AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Mutō Zen'yū Poetry Monument (武藤善友歌碑, Mutō Zen'yū Kahi) is a quiet literary stone set in the leafy Green Belt walkway of the Toyokawa-cho district in Hakodate's Yamate ("upper town"). It commemorates Mutō Zen'yū (1900–1971), a Buddhist priest from Akita who became one of the driving figures of Hokkaido's modern tanka (5-7-5-7-7 short-poem) world, and it carries a single evocative poem cast in stone.↗↗
Rather than a grand sight, this is a small hidden treasure for walkers: a slim pillar marking the poet's name and a stele engraved with his verse, half-swallowed by trees beside the old Toyokawa Inari Shrine. The poem itself captures something essential about Hakodate — at sunset over the hillside town, the bells of a Christian church and the bells of a Buddhist temple ring out together.↗↗
Good to know
- Stone carving
- 2 kmfrom Hakodate center
- 3.5 / 52 reviews
- Hakodate
The priest-poet behind the stone
Mutō Zen'yū was born in Akita Prefecture in 1900 and came to the Hakodate world as a priest of the Jōdo sect. He took his first vows as head of Jikyō-ji (in today's city of Hokuto) from 1932, and from 1936 served as the twenty-third-generation abbot of Shōmyō-ji in Hakodate's Kitara quarter. Poetry ran alongside his clerical life: he joined the influential Araragi tanka society in 1919, and in 1931 he founded and edited the regional magazine Hokkaido Araragi, staging the Araragi Hokkaido poetry gatherings from 1934 onward. His collections, including Tarachime and Ninin-sō, helped shape a Hakodate verse culture in which local poets, editors and church-and-temple neighborhoods fed one another.
