On April 14, 2012, Noriko Mizuta's critical essay collection “Modernism and the Expansion of Post-War Female Poetry” was published by Shichosha. To commemorate this publication, a symposium sponsored by Shichosha on the theme of “Poetry and Gender: Things Handed Over by Chika Sagawa” was held in Josai University Educational Corporation’s Tokyo Kioicho Campus.

Chika Sagawa, was born in February 1911 in Hokkaido and died at the young age of 24, is a female poet who represents modernism. Last year, in the first part of a symposium marking the 100th anniversary of her birth, Noriko Mizuta (poet, comparative literary scholar, and chancellor of Josai University Educational Corporation) gave a keynote speech entitled “From ‘Talking about Myself’ to Self-Representation—The Sensitivity of Modern Female Poetry After the Disaster,” in which she analyzed the works of post-war female poets such as Noriko Ibaragi and Kazuko Shiraishi, explaining how they are connected to the poems of Sagawa.

In the second part, Mr. Sadakazu Fujii (poet and Japanese literary scholar), Youko Isaka (poet), and Kiryu Minashita (poet) joined Ms. Mizuta to discuss modern gender and poetry, and gender-free poetic expression, based on the poems of Sagawa and Mizuta’s critical essay collection. With Chika Sagawa as a starting point, the topic which stood out was, reading about the sense of being a survivor of a “disaster” in recent years and the “imagination along the way of returning” of those who lived through it in the expressions of Noriko Ibaragi, Rin Ishigaki, Sachiko Yoshihara, Rumiko Koura, and Kazuko Shiraishi, et al., in the modern era as the sense of existing moves from “woman” to “person,” from “person” to “individual,” and from “me” to “an indefinite self,” the issues of self-representation undertaken by female poets who aimed at the manifestation of gender.

About 160 people including students, citizens, and the media gathered and were listening intently.