speaking” frequently make use of the ambiguities made possible by the modern Japanese writing system, which combines some two thousand ideographs (kanji, or Chinese characters) with two phonetic kana syllabaries (the hiragana and katakana, of which there are 46 each). In principle, it is possible to spell out any Chinese ideograph in phonetic kana; but homophones that would be unambiguous when written in kanji become potentially ambiguous when written in kana alone. For instance, toward the end of the poem “U/mu” (Niikuni 1963: 36-37), there is the line “Mainichi kimi wa umu”, written all in katakana. A basic translation of the line would read: “Every day you umu” (1963: 37). The reason to leave umu untranslated is that, if it is a verb as the syntax suggests, then umu can have any of several meanings: “give birth”, “fester”, “lose interest”, “ripen”, or “spin (as of thread)”. If an ideograph were provided, the meaning would be somewhat delimited (although the pronunciation umu would still evoke the whole range of possibilities, to a reader attuned to such overtones). But the text includes no ideographs; nor does the context help to disambiguate, since the preceding and following lines of the text contain nonsensical, quasi-combinatoric rearrangements of the syllables u, mu, mi, and me plus a few others. Many other “poems for speaking” in 0 on follow a similar approach, disorienting the reader by blending nonsense, sense, and polysemy, frequently within a single line of verse.

The collection 0 on, published within a year of Niikuni’s relocation to Tokyo, was his ticket to an expanded number of platforms and collaborations. In early 1964, Niikuni and a poet named Fujitomi Yasuo (1928-2017) – who had published a Japanese translation of e. e. cummings’s poetry in 1958 – founded a coterie-cum-magazine, ASA (Association for Study of Arts). (There is wide variation in how scholars have represented in English the words on which the abbreviation ASA is based. Library search databases, too, give various titles; for example, the titles Association for Study of Arts, Association for Study of the Arts, and Association for the Study of Arts are all attested.) It was in the pages of ASA that Niikuni would publish many of his works over the following years. Through Fujitomi, Niikuni was introduced, in 1964, to Luiz Carlos Vinholes (b. 1933), a Brazilian composer who was in Japan as a cultural attaché at the Brazilian embassy (Fujitomi 2009: 35; Vinholes 2009: 76). Vinholes was a member of the Noigandres group, a Brazilian collective of concrete poets whose number included Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) and Augusto de Campos (b. 1931); Niikuni translated a selection of Haroldo de Campos’s works in 1964 (Niikuni 1979: 66).

It was also at Vinholes’s recommendation that Niikuni sent a copy of 0 on to the French poet Pierre Garnier (1928-2014) in April 1964. Garnier’s response to Niikuni’s work was immediate and positive, and the two writers embarked on a multi-year, multi-work collaboration (Simon-Oikawa 2018: 52-64). In November 1965, Niikuni and Garnier wrote the Third Manifesto of Spatialism: Toward a Supranational Poetry, in which they asserted that the advent of human exploration of space marked the beginning of a new age. In that new age, the manifesto concluded, the poets who wrote a spatialist poetry could “take part in the creation of a humanity that has exceeded the bounds of its terrestrial envelope” (Niikuni and Garnier 1965: 3). Niikuni and Garnier’s French-Japanese Poems was published by ASA in 1966 and in France by André Silvaire in 1967. Two other short co-authored anthologies followed in 1970 and 1971. Their collaboration also bore fruit in a recording of their work: Poèmes phonétiques sur spatialisme (Phonetic Poems on Spatialism) from Columbia Records in 1971. Side A of the disc contained two works, one each by Garnier and Niikuni; side B also contained two works, one by Ilse Garnier (a poet, married to Pierre) and Niikuni, the other by Pierre Garnier and Niikuni (Simon-Oikawa 2018: 62).

