The Italian War as Seen by a Japanese is composed of several letters Harukichi Shimoi wrote from the Italian-Austrian front of WW1, as well as letters and statements from his friends. Originally published La Guerra Italiana Vista da un Giapponese, it describes Shimoi’s experiences as an Arditi, the elite soldiers of the Italian army. Whether crossing the Pieve under the fire of machine guns or liberating the city of Trento from Austrian rule, Shimoi always keeps a keen eye and poetic sensitivity as he describes the scenes of war.

A Japanese poet in Italy, 1919

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

A minor footnote in a criminally overlooked period of history, Harukichi Shimoi was, for a time, the most famous Japanese man in Europe. Benefiting from a period where japonisme enthralled the European public and great artists looked to the East for inspiration, Shimoi was able to make a career for himself as an interpreter of Japanese culture for an eager European audience. At the same time, he came to interpret the risorgimento movement, and its nascent successor fascismo, according to his own pedological beliefs about Japanese culture. Over the course of his career, Shimoi would rise to become a celebrated poet and translator, influencing such authors as Ezra Pound and Yukio Mishima, as well as a spy, diplomat, advisor to the highest political offices in Italy and Japan, and regular fixture in Neapolitan high society, before being finally forced out of the public spotlight and retiring in obscurity during the post-war world order.