Ballads of Tokyo Jail

Poetry in Japan is considered too pleasant an art to be left exclusively to poets. Japanese of all backgrounds like to compose spare, highly stylized verses* whose aim is to evoke a moment or a mood, rather than convey a moral or tell a story, as in Western poetry. One of the top features of Tokyo's Mainichi Shimbun (circ. 3,568,000) is its Sunday selection of the ten best haiku and waka culled from some 500 it receives weekly. Last week an amateur poet named Akito Shima achieved the rare distinction of having had his work printed in the paper's poetry section for 17 successive weeks. Even by the melancholy standards of most Japanese poetry, they are unusually poignant, and with reason: Shima, 27, is a condemned murderer awaiting execution in a Tokyo prison.

Shima's background became known only when the paper, impressed by his "great promise," decided to learn more about its hit writer. While his verses in translation lose the rhythm and most of the overtones and associations that the original words have for the Japanese, they nonetheless give vivid insights into an unhappy past and remorseful present. After a lonely childhood, Shima fell in with young hoodlums, served two years in reformatories and jails before stabbing a farmwife to death during a 1959 burglary. He writes:

This hated felon

During the interminable night

Recalls

And counts on his fingers

The times he has been praised.

In one of his latest poems. Shima expresses relief at still being alive as well as resignation at the prospect of death:

Being privileged to greet the New Year

The faces of this felon

And his fellow felons light up.

Shima's waka, reminiscent at times of Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol, were inspired by a book of poetry sent him in jail by the wife of his former schoolmaster. Poetry writing has long been considered an effective form of rehabilitation in Japanese prisons. There are utakai, or poetry clubs, in all of Japan's 73 penitentiaries, with an average membership of no each; the number of poetasters behind bars is estimated at more than 16,000. *Prison magazines are filled with their efforts, and several prison wardens are famed versifiers. Explains the director of Japan's prison rehabilitation program: "Literature has a tendency to refine the coarse, materialistic mind of a convicted man." It is possible, also, that a condemned criminal has a unique compulsion to communicate with his fellows. Wrote Shima recently:

Numbered are my days.

As a felon

Awaiting execution

I know now

The meaning of loneliness.

* The haiku consists of 17 syllables, usually arranged in three lines; the waka, of 31 syllables, usually in five lines. * Despite such enthusiasm, say prison officials, inmates would be too "ashamed" to enter their work for Emperor Hirohito's annual poetry-reading party. Held last week, it was televised for the first time, attracted 31,621 entries, including 74 in Braille, 53 poems from non-Japanese.

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