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Niikuni’s work appeared in numerous exhibitions, as museums and galleries in Japan and around the world began showing works of concrete and visual poetry. In 1966, the Kurisutaru Garō gallery in Tokyo exhibited works by ASA artists; the Chikyūdō Gallery in Tokyo held exhibitions in 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, and 1973, in each of which a selection of Niikuni’s works was displayed (Niikuni 1979: 66-67). In 1970-1971, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam held an exhibition of international concretism, titled “sound texts/?concrete poetry/visual texts” (Kanazawa 2008: 196; the question mark is in the original), in which eleven of Niikuni’s works were displayed (Niikuni 1979: 67). Niikuni’s work appeared in exhibitions elsewhere, as well: for example, in Las Vegas (1973); London (1974); and Bologna (1977) (Niikuni 1979: 68).

Contents

To the above list of collaborations and exhibitions, one should add that Niikuni’s work was circulated in anthologies and other publications in European languages, beginning as early as the 1960s (Solt 1968: 161; Wildman 1969: 4-7 and 62-65; Schmidt 1972: 34; Dencker 1972: 113; Guest, Guest, and Kojima 1972: 95-100; Herman 1974: 114-115; Reichardt 1974; Klonsky 1975: 271-274; May 1975: 315-316, 319, 322, 324). Niikuni’s work was favourably received: for example, Niikuni was praised as “the most innovative and best known of the Concrete poets in Japan” (Klonsky 1975: 329) and as “[t]he most gifted” Japanese concrete poet (Kim 1973: 318).

To situate the wide appeal of Niikuni’s work, it is useful to consider matters of content and form separately, for heuristic purposes. Jasia Reichardt, writing of the 1974 exhibition of Niikuni’s works in London, described Niikuni’s themes as “timeless”, and added,

There are no references [in Niikuni’s work] to our contemporary technological society and when objects are the subject of the poem they tend to be classical rather than new. … His themes … belong more closely to traditional Japan in both subject matter and its visual interpretation, than does the main body of work worldwide which we associate today with concrete poetry. (Reichardt 1974: 738)

Reichardt did not elaborate on this statement, and it is difficult to determine why Niikuni’s work might have seemed to “belong…to traditional Japan”. Pace Reichardt’s assertions regarding thematic timelessness, Niikuni’s 1971 graphical text Anti-War (Niikuni 1979: 35; Niikuni 2008: 142, where the year of publication is given as 1970) is one candidate for contemporary relevance: World War II was still recent history, and the war in Vietnam had begun more than a decade earlier. But the import of Anti-War is ambiguous. The text plays on the title phrase anti-war 反戦, by calling a viewer’s attention to the fact that the ideograph that means anti 反contains an ideographic radical 又, which by itself can mean again. The suggestion is that opposition and iteration, anti and again, are connected; but the nature of the connection is not clear. The text might be read as suggesting that opposing war is futile because of the inevitability of war’s recurrence; alternatively it might be read as encouraging the anti-war movement to persist in their efforts. The image is memorably elegant, and its ambiguity perhaps contributes to the image’s appeal.

It has sometimes been suggested that ideographs require no translation: they communicate meaning immediately, as it were, quasi-pictographically. Indeed, the emphasis on visuality in Niikuni’s work goes some way toward explaining the acclaim which greeted it. However, there are limits to the immediacy of kanji. Readers who are unfamiliar with the meanings of individual ideographs will not understand the nuance of many of Niikuni’s works, as Niikuni recognised; in fact, many of Niikuni’s graphical works are accompanied by simple glossaries. Depending on the publication, these glossaries appeared on a facing page or in a corner of the same page. To refer to the text Anti-War, for example, the accompanying glossary clarified the three ideographs that appear in the text:

反 = anti, 戦 = war, 又 = again

Even with such glossaries to explicate the texts’ content, one could argue, as Andrea Bachner has done (2015: 158-159), that in such texts “[the ideographs’] meaning remains tangential to the poetic effect”.

