Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash.

Poetry by Hirata Toshiko

Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles

This poem was written in response to the massive earthquake that occurred in Japan in 2011.

First published in English in Words Without Borders' March 2012 collection: Japan, One Year Later.

for Do Not Tremble
https://wwb-campus.org/literature/do-not-tremble

Hirata Toshiko

Hirata Toshiko (1955-) is a prominent Japanese poet and novelist. During the 1980s, she, along with Itō Hiromi, emerged as one of the foremost voices so-called “women’s boom” of poetry. Her poetry is known for its directness and black humor. In the last decade, she has increasingly turned to writing novels, which often feature ordinary people in bizarre circumstances that lead them to question the traditional family system and the spots allotted to them in society.

Jeffrey Angles (translator)

Jeffrey Angles (1971- ) is an associate professor of Japanese and translation at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Japanese Modernist Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and translator of the award-winning Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako (University of California Press, 2010), Mutsuo Takahashi's Twelve Views from the Distance (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Hiromi Itō's Wild Grass on the Riverbank (Action Books, 2014) and numerous other works of prose and poetry. He also writes poetry in his second language, Japanese.

Links available online only

Hear the Names

Listen to the pronunciation of the author's name, read aloud by the translator Allison Markin Powell.

For more tips on pronouncing Japanese names and words, use this illustrated guide from wikiHow.com and this explanation of sounds, syllables, and stress from JapanesePod101.com.

Analysis of an Earthquake

Use the BBC's Tremor Timeline to see the size, spread, and frequency of the earthquakes of that day (press the play button in the top left.)

Look at a NASA map of the locations and sizes of the quakes and shocks on March 11.

Then look at another map, showing the intensity of the shaking.

Find out the science behind the disaster in this special report from Scientific American.

Aftermath of an Earthquake

Look at photos of the March 2011 earthquake and its aftermath from The Atlantic.

View the before and after images from the quake.

See a video from the NHK broadcasting studio, Japan’s largest broadcasting corporation, that was shaking in Tokyo during the quake. Then, scroll down to browse the other videos, including many oral histories, on the Great East Japan Earthquake Archive.

Look at the earthquake's effects on apartments, offices, full buildings, and vehicles parked on streets in the first two minutes of this 26-minute video.

(Watch the video on YouTube.)

Then, view video footage of the tsunami waves caused by the earthquake, published online by National Geographic.

Background on Japan

Read the BBC's short country profile of Japan, or visit nippon.com for the latest news.

Links available online only

Writing After Disaster

Read March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown, which includes writing from WWB Campus authors and translators, including Ryu Murakami, Hideo Furukawa, Mieko Kawakami, and David Karashima, who edited the volume.

Calls to the Other Side

Listen to "Really Long Distance," an audio story from This American Life, which describes the unusual way that some people who lost loved ones in 2011 are coping with their grief.

Picking up the Pieces: Japan Post-Earthquake

Find out about the “bleak reality” facing many of the survivors of the 2011 earthquake in an article from the Japan Times.

Learn about what happened to some of the items taken by the sea years later in “Japan’s tsunami debris: Five Remarkable Stories,” from BBC.

Understand more about the lasting effects of the March 2011 disaster with CNN’s collection of videos, maps, and reporting from 2016.

A Natural Disaster and Nuclear Collapse

The earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 also caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the worst since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 (read “Memories of Chernobyl,” also on WWB Campus.) Listen to a PBS story about the slow and dangerous clean-up of Fukushima.

Artistic Responses to 2011

Read an interview with the "prophetic" artist Ikeda Manabu, who painted a devastating tsunami three years before the disaster, and look at his more recent work, which portrays the aftermath of March 2011.

Then, find out how March 11 has influenced other artists in Japan and around the world:

The art collective Chim↑Pom’s projects including an exhibit using irradiated objects from Fukushima, volunteer work and videos in the villages of Fukushima, and an update of the post-Hiroshima Myth of Tomorrow mural in the Shibuya station in Tokyo. (“Activist Art Challenges Post-Disaster Japan” from PBS)
In the Wake, an exhibit of work from Japanese photographers at Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Musical Responses to 2011

Learn about how the post-disaster music scene in Japan has “captured a cultural rift—hope scraping against fear and lack of faith in government,” and listen to some of the music, in a piece from The Atlantic. Then, read about the music scene in 2016: “Music in the Post-Fukushima Era.”

