For an interview on an anthology "Pen's Dew", I met Heima-san in Shirakawa who had been involved in the issue. Before the interview, I had been very worried about it because it was my first experience.
Pen's Dew is an anthology that was issued during the Taisho era(1912-1926). Young people in Shirakawa who were studying at a night school wrote an essay, Tanka or Haiku and edited them as an anthology voluntarily. This anthology was issued only in Shirakawa. When I heard about the anthology first, I was curious about how it was printed. Nowadays, we have lots of useful tools, such as a word processor, copy machine, but I was wondering what kind of tools existed in the era. That is a so-called "Do-Your-Best Printing", by which they wrote down words on a stencil paper one by one with an iron pen and got mineograph copies using an ink and roller.
Writers' names in the anthology are not real, but imaginary pen names. Each of them were lovely. Heima-san whom I visited this time used a "Breeze" as his pen name. He wrote an essay as an invitation style, such as "A letter to invite friends to a Festival". The friends whom he invited were people in Shirakawa, not ones who left there or relatives in other regions.
One thing which I was impressed by is that people who worked on the anthology were from a night school. In the past, they were working in the field during the daytime, and after work, they went to school in the evening. In spite of the busy life, they managed to find spare time to work on the anthology. For me, I cannot follow such a tough life.
When I looked into depopulation in Japan for my experience report "Visiting Hometown", I felt sorry that young people were leaving their hometown for urban areas year by year. However, during the time when the Pen's Dew had been issued, there was not such a depopulation, and few people went out of town. I thought first that lots of people had left Shirakawa in the past, so Heima-san's answer was surprising.
A Festival in the Heima-san's invitation is Fukisanpouzouin Festival. The Festival takes place in every November and there used to be full of people. I imagine that merchants who came to Shirakawa although the village was hard of access were full of commercial spirit. The Festival lasted for two or three days. Another impressive story is that usually people in Shirakawa went to Nishina on foot, but injured or very important people were carried by a kago (a palanquin). I didn't know that Kagos still existed in the Taisho era.
Though this report, I found myself a lack of knowledge on my hometown. I wish to know about its history more deeper and I felt important to think of the past.
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