There is another way in which Niikuni’s texts have a bearing on their historical context: as created objects, they are of the modern era. This is apparent in the most fundamental technical aspects of Niikuni’s work. For example, Niikuni used the so-called Mincho font in “an overwhelming majority” of his published works (Takashima 2009: 55). Now, the Mincho font (minchōtai, in Japanese) is named, literally, for the Ming dynasty, making explicit the Japanese debt to the mainland: the Mincho-font kanji are derived from Chinese writing conventions. But the phonetic hiragana and katakana are used only in Japan, and it was Japanese type designers who created kana typefaces to accompany the kanji. Motogi (or Motoki) Shōzō (1824-1875) is usually credited with the development of the first Japanese modern-style type foundry, as early as 1870. The Mincho font was one of the premier fonts of Motogi’s foundry (Suzuki 2003: 66-68; Komiyama 2020: 254-256); today, in Microsoft Word, the default font for Japanese input is called MS Mincho.

Furthermore, Niikuni’s works relied on twentieth-century means of technical production. Many of Niikuni’s works rely on effects that would be difficult, albeit not impossible, to render by means of traditional typefaces, such as isolating an ideograph’s individual radicals or strokes. However, the modern phototypesetting process renders such effects feasible. The perfecting of the phototypesetting process (shashoku) in Japan is usually attributed to Ishii Mokichi (1887-1963), who first filed a patent for the process with Morisawa Nobuo in 1924 (Kozuka 2013: 94). While in principle the means for creating images such as Niikuni’s existed in earlier centuries, nevertheless the technology on which Niikuni relied when creating his graphical works was of comparatively recent invention. A similar archaeology might also be undertaken to contextualise the audio recordings of Niikuni’s texts (Tatehata, Kido, and Kanazawa 2009: 19-21).

Conclusion

The scholar Okuno Akiko, in a recent article about Niikuni’s relation with international concrete poetry, has observed that several standard reference works about modern Japanese poetry carry no entry about Niikuni Seiichi, nor about concrete poetry or its Japanese calque, gutaishi (2020: 199n24). Moreover, in more general surveys of modern Japanese poetry (Kitagawa 1993; Shimaoka 1998; Nomura 2005), no mention is made of Niikuni’s work. (Niikuni is cited and discussed, however, at Kobayashi 2021: 160-162.)

To account for the comparative neglect of Niikuni’s works in recent decades, at least one scholar has pointed out that Niikuni’s death contributed to the overall decline of visual and concrete poetry in Japan (Tatehata 2008: 202). Kitasono Katué (mentioned above) died in 1978, just a year after Niikuni; soon after the deaths of these poets, the VOU and ASA groups effectively disbanded (Okuno 2020: 199). Finally, one might also suggest that trends of a more global scale, in Japan and beyond, may have further contributed, in the last decades of the twentieth century, to a waning of interest in experimental poetry of the sort created by Niikuni.

In the early twenty-first century, there were signs of a recuperation of Niikuni’s work. An exhibition at the National Museum of Art in Osaka from December 6, 2008 to March 22, 2009 was titled “Niikuni Seiichi’s Concrete Poetry: Between Poetry and Art”. To accompany the exhibition, a multimedia selection of Niikuni’s work was published under the title Niikuni Seiichi: Works 1952-1977. In February 2009, the monthly poetry magazine Gendaishi techō (Contemporary Poetry Journal) included a special feature on Niikuni Seiichi, which gathered short articles by 14 poets and critics along with a brief selection of Niikuni’s poems and critical essays. In 2019, the Shichōsha publishing company issued a selection of Niikuni’s writings as Volume 243 of their Gendaishi bunko (Modern Poetry Library) series. Recent scholarship on Niikuni (Tanimura 2012; Wakui 2015; Wong 2015; Simon-Oikawa 2018; Houwen 2019: 150-151; Okuno 2020; Okuno 2021a; Okuno 2021b; Tornatore-Loong 2023: 36-46) is of high quality, breaking new ground in media studies and the theory of visual poetics; and Niikuni’s works are being assigned in Japanese language and literature classrooms (Ishibashi 2020: 35-37).