Portland State University PDXScholar World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations World Languages and Literatures 2014 In a Senchimentaru Mood: Japanese Sentimentalism in Modern Poetry and Art Jon P. Holt Portland State University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/wll_fac Part of the Japanese Studies Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Citation Details Holt, Jon P., "In a Senchimentaru Mood: Japanese Sentimentalism in Modern Poetry and Art" (2014). World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations. 43. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/wll_fac/43 This Article is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible:
[email protected]. In a Senchimentaru Mood: Japanese Sentimentalism in Modern Poetry and Art Jon Holt Woman! Café Woman! Be Strong! Be strong like winter! Don’t let your fragile body fall prey to the hands of sly playboys Hold high your intuition Root out worthless sentimentalisme (sanchimentarizumu), meaningless smiles, the charms that show subservience, and any effeminacy And work hard!1 Sentimentalism (senchimentarizumu) for Meiji poet Takamura Kōtarō 高 村光太郎, and others of his generation, was not a practice to be cultivated—not in one’s personal life, where it connoted emotional weakness, and certainly not in one’s artistic creations, where the concept suggested a sycophantic appropriation of Western trends. By the Taishō period (1912–1926), however, the term senchimentarizumu appeared with greater and greater regularity in the works of such luminaries as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Hagiwara Sakutarō.