Then, listen to some of the anti-nuclear songs that became popular.

“You Can’t See it, And you Can’t Smell it Either”

(Listen on YouTube.)

“Free from Nuclear Power Plant,” performed by a teen idol pop group that strayed from the apolitical norm of J-pop to deliver civic and political messages. (There are some typos in the English subtitles.)

(Watch the video on YouTube.)

Listen to the Atomic Bomb Compilation, put together by electronic producer Crzkny (Kenji Takikawa) on Bandcamp (in Japanese).

For more, read The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima.

Learning from Disaster

Explore the vast resources on “the cascading series of natural and human-made disasters" of 2011 in the Japan Disasters Digital Archive at Harvard University.

For educators: Read “Learning with Namie,” an essay about the March 2011 disaster that asks “how we learn with disaster” from the site Teach311.org.

For more from this site, which is dedicated to providing materials to teach about the Japanese earthquake of March 2011, search through English-language resources by selecting “English” under the language tab.

Japanese “Women’s Boom” Poets

Read more post-disaster poetry by Hirata Toshiko, translated by Jeffrey Angles and published in Japanese and in English, and two other poems translated by Hiroaki Sato.

Find more work by Hirata Toshiko in The New Poetry of Japan, the 70s and 80s.

Then, read about another poet from the “women’s boom” of poetry in Japan: Hiromi Ito.

Read and listen to three of her poems: “Coyote,” “Nasty Morning,” and “The Maltreatment of Meaning.”

You can find poems from both poets in Poems of Hiromi Itō, Toshiko Hirata & Takako Arai.

More Poetic Laments and Appeals*

“Afterimages,” by Audre Lorde—a lament for the brutal murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a flood in the river where he was drowned, and other brutalities.
“Nothing Remains Empty”—From Mexico, and originally written in the indigenous Mazateco language, an invocation that expresses the poet's desire for his words to become powerful: "These images plead" and "they will be heard."
"Incantation," by Czeslaw Milosz, a poem invoking the power of reason to save mankind.
Japanese Shinto prayers, which call upon "Spirits of the Sky and the Land" (scroll down the page.)

* For Teaching Idea 1

More Complex Poems about Spring*

The first stanza of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," with its famous line, "April is the cruelest month."
"Spring in War-Time," by Sarah Teasdale
“Notes on a Zombie Cataclysm,” a poem from Mexico which depicts a different kind of disaster.

Looking for more poems? Check out the Poetry Foundation’s “Asian American Voices in Poetry” collection.

* For Teaching Idea 2

More Shaped Poetry*

"Notes on a Zombie Cataclysm," a poem from Mexico which depicts a different kind of disaster. Like this poem, it uses line breaks to create a mood.
e.e. cummings' "[in Just- ]," which also uses one-word lines, to achieve a different effect.
The Poetry Foundation's collection of shaped poems, some of which imitate the shape of the image they are describing.

* For Teaching Idea 3

Reading Grade Level(s): 4, 5, 6 and up

1. Poetic Laments and Appeals
2. Poems About Spring
3. Shaped Poetry

To access these Teaching Ideas, please register or login to WWB-Campus.

Do Not Tremble

It trembles

It is trembling again today

I did not know that the earth

Is an unruly cradle

A cruel cradle that lets

Neither adult nor child sleep

It is March, it is spring

It should be a gentle season of vernal sleep

When one sleeps so deeply there is no dawn

But spring this year

Shakes us to keep us

From falling asleep

Earth, it is enough

For you simply to

Keep spinning happily

Leave the trembling

To windblown flowers and

Laundry hanging in the yard

You should simply spin

Innocently

Those forces that shake the earth

May you turn to bubbles and disappear

Do not tremble

Do not trem

Do not tre

Do not

Not

No!

March 29, 2011

Related Reading

Nothing Remains Empty - Poetry

Notes on a Zombie Cataclysm - Poetry