Eyes that Refuse Illusions: Mitsuharu Kaneko's Ideological Recollections (Prewar to Postwar)

Eyes that Refuse Illusions: Mitsuharu Kaneko's Ideological Recollections (Prewar to Postwar)

Mitsuharu Kaneko was a poet who lived from the Taisho to the Showa period, and at the root of his thought was a consistent attitude of "Do not be intoxicated by illusions. During his youth in the Taisho period (1912-1926), romanticism and modernism flourished, and the arts were filled with the pursuit of dreams and ideals. However, he regarded such illusions as "false pretenses that distracted from reality," and always insisted on facing the real human condition directly.

During the war, many literary figures and artists were mobilized for nationalistic propaganda, playing with words in the name of ideals and a cause. However, Kaneko was not complicit in this, but rather continued to point out the "danger of losing sight of human beings in the drunkenness of dreams. His perspective remained unchanged after the war, and even in an era of reconstruction and rapid economic growth, when society was once again trying to become intoxicated by the illusion of "progress," he insisted that the truth lies in the contradictions and weaknesses of human beings.

In the interview, he mentioned popular culture such as rakugo and science fiction, which he viewed not merely as entertainment but as mirrors of real human beings. His attitude of reading the human smell, contradictions, and ridiculousness hidden in laughter and fiction was his very creed of not being intoxicated by illusions, and of trying to look at reality.

Mitsuharu Kaneko's thought was a wake-up call for a generation that had learned the dangers of illusion through war experience, as well as a critique of postwar Japan's tendency to be swept away again by falsehood in the midst of modernization. His words still carry a heavy resonance as an attempt to define the role of literature and art as "facing reality and depicting human contradictions.