SOURCE: "Yosano Akiko on War: To Give One's Life or Not—A Question of Which War," in Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 25, No. 1, April, 1991, pp. 45-74.

In the following essay, Rabson compares Akiko's "Brother, Do Not Die" to her later poems and essays on war in order to reevaluate her reputation as an antiwar poet.

Although Yosano Akiko continued to produce important volumes of poetry in the 1920s and 1930s, her greatest popularity ended with the demise of Myôjô. Her defiant poems were no longer so startling to a new generation of readers, and Akiko looked less convincing at fifty in the role of the emancipated woman than at twenty. The mainstream of the modern tanka was to head in a different direction from hers. In later years Akiko detested even to hear Tangled Hair mentioned, no doubt because it irritated her to...