The Italian War

Description

The Italian War was a work of transition also in Shimoi’s poetic taste. While bearing the hallmark of romantic lyricism, it also displays elements of futurist origin. Shimoi effusively wrote about his perception that order, self-sacrifice, and camaraderie helped soldiers to set aside regional identities and class conflict and embrace each other as Italians. In writing the book, he claimed that he was offering the “simple but sincere words of affection and admiration of a Japanese” to those “old fathers who offered their sons in the name of the sacred fatherland [patria] . . . to the simple soldiers [who] after the sorrowful life of four years in the trenches . . . return now to their ploughs and hammers, content and happy.” In the war, he argued, Italians found the nation in their everyday lives. He praised the bravery in ordinary people, “those many heroes, young and old, [who] every day are actors in moving scenes without being remembered by anybody.” A scene of an old man, women, and children sitting near their dilapidated house around a makeshift hearth expressed Shimoi’s ideal of nationalism: “Love of the hearth is the sacred origin of love of the fatherland.”

-The Fascist Effect, Reto Hofmann

Harukichi Shimoi was a Japanese poet, translator and writer. Shimoi lived in Italy for many years and was an important promoter of cultural exchange between Japan and Italy.

Shimoi translated works from Yosano Akiko and Matsuo Bashō into Italian, and conversely translated Dante into Japanese. Shimoi was close friends with Gabrielle D’Annunzio and translated several of his works. He accompanied the poet on his Fiume endeavour.

He was influential in introducing the haiku to Italian futurist poets, organizing the Tokyo-Rome flight with Arturo Ferrarin, his early involvement in the Calpis soft drink, and promoting Karate and Judo to Italians.