Roman Yamamoto (the Japanese who wrote all his poems under the name of Gai), while he was still alive, took to poetry and poetry wrote him a large number of songs. Yamamoto would also write poetry about horses at night, about the sun rising and setting, about being attacked by animals, and about the rain, etc. In this way, he wrote hundreds of poems and poems with a strong religious theme. The most famous of these, ‘Yomoto no Shousyo (The Horse Song),’ is so known that its contents and meaning are even considered sacrosanct in many traditional cultures.

Ichiro Yoshizawa, an American poet who lived in Japan between 1885 and 1897 and was much more conservative than most Japanese poets at the time, wrote this song in Japanese about his own experiences of being a samurai, which may be the only song in Japanese that explicitly presents a story about sword fighting, the sword, and the samurai.

Although this is his only song in English, it was used during war time as an anthem in Japan in honor of the sacrifice of the Japanese troops participating in the War of the Pacific. One of its songs is very effective, in some ways surpassing even the old samurai tunes:

O I see the sun and my love

I see the sword and the rain…

For I am at war with the enemy…

O, is this not the song of the sword?

The sword is the heart of the world,

I am afraid of not being able to wield it…

I’ll take the old sword and go fight you again…

Because when I kill, I’m not afraid to die…