Toki Zenmaro

Toki Zenmaro

Toki Zenmaro ( Japanese 土 岐 善 麿 ; * June 8, 1885 , † April 14, 1980 ) was a Japanese journalist, literary scholar and poet.

Toki studied literature at Waseda University until 1908 . He then worked for the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun and, after the First World War, until 1940 for Asahi Shimbun as a columnist and editorial writer on the topics of society, culture and science.

He was also known as a poet under the name Toki Aika ( 土 岐 哀 果 ). In his early days he wrote three-line poems in Latin script. A collection appeared in 1910 under the title Nakiwarai ("Laughing with Tears"). He was friends with the Tanka poet Ishikawa Takuboku , whose collected poems he published after his death in 1912.

He later returned to the Japanese spelling and published nearly forty volumes of poetry. A four-volume biography of the waka poet Tayasu Munetake was written from 1942 to 1946 . After 1945, Toki taught Japanese literature at Waseda University and became director of Tōkyō Toritsu Hibiya Toshokan ( Hibiya City Library , Tokyo Prefecture). From 1949 to 1961 was advisor to the Japanese government on language reform issues.

In old age Toki increasingly dealt with the research of classical Japanese and Chinese literature (including Du Fu ) and the Nō drama and campaigned for the spread of the artificial language Esperanto in Japan. From the age of 80 until his death he was a full professor at Musashino Women's University .

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• German Institute for Japanese Studies - Toki Bunko (Toki Zenmaro)
• J. Thomas Rimer, Van C. Gessel: The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature . Abridged. Columbia University Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-231-53027-9 , pp. 430–431 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
• Find A Grave - Zenmaro Toki

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Toki is the family name, Zenmaro the first name.