This page is referenced by:

• 1 2020-05-26T15:13:25+00:00 Collaborators Near & Far 3 plain 2020-06-24T21:35:14+00:00 For a poetry group in a provincial city, the Our Poems circle (Warera no uta no kai) had unusually robust connections to Tokyo and the world beyond. Tokyo-based leftist painters Maruki Toshi and Maruki Iri, pictured here with the Our Poems circle, agreed to be interviewed for the Our Poems journal. The Marukis were already well known for travelling throughout Japan to exhibit their Atom Bomb Panel paintings. The Marukis’ introduced Tōge to the Tokyo publisher Aoki Shoten and thus provided a national outlet for Atomic Bomb Poetry. Tōge, along with some other Our Poem members, joined the Japan Communist Party in the late 1940s at the height of the party’s popularity and representation in the Japanese Diet (Parliament). Our Poems’ association with the authoritative leftist Shin Nihon Bungaku literary group headquartered in Tokyo is also noted regularly in the poetry journal.
  
  The Our Poems Circle was not, however, a “communist front,” nor did it rigidly adhere to the Eastern bloc directives. Culture circles such as this one are by definition not rigid or hierarchical groups or political parties, but rather associations that encourage knowledge construction, interpretation, and social engagement through cultural production, such as poetry composition. Our Poems also flourished in the complexity of its Cold War moment, which witnessed not only the terrifying nuclear arms race but also decolonization, coalitions among disparate groups who had a common goal, and struggles to realize human rights and social justice on the part of people who sought a third way separate from the increasingly rigid dogma and often dubious and unjust and violent practices of East and West blocs.