WADA Jitaro
和田治太郎
Born: 8 February 1892 – Died: 8 February 1944
Particulars:
Jitaro was born in Hyogo Prefecture in Japan. He was a merchant and owner of Wada & Co, a business specialising in the shipping industry in Macassar, Celebes in the Dutch East Indies, now Sulawesi, Indonesia, when the Pacific War broke out. He was married with one son and one daughter, who were still living in Nishi Arita in Japan. He was taken to Australia and was interned at Loveday Internment Camp in South Australia, where he died at age 52. His grave is in the Japanese Cemetery in Cowra, New South Wales, Australia.
–Mayu Kanamori
More info:
Corey Wakeling
Artist/s Statement:
When poetry visits documentary, it has an obligation – and an opportunity – to zoom out to the circumstances and conditions under which the work is written. On this point, I often think of how early cinema, which was so much more experimental than it tends to be today, thrived by thinking of documentary’s responsibility to witness, and fiction’s responsibility to imagine as mutually beneficial concerns. The documentary edge coruscated for the early artists of that medium, as did its imagination.
I would decline to see my poem ‘Ecce Homo’ as a biographical account or indeed any form of documentation of any of its four angles: Jitaro Wada, the Japanese internee whose archival references I was kindly asked by Mayu Kanamori to write about; Yukie Wada, his wife, who presumably lived at their listed address in a country village outside of Himeji City in Hyogo Prefecture; Frank Harding, my uncle’s uncle who was killed in Java around the time that Wada was captured; and my own subjective perspective.
As a Japan based writer with my own children, ever trying to find threads of history in biography and vice-versa from this archipelago, the strongest obligation I observe in work on that much documented period from before our own arrival is to a simultaneity that thought brings to things then and now, a simultaneity that attests to a suspended animation of people linguistically present but no longer visible.
Artist Bio:
Corey Wakeling is a writer, scholar, and translator specialising in modern and contemporary literature. He lives in Tokyo, Japan where he works as an associate professor of English literature at Aoyama Gakuin University. He is the author of four poetry collections, including ‘Uncle of Cats’ (Cordite Books 2025). He also wrote the monograph ‘Beckett’s Laboratory’ (2022), co-edited the Australian poetry anthology ‘Outcrop’ (2013), and contributed numerous essays on modern and contemporary literature and performance.